Welding Tips and Tricks

Hey guys I had a question for you... I've been buying and selling TIG machines primarily Miller and I wanted to know if anybody has the answer... Am I'm able to plug in syncrowave or A 330 or a square wave into my Honda 5000 generator basically to Strike an arc primarily to make sure that it's working before I purchase it.. anybody with any information along these lines would be very helpful thank you

I don't own a synchrowave or a 5000.

However, being familiar with electrical loads and circuits, I would think that if you kept the welding amperage well in the lower quarter of the machines capacity, you shouldn't have any problems striking some arcs for testing.

I have run my dynasty on 220v from a 5500 generator successfully in the middle of field. Ran it for about 90 minutes without issue so I’d suspect you’d be fine for a test weld.

Probably not, If you kept it real low on DC you might be fine, But I trip the 50 amp breaker at school tig welding at anything above 140 amps on AC. those giant transformers are just very inefficient.

There's a contributor here named Oscar who is a teacher (math, physics, or some combination thereof) who seems to be quite adept at taming the pixies. Curious on his thoughts here.

It's probably going to depend upon the model as much as anything else since some pull more inrush amps than others.

I've run both Syncrowave 250 and 250DX as well as a couple of Hobart TIGWave 250 on a 40A breaker, but they would sometimes trip the breaker if the switch wasn't flipped smoothly. I ran them at least as high as 250A output without tripping the breaker, but the problem is more the inrush when you turn them on. A 5K generator is only putting out about 21A, so that will be a stretch for machines that size.

Spartan wrote:There's a contributor here named Oscar who is a teacher (math, physics, or some combination thereof) who seems to be quite adept at taming the pixies. Curious on his thoughts here.

Close enough. My last year in the classroom was 6 years ago, when the higher up's said I needed to be promoted, lol.

A 5000W peak generator likely can only support 4000w continuously. That's 17A @ 240V. From my own measurements on my Troy-Bilt 7kW/10.5kW max generator, when you pull the maximum rated continuous current from the generator (in my case 30A from the 240V outlet), you will experience a pretty good voltage drop; you can estimate at at about 20V, give or take. So if you pull 17A from the 240V outlet, assuming it is actually putting out 240V, you can expect the voltage going to the welder to drop to 215-220V.

Another important factor is AC Frequency from the generator. Mine is configured to output about 62-63 Hz un-loaded; which is great because when I pull the full 30A out of it, it drops about 5 to 6 Hz because of the large load on it, so it ends up at around 58Hz. Perfectly acceptable for my welders, but if a generator is not set-up like this and is barely running say 57-58Hz for whatever reason, when you load it up, it will bog and you might end up with an AC frequency of 51-52Hz. Some machines might not like that.

Thank u guys for sharing your excellent information..i was pretty sure someone would have the answer but I wasn't expecting such indepth feed back from so many people..im grateful for that!...thank you!!...btw its a Honda 5000 watt...i assumed when I bought it that because it was a Honda it would have higher end circuitry and generate propper electricity as its rated... I'm going to go look at a old Miller 330 later and put it to the test I built a 220 single phase pigtail it pretty much takes all the plugs so I'll give you guys feed back and see how it goes thanks again

Yup, exactly. Testing it out and taking measurements is the only way to truly find out what is what. Nothing beats properly obtained empirical data.