Welding Tips and Tricks

so as some of you might know i was messing around with a 3000W 120V generator a while ago with my inverter welder seeing just how what the limits were with it and i settle on about 115A being the max with the AHP160ST welder..

so i did upgrade my generator to a 5000W generator with 230V output and i can say for certian now it will let the AHP got to its 160A max and it dose not overload the engine at all.

Well that's nice. Happy welding with that now.

Funny, I just posted the same scenario about my Lincoln 210 MP. I upgraded to a 7500 watt from a 5000watt generator. Good for us

I thought you both were the same people because I didn't read the name and just saw the "guide" tag under your name and read generator.

Farmer! You need to slow down just a bit. Beter to be right once then wrong three times.

jroark wrote:Funny, I just posted the same scenario about my Lincoln 210 MP. I upgraded to a 7500 watt from a 5000watt generator. Good for us

haha yeah always good to go bigger when your dealing with welders i mean i knew i could do 115A with the old one and that was about all i needed for most welding i do how ever if been finding that if i could only have a few more amps thought alot more.. hence the upgrade. only thing i dont like is the fact the new 5000W unit eats gas a bit more then the old 3000W unit. so i am going to keep it around for the smaller jobs.. actualy this is one of the reasons why the Miller 2E gets kept in the shop is due to the fact it eats gas like a PIG and dose something with the oil not sure if it leaks it or eats it or both but.. darn thing makes it disappear at a good rate..

I tried my 7kW generator just to see how it behaved, and it does good on TIG, decent on MIG, but Stick welding can bring it to it's knees with the huge in-rush when I first strike the arc and the hot-start kicks it up a notch. 125A with a 35% hot-start will eat up the whole 7 kW for 2 seconds upon arc strike. Then it settles down to about 60% of total power available when the amperage drops down to 125A.

Miller Legend AEAD 200le here, only a 5000 watt generator, but it will stick weld 200 amps all day long, and into the night