pausing and resuming a print? (or running unattended)

[whaleboy]

Is it possible to manually pause, turn off the heat on the hotend (and bed?), then manually resume a print?

I ask because I've read of people having the Thermistor go out on them and the hotend go into a runaway heatup. I'm also reading that print times can get pretty nuts, with 8+ hours not uncommon. I don't have the printer yet, but for now I'd need to run it inside the house. With longer print times, I would have a hard time being able to stay home and awake to see a longer print through to the end. For longer print to run uninterrupted, I would have to leave it unattended for parts of the run, or overnight. I'd hate to think what would happen in the case of a thermistor failure if I wasn't around, or asleep in another room. And it seems those failures or near failures of this type are not unheard of. What is the actual fire hazzard if a thermistor fails in the middle of a long run and the print tried to keep going?

How do you guys deal with long print times?

Thoughts?

Thanks

-David

[bubbasnow]

we can set limits so temps don't get exceeded, if a thermistor goes bad i think the firmware will actually force the printer to enter dry run mode by default.

[Polygonhell]

The way run away heat ups tend to happen is if the thermistor comes lose from the Hotend.
At that point the thermistor is reading a reasonable value, but it isn't the temperature of the Hotend. As a result the firmware turns the heat onto max, and the actual temperature of Hotend skyrockets.
It's how I lost my first ever Hotend.
But in practice it's a none issue, if you mount the thermistor carefully.

[whaleboy]

So I assume a threaded thermistor would prevent the possibility of it coming loose? Do you guys who print at home leave it to print unattended for extra long prints?

I wonder what it would take for the firmware have a safety where if it senses full uninterrupted power to the heater for more than a preset amount of time it would shut down. That is assuming that the heater should never be In a full power state for that amount of time under normal circumstances. Just thinking aloud...

Thanks

-David