I now have a running 5.1 Pro with the 80mm water-cooled spindle. For those of you with the same setup - and any folks who know best practices: What do you shut off when you’re taking it down for the night? Let’s assume you’ll be using it again the next day or two.
Cooler? Spindle? Shapeoko? Laptop? All of them?
Is there a best practice?
I turn off the machine & chiller. If I know it’s going to sit for a while, I Turn off the VFD as well.
Almost the same set up (65mm spindle). In order to maintain the exact “state” of the machine without having to re-zero (which can be a big pain in the butt at times), I do leave my machine and computer on over night and continue the process in the morning. Probably not the very best practice, but it has served me well for many MANY projects. My only problem is when the power goes off and I lose that “state”. 
I have the same setup and shut everything down every single day/night.
I would turn everything off when not in use. The reasons for me would be the wear and tear of running continuously. When the Shapeoko is powered on the stepper motors are locked and on consuming power and generating heat. I have a VFD Jet lathe and I unplug it when not in use. VFD devices are sensitive to electrical spikes and are quite expensive to replace. If you live in an area with frequent lightning strikes then the best practice is to power down everything to protect you from stray spikes.
There is a rated Mean Time Between Failure for every electrical component used to built the controller and various electrical components. So by leaving your machine constantly powered up you are getting closer to the mean time between failure of everything with power applied.
A simpler analogy is do you leave the kitchen light on all night because you might need a glass of water in the middle of the night or would you simply switch on the light when needed and switch it off when you go back to bed?
A less well known and documented lifetime for most components is the number of power cycles. Each power cycle will also reduce the expected lifetime for most electronics. The only place I really see this value is on some light bulbs - some a recommended to not use in cases like bathrooms, where the usual use case is short, frequent on-off cycles.
It’s still a thing though, even on electronics that don’t document it.
If I remember correctly you should keep the chiller on for a few minutes after shut down for cool down purposes. If I run it for several hours I will keep on for about 10 minutes .
I am new to this so take what I do with a small grain of salt. I have power running from a dedicated 240v circuit and connected to the CNC table via a proper power cord that powers a sub-panel mounted on the back of the CNC table. There are separate circuits running from the sub-panel to appropriate outlets for the controller, VFD and spindle cooler. At the end of the day, I power down all equipment after letting the cooler run for few minutes. I then unplug the main power cord from the 240v outlet. I’ve found that the machine maintains its xy and z zero even after removing all power. For example, last Saturday, I was cutting some star knobs for a project and discovered an issue (my fault) with the cutout toolpath while it was cutting a pocket so I chose to stop the job before it started the cutout toolpath. However due to time constraints I couldn’t make the needed changes and had to postponed the project until today. I powered the machine down as noted above, made the necessary changes to the Toolpaths one afternoon this week and loaded them this morning. I was able to change bits and continue cutting the knobs out without resetting zero and it worked perfectly.
This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.