I have remedied this situation and inspected as best as possible without having to take anything apart. Front right corner there is a fan that draws in outside air through the openings in bottom of the enclosure and blows it through the radiator. The radiator exhausts in to the interior of the GF and is drawn to the left rear to be exhausted. On the left side of the GF there’s a coolant reservoir and a decent sized centrifugal pump. I’m guessing fluid goes from the reservoir to the pump to the laser tube to the radiator and then back to the reservoir.
I was surprised to see the radiator looks pretty much identical to the one I have in my workstation. Then I thought about it for a minute and decided it wasn’t so surprising. The interesting thing is that this radiator is two fans wide. On my workstation, there are two fans. On my GF Basic there is only one fan. However, there’s a plastic frame that connects the fan to the radiator and that frame is clearly designed to accommodate two fans. Given the only marginal improvement in operating temperature you get with the Pro, I have to wonder if it’s anything more than just a second fan to double the airflow through the radiator… in any event, out of warranty, this would be the first thing I’d attack - add a second fan where there’s a spot that’s clearly been designed to accommodate a second fan.
It’s still not clear to me where the GF is sensing temperature. I think it has to be the coolant and not the ambient intake air since it’s the coolant temp that represents the laser tube temp and that’s the only thing that’s sensitive to heat. The electronics, stepper motor, etc., can all operate at much, much higher temps.
If the GF is only paying attention to coolant temp, it will be easy to modify with real “active” cooling like with a Peltier cooler for example to extend it’s environmental operating range. You could even use the Peltier to heat if for some reason you decided you wanted to stand in the cold and run your laser cutter. A thermostatic control could be used to keep the coolant at a specific temperature independent of ambient. But if the GF is sensing ambient air as well as coolant temp it would be a bit trickier since the ambient air sensor would need to be “spoofed”. Not a lot harder, though. Doable with off-the-shelf stuff at maybe a couple $100 of parts, much less than that if you were to roll your own.
If you’re interested in the inner workings of the unit, you should search out @scott.wiederhold’s GitHub. And you can see exactly what sensors are in play, etc.
I’ll check again next time I head to my workshop. But I looked at it pretty carefully for a few minutes. I distinctly remember eyeballing the screws that hold the fan in place and in the adjacent fan bay there were no screws or any sign of a fan, just a gap where a fan should be…, it is the same (or very, very similar) radiator I have in the PC (which I built for myself, didn’t buy) so the difference was readily apparent.
Unfortunately yes. Posted problems are often solved by the community well before Support gets to them. That only works for stuff we can help with though and once we run out of suggestions you’re at the mercy of the queue.
Some of the customers have come up with a very clever work-around that might let you run it in the garage, even in Texas.
Try curtaining off a small area around the Glowforge and running your portable AC unit inside. It will drop the temperature around it pretty quickly. It doesn’t have to be pretty, and cheap plastic shower curtains or tarps on runners will hold the cold air in better than fabric.
@ jbmanning5 Yes, I checked that. I also cleaned everything. It still seems to be running at a much reduced level. At least, if the number of passes to cut is a guide. I tried running at slower speeds, but still couldn’t cut through the proofgrade maple in one pass.
I’m not risking running the GF anymore until I hear from support because I don’t know if there is something significantly wrong that could cause damage if I did.
@Jules - my fault for mixing problems in one thread. I’m dealing with the temperature issue, it’s the lack of cutting power that has shut me down.
PS - None of this is anyone here’s fault! The community has been great at responding and I really appreciate it!
Suggestion: If you are having problems cutting through PG material then I would open another P&S topic. Support has to triage the problems. The 75F maximum issue as stated in the original post is simply them answering and saying yep you need to keep within the limits. So likely it’s at the bottom of the list to respond.
However, your inability to cut through material is a real problem that they are likely to miss hidden way down in this topic. They might not even see it but would normally get to it quicker.
@mike12 , I’d second this suggestion. Once they look at the initial post, they don’t read through all the subsequent gabble by us. They like to see one issue per ticket so they can get it to the right support group to deal with.
No idea what happened there. Replied from the phone. Sometimes when you open the browser up, it shows the reply window and then it disappears. Wonder if that’s what happened?
Thanks for the suggestion. However, I’m not just relying on the forum, I sent support an email with only this question in it as well.
Do you think a post is likely to get more attention than an email? Happy to open another post if you think it would help, I was hoping not to have to go a second weekend with no reply.
They’ve said in the past the prefer people only open tickets in one location. Note that they don’t all have to be opened in the same location (like you’ve done here, with one ticket on the forum and another through email), they just don’t like duplicate tickets (one from the forum and one from email). It’s easier for them to track (and consequently easier for them to deal with everything), rather than trying to sift through potentially duplicate tickets.
usually they’re better about getting back when something is blocking you from using the machine 
I’m sorry they haven’t gotten this resolved.
I see the exact post higher up and he already replied to it.