I have to figure out what I will do for the next Summer…
It’s 5:53PM here in SoCal and we’re still at 101 F, It’s a dry heat though…
I plan to set up my in my garage workshop, so no AC, it’s probably about 85 F in there right now. I’m trying to find out if those portable AC units will work, and also figure out if I can put in on a different circuit than the or our fridge, don’t want to pop a breaker every 5 minutes. Our garage faces West straight on, which means you can sometimes fry an egg on that garage door.
Have you thought about garage door insulation? The humidity in Georgia nixes the idea of putting our 'forge in the garage, but for general messy projects, it sure would be nice to be a tad cooler! Just putting dark auto window tint on the row of windows made a pretty noticable temp difference, btw. I told my mother we had a sauna for her, you just had to go up the pull-down stairs to get into the garage attic Even smells like one!
This happened to me and my room was 86 F. I emailed support and got this response
"Your Glowforge Pro features a solid-state thermoelectric cooler that allows for heavier use at higher ambient temperatures than the Basic. It is designed to print in an operating environment between 60 degrees Fahrenheit (16 Celsius) and 81 degrees Fahrenheit (27 Celsius). Printing outside these ranges may cause your print to pause periodically or fail to complete."
I went out and bought a large fan that I placed over my Pro. After a while I got the temp under 81 and it has been working fine ever since.
Yeah the SFV is always 10-15F hotter than you guys, but I do prefer the dry heat. I lived in Cincinnati for a while, there it could be 55 F and really humid, and it was miserable! You would have a jacket on, and because of the humidity feel hot/sweaty and as soon you would unzip your jacket you would feel cold. So it was very uncomfortable…
It’s not so much (imo) about the max temp in which it can operate as about what happens with pauses as you get near or at max temp. We don’t have field data about that, but if you’re trying to keep your coolant at or below 75F while pumping 75F air through the heat sink, that sounds like it could have a lot of pauses to get the coolant back down to operating temperature. So for long heavy jobs the effective max temp for the basic could be lower, while the pro, more overall capacity for pumping heat out of the machine, would just keep zapping along.
(I’m sure GF has internal models and tests that make this very specific, and I also expect that their liability people are unlikely to release those because someone will figure out an underspecified edge case.)
That reply was July 30 and I don’t remember the limits being published when I got my pre email on Aug 2. A week or two later they came up with those pro temp limits quoted above.
Frankly my expectation for what a Peltier cooler can do is quite low, so I’m not surprised. But I start pausing at around 74°F, which is why the basement is air conditioned, so it was not a concern I had.
At work we had a FSL and to use it you had to fill (and empty) a bucket of water with an aquarium pump in it. Spills and leaks were inevitable, and on a long job the water would get warm and the power would fade. No warning, no pause, just ruin your job. And presumably hurt the tube. So as far as I’m concerned, having it take care of itself as long as the room is reasonably cool is just magic.
I think it may be too early to assume this is the final answer. The complete quote from dan was:
It’s the ‘One we get Pro units in more hands’ part that I think is pertinent. At this point they still don’t have a lot of pro units up and running, and certainly not in the hottest part of summer where the issue with basics was so pronounced. As with the basic currently, they just might end up letting it run hotter than what the manual says.
One of the advantages of a peltier device is that you can probably switch the one in the GF out for a more powerful one. But that would also require a dedicated power supply since these things take a lot of amps. I think that post-warranty I’m just going to replace it with a copper block that has chilled water running through it. The location of the peltier makes it convenient to run some copper tubing out the back to hook the water chiller up to.
If you’re talking about the makerspace at Google’s Mountain View office, then that very same laser is the first one I ever used. It’s where I prototyped the Robot Turtles 3D edition.
My understanding from other discussions is that the operating temp of the coolant is higher than 75F. The rate of passive heat dissipation via a heat sync is a function of the difference in temperature between the coolant and the air. If the operating temp is 90F* then they seem to be saying they need at least a 15F differential to dissipate the waste heat from the laser.
If you only have 10F differential, you can still run the laser, but the temperature would tend to rise to 95F or so before reaching equilibrium. Therefore, it would need to pause when the temp exceeds 90 and wait for it to cool to something lower before restarting.
in my garage workshop, so no AC, it’s probably about 85 F in there right now. I’m trying to find out if those portable AC units will work, and also figure out if I can put in on a different circuit than the 
Even smells like one!