Its cold out there

I’ve had my glowforge for two months now… gotten to use it exactly twice. Because its been too cold in the workshop to use so it sits, waiting, inside the house, for glowforge season. And all I can do is build a backlog of ideas in my brainspace whilst trying to teach myself various design software and drooling over what you’ve all managed to make. To say I’m jealous of all of you who can use theirs is an understatement.

But there will be long nights aplenty when the time and temperature rolls around to something more friendly for my laser.

My biggest problem right now is what to do first when the time comes.

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I’d be happy to hold it someplace warm while I wait for mine to arrive. :thinking:

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Make a window vent! Get that thing fired up! :wink:

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Wife won’t let me, its too loud and might wake the 9 month old. :frowning: I did run it in the house once and vent it out a window when the first cold snap hit. Just to make sure it was just the cold and not a different malfunction. The basement smelled like a campfire for a week, which I was fine with. Not so much her, she did like her reindeer though. Shoutout to @willcfc for the free design.

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Adding an in-line booster fan to the venting helps with the smell, as you can leave it running the entire time you’re working; the GF fan shuts off not long after cutting and so the smoke just sits.

Hope you find a solution. I felt your pain, my original work area in the garage proved impossibly cold, forcing me to build out (in progress) a basement shop. All for the best, this summer it would likely prove impossibly hot.

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Just read a thread where a guy hooked his up in the bathroom so he could use the exhaust fan from that. I think I have a spare one of them somewhere in the empire of dirt. I know I had two that were new in box and about to be tossed awhile ago, and one became the blower to my actual forge.

So that might be part of the next step in the process after adding some insulation to the basement, if I can locate said fan. Else I’ll be likewise out again over the summer as the great yellow face beams its spiteful glare from the sky.

If you have a basment you need to be cutting! Add a fan, make one of your first projects a HEPA filter. Make a “cone of silence” so as to not wake the baby. There are always soulutions.

Baby can sleep through the disruptions, his/her first apartment wasn’t exactly a sound-proof chamber after all. :slight_smile:

If the glowforge is in a separate room behind a closed door, it’s barely even audible.

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Yes, ‘white noise’ can work for you.

Man, this production unit is almost half as loud as the PRU.
It might be the frequency. Where before you could make yourself heard, now almost normal speech is possible.

That was my original incentive to get the GF - my garage was too cold (insulated but not heated and opening a 17’ door just a few times will kill whatever heat you can add using portable heaters (propane ones in my case). I was shutting down laser operations for 3-5 months a year.

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Run it next to the baby whenever he/she is going to sleep. Pretty soon, the only way to get her/him to fall asleep will be to use the glowforge. Good for you.

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^ These are wise words. Our twins are 9 and still love their white noise machine.

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