Thanks @dan! I sometimes let it run before and after but I wan’t doing that consistently. On a related note… should I contact support about buying another filter? Is that an option yet? 
Nevermind! I saw they are in the shop now and just ordered one.
The sudden filling sound like what happened to me with Red Oak hardwood. Filter went from fine to room is filling with smoke in 10 minutes.
This running the filter after the job is interesting. I know the advice was out there before to run it a bit after, but I think we all thought it meant keep it running so the glowforge cools off and any remaing smoke is pulled in. I’m certainly hoping this gets a little more life out of the filter.
And I agree with @rbtdanforth, Red Oak is on my banned list for now. Even hardwood of it produces multiple times the amount of smoke of birch plywood, and plywood isn’t even that great for the filter.
So what is appropriate?
If MDF, PG ply (due to the MDF core) and hardwoods are bad for the filter or can quickly overwhelm it, are acrylic/stone/paper the only things that can be consistently used without issue? If so, that makes it more if an odor (acrylic) filter than anything else.
I’m still waiting on my filter but reports are making it seem like there’s a bug disconnect between expectations & reality now.
Do you think we could use the FSL-100 cartridges in it? I wonder if that would work. I found replacement filters on their site, but it’s like $600 bucks. Yikes! https://fslaser.com/Product/FilterSetSm
Woops, never mind! Just saw the cartridges are listed now in the shop. https://shop.glowforge.com/products/compact-filter-cartridge?taxon_id=57
$250 for a filter, and elsewhere on the forum, someone said they got about 12 hours without use of a pre-filter. Wow. I am glad I cut a hole in my house.
Wow! $250 is right. Fortunately my use case is only for traveling where I am not going to be outdoors.
Can’t imagine how a library or school is going to afford that costly a consumable in bulk - that’s textbooks for a classroom numbers every time they need a replacement.
I am definitely planning to go back to venting. But my venting setup was not ideal and only temporary so the filter has been an improvement and buys me time to figure out how I want to improve it.
I think the filter is good for very light use or when traveling, but it’s not really viable for an every day situation. I am trying to run a part time business with my glowforge, and if I run in the filter I’d have to increase my prices significantly to cover the costs, which I really don’t want to do.
You can do 4 hours of printing, then 4 hours of running; eventually the two should be roughly equivalent for maximum filter life.
The only material we recommend against is Draftboard and other MDF. We recommend using the filter with any other PG materials (including plywood). I’m going to have the team look at Red Oak though - we tested with a set of hardwoods, but I don’t think Red Oak was on the list, as it’s usually similar to hard maple in tests.
I’m baffled by this. Can you give us the cliff notes version of why this extends the life?
Looking I see that the filters for the Blue monster are much cheaper $158 for a pack of 12 or a six pack for $70 looking about And the carbon filter $177 for a pack of four
I was mostly cutting oak plywood when I started and eventually it ended up choking Puff to death, though I was late in figuring out how to clean properly, and about magnets. Since Puffette has arrived I have done almost no oak plywood and almost all Maple, Paduk, Walnut with Mahogany and Zebrawood treated gently as to not burn them up and the amount of crud is less that one big oak plywood job.
??? There are a lot of things in this world that I don’t know. But it’s rare that I come across something that still doesn’t make sense after thinking about it. Clearly this is one.
My Vivosun 4" inline fan runs most of the time and is very quiet, but in so doing pulls air through the Gloforge exhaust spinning the fan in the process. I’m not sure of the good or bad of it, but no bad has reached up and bit me as yet.
I would imagine the idea is for the filter to pull particles through the mesh and disperse them more gradually into ambient air, or along later stages of the filter.
Since users are reporting full clogging of the first half of the filter and a clean looking second half, this makes sense as a viable option. Particulate matter is experiencing cohesion (sticking to itself) and clogging the already small openings in the filter. Keep hitting air against those clogs, and some of them may break, releasing the excess particulate into the later stages of the filter.
If that is the case, then cranking the filter up to run at higher power should also serve as a life extension for the filter (prevent the initial clogging, and break clogs better when they do form).
I don’t know either, but that was what I assumed as well. The recommendation comes from measurements in the lab, though, so we we’re confident that it works.
If the fan is run too fast, the air won’t spend enough time in the filter, and it won’t clean as well, so we recommend starting at the slowest speed and turning it up bit by bit.
I would be very surprised as the HEPA filter is supposed to be extremely small holes and lots of them you might shove some collections around but I would be very surprised of they got through. That would not be the case for pre-filters as the goal would be to block everything over a moderate size without allowing the air to be blocked and holding back the larger particles so they did not jam the HEPA-filter. The Prefilters I have are 1/4 to 3/4 inches thick so the large particles sort of get caught up in a jungle without blocking air flow, while the HEPA filter is thin like paper.
Wait… The consumable is $250 per?! That’s way higher than I would have ever anticipated. And I’m guessing many, many people are going to feel the same way. No wonder the price wasn’t announced…
I’d rather spend $50 cutting a hole in my wall. That kind of expense is going to majorly eat into profit margins and make you double-think about making all those little one-off things. You’ll feel the dollars running through your head.
FWIW, the (unreleased) Glowforge Air Filter has always had a claimed filter replacement cost of “under $300.”
Effective filters for fine and ultra-fine particulates are expensive. There’s no way around that.