We’re shipping all Glowforge Air Filter pre-orders to all supported countries
We’ve now sent all shipment notifications for Glowforge Air Filter pre-orders around the world. If you didn’t receive the email asking for your address to accept shipment, here’s what to do:
If you are ready to receive your Glowforge and Air Filter, go to https://glowforge.com/shipping to confirm your shipment.
If you have your Glowforge and are only waiting for your Air Filter, check your spam folder for an email from glowforge. If you don’t see it, write to support@glowforge.com and we’ll help you out!
The Glowforge Air Filter is available in the shop in the US
If you’re venting to the outdoors and want a filter instead, customers in the US now have access to the Glowforge Air Filter at shop.glowforge.com! We’re continuing to work to open the shop in additional countries.
We’re still working on making Air Filters available in the shop for other countries - we’ll list it just as soon as it’s available.
I’m wondering if it is going to be possible (maybe later, after the backlog is cleared) to purchase the filter separately @dan?
(For those of us who change our minds frequently.)
I like the idea of it running quieter too…nice incentive to add one.
Thank you for the transparency. Had you elected to be this forthcoming earlier you might have kept more of my goodwill as a customer.
Is this the only problem that you have identified in the production run to date? Recognizing that one cannot have foreknowledge of all things, how much confidence do you have that the new tooling will remedy the problem and that there are not other production issues waiting in the wings? It seems odd that you are introducing an alternative product in October when you say your whizz-bang product will be shipping in January.
If you want to stress test it, do some of the deep engraving I’ve been doing on 0.5" Red Oak (315/full power). It produces copious oily smoke (you can actually see the smoke in the backyard when it’s engraving). I wonder how the filter will cope with that stuff. Just the front of the case gets caked with crud when I do those jobs, but I would question how well an activated charcoal filter might survive something like that given it will coat all the pores in the carbon with oily buildup.
Dremel says they are shipping their digilab laser cutter on sept 22. They will also have available an air filter for $2K from bofa. Probably GF wants to be able to have an air filter shipping in order to reduce marketing noise from Dremel.
I would hope that any carbon component would be in the “post filter” phase of the thing… not ‘pre’. A HEPA (or even a 13 MERV) box filter will get a lot of the odor just by trapping the particles. 1/2" prefilter, 3 or 4" merv/hepa cartridge, 1/8" carbon post…
First of all thank you for the update! Currently I can hardly use the glowforge because of noise and smoke (only Saturdays are left for me… ) any improvement of those two factors are highly appreciated!
Dan do we have to add any “international” approval time to the proposed date? I’d like also to know how long the cartridge will last and how much replacement will cost. Are we able to order one additional cartridge to save some money on shipping?
Any chance that the air filter plastics will help to ensure a level bed for the Glowforge unit? There have been a lot of users complaining of the lid mis-aligning, and this is sometimes traced to a small difference in surface height across the body.
I don’t know how it would be accomplished, but would like to imagine there is a way to ensure level placement of the main unit with the filter serving as the base.
This is the only problem we know of and the new cartridges look to perform well. That said, there’s an infinite range of possible problems. The current forecast has significant buffer (it could be earlier) but there are a huge range of problems that we could find that could push it later.
We considered this a lot, and decided it was better to do more work to get people another option, vs. making everyone wait for what we think is the ideal product.
@Dan, I hope this works better than those super expensive 3rd party filters you provided for MFNY last year. For the cost of a used car, I figured they’d have worked better than they did (not sure if the oppressive heat affected their efficiency - Alex and I still talk about how awesome you and @Bailey were at helping us stay cool and able to keep going with that crazy mob with the waters and popsicles that one day). For something the size of a dorm fridge it got the air “cleaner” but certainly not “clean”.
Unfortunately we can’t find any good way to express it - no other filter manufacturers have either. It just varies too much with settings and material. I’ll ask the team to keep thinking about how we might be able to give better direction, though.
I believe this is an offset from the previously communicated times, which are longer for international. So no, we don’t know of any additional delay, although delays are possible and international dates have less certainty.
That would be great. Not having used any laser air filters before, I don’t have any idea at all what to expect. This could cost me a buck an hour or a nickel an hour to run.
I might suggest producing a runtime value given the assumption of cutting nothing but one specific material. You know what the most commonly cut PG materials are, so you could develop that figure for, say, the top 3-4 types of materials.
Like:
750 hour expected filter life when cutting Proofgrade Walnut Hardwood
500 hour expected filter life when cutting Proofgrade Medium Maple Plywood
450 hour expected filter life when cutting Proofgrade Medium Clear Acrylic
350 hour expected filter life when cutting Proofgrade Thin Leather
That way at least we get in the right ballpark with the most common materials, and extrapolating from one kind of material to another is the user’s responsibility, not yours.
As a patient customer, I would ask for you to add-on a few credits or bonus items for having to wait even longer on this!
If I’m remembering correctly, originally the filters were supposed to be shipped June/July 2018, now they’re being pushed again to JANUARY 2019! I received my Glowforge in January 2018. It will be a whole year waiting for the Air Filter! And I have not even attempted to laser cut anything plastic due to the harmful smokes I may inhale without a proper filter.
A read other Glowforge owners have posed the following questions: how long will the cartridges for the Air Filter last? And how much will the replacements cost?
—Perhaps here is an opportunity to provide a handful of filters to us, the customers, included within the shipment of our Air Filter.
Another important question for me has also been one asked by Glowforge owner @jacobturner. He wrote: “Any chance that the air filter plastics will help to ensure a level bed for the Glowforge unit? There have been a lot of users complaining of the lid mis-aligning, and this is sometimes traced to a small difference in surface height across the body.”
—I am very interested to hear the response to this question, as I am one of those affected by the “lid mis-alignment” ailment in my Glowforge unit.
Finally, one last thing I would like to suggest…
—Could you provide a temporary AirFilter (the one you would be producing for October) that us as customers could eventually exchange for the “ideal product” that would be shipped next year? In other words, give us something in the meantime, BUT allow us to exchange it for the original elite product once that is finished. Specially since you are saying: “there are a huge range of problems that we could find that could push [production] later”.
) any improvement of those two factors are highly appreciated!