double0jimb0

Thank you for all the inputs. I do have it on the desk right now outside the desiccant box. It's pretty dry here (Denver) in general, shop humidity bounces between 20-30% (but currently blizzarding with 92% humidity outside...) I will put it back into it's own desiccant box in a couple days and monitor humidity level over time. Aiming to level out at 20%. Will report back with results. As for: No, the whole spool is super brittle. And it is not possible it has seen UV degradation, it is in a windowless workshop.

I store PVA in sealed box with the "under sink" dehimidifier that gets recharged by pluggin into wall: https://www.amazon.com/Improved-Eva-dry-333-Renewable-Dehumidifier/dp/B000H0XFCS/ These things I think are power dehumidifiers. I monitor humidity with two battery powered gauges, humidity stays at a constant 10%. I went 3 months between PVA runs, spool was maybe 6 months old total by this time. The filament was so dry and hard that it cracked in the feeder on our S5. When I managed to get the filament all the way to the extruder without cracking, it would extruded extremely unevenly and almost in a pulsing pattern. I put in a new bag of Ultimaker PVA, and it extrudes perfectly. So, can PVA be too dry and does it have a shelf life? Others experience here?

Your initial PVA layer is too far off the bed. I've caught Cura doing this a few times, I think it is a bug. "initial layer height" would get kicked to .27mm (when printing .1mm layer height), which would result in the bead of PVA not being squished into the glass. I change that "initial layer height" to something around 1.5x my layer height.