Every time I think there is an upper limit or even normal use case, I’m proved wrong by the good folks here. Someone will find the limit eventually.
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I plan to bang my head against those limits quite often. 
However I hardly meet the definition of “normal case” buwahahaha! 
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The GF won’t get hotter and hotter for ever. It will reach thermal equilibrium after a certain time. I.e. it will have a time constant. Once you know that time there isn’t any point testing it for longer at that particular ambient temperature.
If the coolant gets too hot, there are two things that happen. First, the tube power becomes unpredictable, and engrave and cut quality may suffer. Second, the tube may be damaged.
Today public units have limits on the second - if you enter the danger zone the machine will simply abort the print, which can mean you have to scrap your material. Internally we have limits on the first. Also internally, we have the ability to pause without aborting (which is pretty neat). Once we get those settings dialed in, we’ll roll it out so that we pause when we’re in the “cut quality suffers” zone.
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Cool. (pun intended) Thanks.
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Actually the first thing that was running out was my bladder. The second thing that ran out was my patience to sit in the room with a laser cutter running (ironically I wanted a pause button). The glowforge however did not run out of cooling capability…
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I kind of wanted to know the difference in the Basic and the Pro units. The Pro units were advertised in having better cooling, and I just wanted to know how much better. I might consider upgrading to the pro before my order ships if the data supports doing so. Has anyone run the Glowforge for 8 hours straight? 10 hours? I don’t see myself using it for more than that in one go.
It is less to do with how long you run if for and more to do with the ambient temperature in the room. If it is cool enough the machine can run forever. If it gets too hot it currently will stop but in future it will pause and carry on. Nobody has had this happen on long prints yet.
The pro will be able to run continuously in warmer rooms. I don’t think anybody has figures yet. It also has a 45W tube, better optics, faster motion as well as the pass through slot.
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I’m not too concerned with the optics, passthrough, or increased speed. I’m only concerned with the workload that it can take. If the only concern is ambient temperature, I can figure out a way to cool down an area for a lot cheaper than the 2000 dollars needed to upgrade it. I will most likely stay with the basic
It was originally recommended for continuous use but none of the PRU users have hit the limit yet, so the cooling system seems to have exceed expectations. We haven’t seen a summer yet though.
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I ran for 10 hours in a 12 hour period with two back to back three hour engravings/cuttings. Not a proper test. But for the first month or so, I was reticent at making long engraves, thinking I’d be bumping against the limit. Then @karaelena and @takitus posted some long print times and I started regularly doing over two hour prints. My Glowforge room was around 70 most of the time, mainly because of the lighting in the room. It’s very cool in the summer, so I’m not stressing it. Now that there are recommended settings to go 100% for cutting most things, I’d say they are fairly confident about the cooling setup.
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