I am a product safety engineer. I am tasked with making sure our soldiers are not injured by inherently deadly equipment that my company builds for them. Think what is like to keep a bunch of 18 year old boys from killing them selves with a 50 ton tracked vehicle or weapons. I know what tech manuals for dangerous systems look like. When you try to fool proof something, they just come up with bigger fools. We finally have to draw a line in the sand and say, “That’s all.” You should see the size of our TMs. - Rich
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Hahahahaha this will be an excellent slogan 
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I’m sorry to say I never read the manual 
Survival of the fittest I guess.
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We know that. 
There are lots of other safety things we do, like design controls. TMs are mostly for operation training and maintenance personnel. - Rich
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I’m currently designing a sort of clean room, inside my garage, for the Glowforge. I’m taking the “don’t move the Glowforge” issue very seriously, so I’m making a space that will have enough room for it, materials, and lots of passthrough clearance on each side, so I don’t have to move it what so ever after putting in place. However, without knowing the necessary storage and operation temperatures I’m worried my room will be insufficiently heated for the winter. Can anyone help me with a rough estimation of the kind of temps i’ll probably need and or a link to some engineering equations that may help me? Outdoor temp probably won’t ever hit less than -10 Fahrenheit here, the room I’m building will be inside a steel frame garage. I need to figure out if I can get away with just insulating two of the garage walls, or if I need to build an entirely free standing room. My husband and I do plan to get a heating cooling unit for the space but we’re hoping we don’t have to run it all the time this winter.
Any help would be VERY appreciated, Thank You 
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Here is one discussion.
The fluid for cooling hasn’t been divulged yet I believe, except that it won’t be water.
perhaps @dan has some further insight at this point, in terms of storage temperature.
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Speaking from Vermont, I’d say either extra insulation on the exterior walls as well as the interior ones, or else a backup heater set above freezing, or preferably both. Because that kind of temperature cycling on a daily basis isn’t so good even if you don’t get to the frozen-coolant scenario.
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Agreed, I feel like this is just too precious to risk to the vagaries of climate.
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I live in San Jose, CA. It occasionally gets well below freezing at night during the Winter (gasp! I know). Was there any conclusion on the cold that the GF can take while not in use? - Rich
Nothing announced by the company or in this forum other than the cooling liquid isn’t water. A lot of speculation. The possibility of the cooling liquid freezing is only one consideration. Electronics and other things inside the GF may not like temperature extremes or rapid temperature changes.
The manual will certainly have storage and operating temperatures listed. TBD whether they have locked the numbers down or whether that’s one of the gazillion tests an outside lab will perform. (Or some of the folks in Minnesota/Canada will let you know about 3 months before you need the info.)
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I can always plug in one those terrarium/lizard heating pads underneath the GF if I am expecting very cold weather. - Rich
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Those heating pads can fail as the late Gimp the Iguana could attest if hadn’t died of cold.
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We’ve had one for 10 years under our leopard gecko tank. Is that unusual? - Rich
No idea. It was a friend’s iguana. He mainly kept fish. He had some incredible looking aquariums. They kept the house cool in the WI winter to save money and he had a heating thing for the iguana. One morning gimp was no longer with them and the heating thing was cold. Considering the basic mechanics of it, it’s something that should last until a week before ever. Not that one.
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Heating pads are the kid of thing that last until they don’t. Typically not a lot of warning. They are also pretty much the poster-child product for thermal-cycling failure, especially if they’re doing the cheap thing of having a small element that runs at high temp that then gets dissipated through the rest of the material.
If I were doing something like that I’d make an insulated cover box that would require only a tiny heat source inside.
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Also watch out for condensation in the GF! 
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“A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools”
-HG2G
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Will this be reported as GF Flu? Like when we were all short handed when the new Halo Released? Ha
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I’ve always heard that one as “nature keeps developing better fools”.
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This is a quote by Douglas Adams an English writer. He said many quotable things. Here’s one for @dan and 
(and us?):
“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” - Douglas Adams
or:
“To give real service you must add something which cannot be bought or measured with money, and that is sincerity and integrity.” - Douglas Adams
These are from: brainyquote.com
- Rich
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