Starting the dryer

Before printing a hygroscopic material — PETG, and recycled PLA — the pellets have to be dried. This is the one page that owns the numbers: every other note that mentions drying points here.

Which materials need it and why, and which dryers do the job, is on the Dryer component page. The D1 itself has its own section.

Watch it

D1 Dryer — Unboxing, Setup & First Assembly — 4:23, official Ginger Additive video. More on Official videos.

Why it matters

Wet pellets turn to foam in the barrel: the water flashes to steam and the extrusion comes out bubbly, crackling, and weak between layers. On PETG that is the most common material fault there is — see PETG foaming and moisture. Most PLA prints straight from the bag; the exceptions are below.

Temperature and time

Material	Dryer temperature	Time	Notes
PETG	60–70 °C, by grade	4 h minimum, 6 h to aim for	Back off the moment pellets start packing together
PLA — recycled, or left open about a week	50 °C	4 h	Most virgin PLA needs no drying at all
PLA — low-HDT grades	50 °C	4 h, not beyond 6–7 h	Packs solid if held longer; see below

The limit is aggregation, not a number on the dial

Hotter dries faster, up to the point where the pellets soften and fuse. That point depends on the grade, which is why PETG is a band and not a figure. Watch the first hour: if the surface of the pellets starts to look glossy, or they begin to stick, come down.

The procedure

1. Load the pellets into the dryer tank, to the level marker or the batch size you need

2. Set the temperature for the material, from the table above

3. Close the gate. On the D1 that is the guillotine above the pellet gate. Closed, the material stays in the tank where it is being dried instead of sitting in the feed line taking moisture back

4. Close the dryer and start it. Then leave it closed

5. Wait the time in the table, counted from when the display reaches the setpoint — warm-up is not drying

6. Open the gate when you start printing, so the feeding system can draw from the tank. A closed guillotine looks exactly like a feeding failure: the vacuum cycles, nothing arrives, the buzzer sounds

7. Leave the dryer running for the whole print. Drying continues while it feeds, and pellets that leave the dryer start taking moisture back within hours

Never run the dryer open

Not the lid, not the tank, not “a crack at the top to let the moisture out”.

A dryer works by holding heated air around the pellets in a closed volume. Open it and it pulls room air through continuously — and room air is what put the water in the material in the first place. It then runs for hours, gets hot, and dries nothing. If you have been doing this, the material was never dry, however long the cycle ran.

Feed the printer from the dryer

That is the whole answer, and it is why the D1 connects to the feeding line directly: the pellet gate under its tank is where the G1’s feed line clamps on.

Pellets tipped out into a bucket or a bag start taking moisture back within hours, and no amount of sealing makes that a better plan than leaving them where they are. Storing dried pellets is a compromise, not a step: if you must, it takes a genuinely vacuum-sealed container, and never loose desiccant mixed into the pellets — if air is getting in, seal the path rather than contaminate the batch.

For a long pause mid-job, put the pellets back in the dryer before resuming. Anything left in the printer’s hopper or the feed line overnight has been out of the dryer overnight.

When pellets pack together

Two different things look the same in the tank, and one of them is fine.

PETG held too hot softens and fuses into clumps or a cake. The vacuum cannot move the lumps, and one that reaches the screw stops it. The material is not ruined — drying does not degrade the polymer. It is a feeding problem: empty the tank, break the clumps apart, check the batch through so no compacted lump survives, lower the setpoint, and reload. Nothing gets thrown away.

Low-HDT PLA held too long — past six or seven hours — compacts under its own weight. The symptom is not a print defect: the printer runs out of material while the dryer still looks full, because nothing is dropping out of the tank. Stir the lower part of the tank by hand or with a stick and it flows again. The polymer is fine.

What makes either one dangerous is going into the machine still stuck together: lumps bridge the hopper, and then jam the screw — a suction fault followed by motor skipping, from one batch.

Keeping it from happening:

• Do not fill the tank to its absolute maximum — the bottom heats unevenly
• Check the dryer’s own thermostat against the pellets, not the display; some run hotter than they say
• Watch the first hour

Still bubbling after a full cycle

1. Leave it longer, or raise the temperature a little — and watch for packing
2. Test-extrude on a skirt before committing to a print
3. Still foamy after an extended cycle: the batch has been stored badly or is old. Open a fresh sealed bag — see PETG foaming and moisture

If the dryer does not start

• Power cable connected, wall socket live
• Red emergency stop, if it has one — turn clockwise to release
• Rear power switch on
• Display lights briefly then goes black, or it fails to boot after several tries: that is a hardware fault. Contact Ginger Additive support — on the D1 it can be the SD card in the display unit

Related notes

• Dryer — which materials need drying, which dryers work, how the gate and guillotine work
• D1 Dryer — the Ginger Additive dryer: setup and maintenance
• PETG foaming and moisture — what wet PETG does
• Loading pellets — filling the printer
• PLA · PETG