Welding Tips and Tricks

New member but plenty of bench time with all kinds of processes on ol blue machines. Recently purchased an ahp alphatig 200x. Wondering if anyone has run this machine on a conventional generator

Welcome! Congrats on the new machine. I have not used the Alpha Tig, but have heard that inverter machines need a "clean" power source with less than 5% total harmonic distortion. You can look up that metric for your generator, and here's a hint: the more you have to search, unfortunately, the less likely the machine is within that spec. I was considering a generator sold at the warehouse club (mostly to handle power failures, but also to run welders) and had to call tech support to find the THD was 20-something percent.

Welcome...

Thanks for the info. This alpha tig is truly impressive. I had my doubts about a sub $800 machine but honestly I haven't come across anything it can't do. Could use a better foot pedal and torch but again sub 800 can't get too picky. That being said having a hard time spending 3 grand for a inverter based generator to run a $800 dollar welder. Seems silly. I talked to an inverter supplier and he said I could run the conventional generator have but would need to get a battery bank and all that and at that point you're dragging around four pieces of equipment to power a welder. Urg...back to the drawing board