PSA: Shut down your Carvey, machine ON time affects warrenty

So I just got off of the phone with Inventables Support, after my Carvey CNC went completely nuts.

Backstory: Started having issues with the X-axis skipping steps, reduced speed/feed did nothing. Watched the carve, saw that the X-axis was skipping during the rapid acceleration in travel moves (no load at all, wtf?). Opened up the back panel to check the belt tension, all good. Machine now fails to home Z-axis, acts as iff the stepper driver is dead. Also randomly inverts Z-home direction and crashes into the bed.

Anyways, I contacted Inventables support about the worsening issues, and was told that my machine was not eligible for any warranty work, as it had over 700 hours (30 straight days) on it, and their warranty only goes to 500 hours.

I will admit that I ran my machine quite hard, but I don’t think that I have 700 hours of actual carving time on the machine. However, it is feasible that it has been turned ON for 700 hours. I believe that this is what Inventables uses to quantify their warrenty cutoff, although someone else may weigh in on that.

TL;DR Shut off your machine when it is not carving to get the most out of your warranty instead of having it disappear by leaving your machine on but idle.

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Are you serious?

I’ve never heard of any company having a warranty that was rated in hours. That’s pretty bad :disappointed:

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It’s on the web site. Still pretty bad though.

How Long Does This Limited Warranty Last?

This limited warranty expires on the earlier of (i) 500 hours of use of the Carvey, or (ii) the first anniversary of the date of delivery of the Carvey to you.

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Actual cutting time would seem to be more reasonable.

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Hi All, the limited warranty does state that it expires on the earlier of (i) 500 hours of use of the Carvey, or (ii) the first anniversary of the date of delivery of the Carvey to you. The 500 hours should be tracked based on carving time. I will verify this and get back to everyone tomorrow. Please note Caleb I will take a look with my CS team and see how we can help get you up and running again either way.

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OK, thanks for the clarification on how the hours are recorded.

I have been in contact with the CS team for some time now, and it appears that the main board or one of the stepper drivers is dead. I would be comfortable with installing a new one, especially if I could purchase one outright, but I was told that the only way I could get a new main board would be to ship my Carvey to the contract manufacturer and get a bid to fix the machine. That is not happening, so I think I will be replacing the main board with an xPRO V3 CNC controller or a similar board.

Maybe we could get an “hour meter” that we could see on the machine status page? that would be a nice tidbit to know!

Correct - when we set this up for Carvey it was based on the time from when you click the green carve button to when the job is completed in Easel. This was so we could at minimum offer a limited warranty to customers. We don’t have a way to track “on” time because for example the machine could be switched on without being plugged into Easel.

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Even with no warranty inventables has been the only company that has actually helped me out when I had an issue. Heck even with a warranty with other companies it is a huge hassle. Always the fineprints

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Update: I had our dev team investigate the tracking feature just to make sure everything was functioning as it should and it turns out we do have a potential issue on our end. The feature seems to not account for when a user has multiple Easel tabs open. For example, if you open an Easel tab, start a job and then open a 2nd or 3rd tab to work on a new project while the job is running, the tracking time is being double counted for each tab you may have open simultaneously. We are working on a fix that will be pushed out shortly and correct run times for all Carvey owners. We apologize that it seems we didn’t account for this scenario when we first pushed out the Carvey run time tracking feature. Thank you to @CalebMeyer and the forum community for bringing this to our attention. Also, I do want to reiterate that only actual carving time is counted. If the machine is on but not carving, or if carving is paused, that time is not counted. Please let us know if you have any further questions.

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should be fixed shortly and the correct run times updated for all Carvey customers in the system. But yes in the meantime we would have to look at the date if this issue comes up.

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Yup, but based upon “I do want to reiterate that only actual carving time is counted”, it shouldn’t matter how many tabs/projects you have on the go as it should only be tracking on the tab that is in a current Carve state, no?

Just curious. Is there a way for me as a user to access my Carvey’s elapsed time meter? I’ve looked around the software, but don’t see anything that jumps out.

Hi George, unfortunately we haven’t built that part yet. But if you contact our customer support team or private message me with your serial number we can give that to you. I apologize for the inconvenience.

Woh, I always feel like somebody’s watching meeeee

I don’t know much about the Carvey, but the recommendation to turn it off sounds pretty sound (yeah I just wrote that). In essence while any of these devices are powered on they are applying voltage to the stepper motors, so kind of vampiric to your power bill :bulb:

I didn’t have any particular need to know my machine hours, but just curious if I could casually track them. (although, perhaps I don’t really want to know how much time I devote to this hobby.) I guess it would be good to be able to request the number if I ever wanted to sell the machine so I could include it in a description, but since I’m not planning to let it go any time soon, no problem.

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Hi All, This fix has been implemented. The existing duplicated running times have been deleted and the fix should prevent them from being recorded duplicately in the future. I am going to close out this thread.

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