As promised, feedback after several weeks i've used NCrunch with 1 additional grid node.
Overall experience is positive, most of the time it works as expected, and splits unit-tests between my local box and a remote one.
There is one glitch, it is quite rare, but i get it sometimes. This is actually what triggered this post. The node stuck on phase 'Transfrring files to node'. Progress 1/38. I've turned off Sleep from my home laptop, so I am pretty sure it didnt went to sleep at some time.
disconnecting and connecting again fixed this immediatelly, so i am happy about NCrunch stability. But seems there is still one edge case where response seems to be lost. Hope this helps.
Edit - i've noticed this happening for first time, so it's not an issue. If it would recurr daily, that would def be a problem.