Welding Tips and Tricks

Hi all!

I'm trying to figure out how much kW my Syncrowave 350 LX draws at work.. But how Ive tried to calculate it, its comes down to about $98 a month.. This cant be correct!

Here are some numbers for you if you can figure this out..

8 hour work day.
Total arc-time: 3h (300A)
Idle: 5h
Price per kWh: $0.13



From what I can understand on this spec-sheet pulled from the manual.. Full load is 14 kW with 300A on AC single-phase and idles at 0.4 kW?
so (14kW*3hours)*$0.11= price for 3h arc-time?

Thanks for your time

Sounds about right price-wise...

For an 8-hour work-day you'd have:

3 hours 'on' time: 14*3 = 42 kWh, 5 hours 'idle' time: 0.4*5 = 2 kWh, Total: 44 kWh/day

5 days a week: 44*5 = 220 kWh/week. At $0.13 that's $28.60 a week so your number for a monthly energy cost is not far off.

The idling power use is costing you money but in the scope of things it's still way smaller than the 'on' time usage. (about $1.30 a week)

An inverter machine would be more efficent on the in-use power use and may make more of a difference on the cost as that's where your main draw/cost is.

AC input power is a fickle beast and depending on how you load an AC circuit you can get much better efficiency from the delivered power measured by your electric company than with a plain transformer.

To be able to weld at 300A you still have to feed any machine a sizable input current but if you look at inverters that are in that welding range you'd probably be looking at 8-10kVA input power which is quite a bit less than a transformer and would cut your electricity bill down.

Of course just buying an inverter just for the reduction in energy consumption is neat but probably not very economical unless the old machine is slated for replacement anyway or you need/want the features that inverters can offer. The cost saving in energy versus the price of a new machine means you'd take quite some time to break even on that alone. (if it allows you to do other/different work that pay mosre it may be more interesting..)

Bye, Arno.

Thank you so much, Arno! Big help!