MakerGear Forum

Here's an experiment to see how well rice works as a filament dehumidifier (clicky for more dots):
I put 200 g of rice in a bowl inside a small safe (about 1 ft³) with a gasketed door. During the next 11 days, the humidity rose toward the ambient 52 to 54 %RH maintained by the basement dehumidifier. Afterward, the rice still weighed exactly 200 g, so it hadn't absorbed or released any water vapor.

When I replaced the rice with a bag of silica gel, the humidity abruptly dropped below the data logger's 15% lower limit. The spike just after the drop shows where I opened the door to check the humidity indicator telltale.

Conclusion: rice may fill your tummy and break up clumps in your salt shaker, but it won't do anything for your filament.

Jules made me do it:
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=2837

Dude! I didn't realize you'd actually done it!

I ran my own little rice experiment as well....guess what?

If you leave bags of rice at room temperature with little holes poked into them, without freezing them first, you wind up with............
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wait for it........
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buckets full of weevils.

We have reached perfect accord on the rice.

Jules wrote:buckets full of weevils

Toss some oxygen absorbers in those buckets:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_scavenger

Slows the little buggers down enough that you can eat your way ahead of 'em... [evil grin]

Didn't put them in the filament buckets 'cause I'm in and out of them too frequently. One of the buckets that had not been opened in a while, all the little buggers were quite dead, without even having to use one.

So if you were in a real bind for oxygen scavengers, you could just toss a bag of rice in there, let them hatch and suck up all the oxygen.
Poor man's oxygen scavenger.

(If you can get past the gross-out factor. )

Is this just a coincidence, or was there some debunking of the rice myth that I missed?

http://xkcd.com/1598/

Very timely!

Tim wrote:debunking of the rice myth

When every one of us does our part, that's how we make progress!

If rice absorbed water it would "cook" if you left a bowl out on a humid day. It don't, so it don't!

Nice debunking everyone! Well, everyone except Jules since all she did was feed bugs. Nice bug feeding Jules!

Mark the Greater wrote:If rice absorbed water it would "cook" if you left a bowl out on a humid day. It don't, so it don't!

Nice debunking everyone! Well, everyone except Jules since all she did was feed bugs. Nice bug feeding Jules!

(this is me sticking my tongue out)

I still don't understand why I can't get below 25% measured on a DHT22 in a sealed bucket with a ton of silica desiccant and Damp Rid to boot. https://thingspeak.com/channels/14270

Maybe the library code is incorrect.