In this sponsored video with Push Plastic, I finally asked a filament manufacturer the question that’s been bouncing around YouTube forever: do we REALLY need to dry all our filament before we print? I sat down with Joshua Van Vleet (plant manager at Push Plastic) and we dug into the actual science—hygroscopy, what moisture can and can’t do inside an FDM printer, and why a lot of “dry it and it’ll fix everything” advice online is incomplete. Big takeaway: for most PLA, drying is usually not the magic fix people think it is. A lot of the issues folks blame on moisture are actually settings (especially temperature) or even mystery formulations where the spool says “PLA” but it’s effectively something else. We also talked about brittle filament, broken filament left loaded in the printer, and why that “dryer fixed it” moment can be annealing—not moisture removal—because heat can relax and toughen the polymer structure. Where drying absolutely matters is nylon (and a few other notorious offenders). If your nylon sounds like you’re cooking bacon, that’s steam popping and foaming, and drying can be the difference between a disaster print and a clean one. And yeah—drying doesn’t usually hurt, but it can waste power if you’re doing it when you don’t need to. As always: test, tweak temps, and please print safe.