How Weather-Damaged Impressions Are Costing Dental Labs Time, Money, and Trust

Jul 7, 2025

How Weather-Damaged Impressions Are Costing Dental Labs Time, Money, and Trust

It sounds odd, talking about the weather in the context of aligners.
But lately, it's been coming up more than I expected.

The case looks fine. The staging is clean. The attachments were placed properly. But somewhere around tray 4, the patient says something feels off. The clinician checks the fit, and tracking’s gone weird. Everyone’s scratching their heads, trying to figure out what broke.

Turns out, the impression was taken on a 40°C day. Sat at reception. No cold box. Collected the next morning.
Or it was frozen inside a metal postbox in Sweden.
Or left in a van during a cold snap in Kent and cracked when the courier yanked it out.

The input was off, before it even got to the lab.

This stuff doesn’t show up in the plan file. But it shows up in refinements, frustrated calls, lost time, and trays you end up reprinting just to keep the clinic happy.

Weather Damage Doesn’t Come With a Label

The problem is you can’t tell. The impression looks okay. There’s no warning sign on it that says “By the way, I distorted by 3% while you weren’t looking.”

But it happens all the time. And aligners don’t give you any room to hide it.

Take alginate. It’s brutal in cold, warps up to 4.7% if it’s stored at –9°C. Even 40°C heat causes measurable shrinkage. And polyether? Good luck, it reacts to moisture and doesn’t like low temperatures either.

PVS holds up better, but only within a narrow range. Take it out of that sweet spot, too warm or too cold, and it starts to shift subtly. Enough to throw off contacts. Enough to kill tracking mid-series.

The issue is that in real life, shipping isn’t controlled. Nobody's sending PVS impressions in thermally monitored packaging. They’re tossed in a ziplock, maybe wrapped in a wet towel, and collected in the evening. By the time the lab sees it, it’s already out of spec; they just don’t know it yet.

Let’s Talk Money (Because That’s What This Is Really About)

We’ve normalised refinements. But they’re not harmless.
They cost money. And for labs doing aligners plus appliances, night guards, retainers, splints, the cost runs deeper than we admit.

Let’s say you’re doing 700 cases a month.
Even if just 5% of your aligner cases spiral into avoidable refinements because of warped impressions, that’s 35 cases.

Break it down:

£8–12 in print cost
£15–20 in planning/admin
£6–8 to ship
Another ~£10–15 in queue time, team switching, distractions

That’s £40–£55 per refinement. Every month, you’re quietly losing £1.5K–£2K just redoing work that should’ve worked the first time.

And that’s just the aligner trays.

Now imagine that same distorted impression also leads to:

A retainer that doesn’t seat
A splint that needs a pressure point adjustment
A sports guard that comes back because the bite’s off

Those things get remade too. Often for free.
You lose machine time. You delay other jobs. And the clinic gets a little less confident in your consistency.

So it’s not just about print cost. It’s time, bandwidth, reputation, all quietly chipped away by an impression that sat in the wrong room overnight.

Digital Doesn’t Just Make You Faster. It Makes You Bulletproof

Here’s where digital wins, not because it’s cool, but because it removes risk.

You don’t have to worry if the scan was stored properly. You don’t care what the courier's temperature was. The scan comes in clean. You build trays. They fit. Everyone moves on.

No warping. No drying out. No guesswork.

You remove that one big unknown that can unravel everything else. And in aligner workflows, where 0.2 mm is a big deal, that matters.

There’s a reason why labs that move to digital see:

36% fewer crown remakes
40% fewer aligner refinements due to fit
Lower shipping costs, less material waste, and tighter turnaround

Less firefighting. More confidence.

Smile Genius: Built for This Exact Mess

We didn’t start Smile Genius because we wanted to build dental software.
We started it because we were fed up with inbox chaos and WhatsApp treatment approvals.