Cold temperature and constant calibration - is it temps or connectivity or both?

Community Support
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Apparently I havent seen all the documentation or I didn’t process it. I’ve had my glowforge in my garage. I have been having issues with frequent calibrations and it asking me to restart the glowforge. My wifi may not be reaching perfectly to the garage, (sometimes it seems to do well.) But if the glowforge is too cold in here, does it make sense that it might keep trying to calibrate.

I’m trying to figure out a way I can keep my garage reasonably climate controlled asap. But I may have to stop cutting for the season if I can’t do that. Just not sure.

I see now (hadn’t previously) that the glowforge probably shouldn’t be stored below 40 degrees at all and probably shouldn’t be operated under 60 degrees. Any comments would be great. I’ll also try to find this complete manual. Thanks!

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It would be good to have clearer error messages…as well as operating conditions.
From my observation, there is a temp cutoff somewhere in the lower 40s or so where you get the calibration error.
I have run in the high 40s with no discernable issues, but now have 2 heaters to keep the room around 60 when running the laser. Spent too much on it have it break for something avoidable :slight_smile:

One of the concerns running at too low a temp, is condensation inside the glowforge. This can be also a concern if you heat the room, but don’t wait for the glowforge internals to equalize in temp.
Trotec has a couple good concerns listed if the laser cutter is operated too low a temp. Several of those are likely to be the same for the GF.

It would be great to have a more elaborate usage/storage spec…e.g. Avoid operation/storage outside xyz limits and DO NOT operate/store outside zyx limits…(big difference of not so good to do vs you will break it…). I don’t know conditions in a UPS truck in the winter, but can well imagine it being below 40 degrees…

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Yeah, you want to let it normalize overnight. We ran into the same problems with overheating during the summer months. :slightly_smiling_face:

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You can read about Operating Environment in the Support area, and the manual is always available online, too.

I’m leaving this open because I’m not sure I’ve addressed your question – anything else?

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Thanks for helping me there. There was obviously more to the website than I had seen so far. I’m getting a lot of success now with putting a wireless access point in the garage and running a heater on occasion. Need to get it a little more climate controlled but now my calibration doesn’t get hung up. In fact, before a couple days ago, I would get calibration loops after every cut sometimes, but now it barely blinks “calibrating” and it’s done, so both the wireless and the temps were causing issues.

In a nod to open source, it was an absolute nightmare to get an access point to work with the linksys router I had, UNTIL I installed open source OpenWRT and it was a snap. I hope GlowForge continues down the road of keeping things open so these can live on in the future for some time.

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I’ve seen lots of good things with DDWRT also. Used that several times over the years.

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I’m glad to hear that, and I’ll make sure the team gets the feedback! Thanks for letting us know. I’m going to close this thread - if the problem reoccurs, go ahead and post a new topic. Happy printing!