Welding Tips and Tricks

Greeeeeetings.

As the topic says... LED lights has just been installed in my workshop, and one of them died when I was TIG welding.

When I was tig welding, and had some small start/ignite issues, ALL lights went black for a split second.
After a few more welds, one light just died.

Is there a known issue between HF start on Tig machines and LED lights?


Regards

It is possible for the high freq to cause electrical issues. Usually only if there is a grounding issue.

Lol.

Yep, it screws with electronics like it's no ones business.

Make sure you are grounded properly and your lights are grounded properly, the HF can screw with your watch, phone, all kinds of stuff you need.

Thanks for the reply.
Yes, good grounding is essential.
I've done some reading. Found an article about HF welding on nuclear powerplants/sites. Seems like there is no HF 'cure'
Maybe a EMC filter on the LED lights will help. If not I will go back to old light tubes.
Regards.

I've had the HF kill fluorescent fixtures that were on their last legs, but never LED so far, knock wood.

For a while, the HF start would make fluorescent tubes go dark (or sometimes light up!) ... then it started shutting them off pretty regularly ... then it started tripping the GFCI breakers in the local circuits (which some of the fluorescents were plugged into)...I couldn't figure it out but then someone suggested that there might be coils in the fluorescent fixtures which were getting a current induced in them from the HF ... sure enough I started replacing the fluorescent fixtures with LEDs, and my lighting problems and GFCI tripping problems went away.

Lightning:

Is the welder and lights sharing fuse/line?
Thats the case in my shed.


But as I wrote, I will check up on the EMC filter stuff.

sveiseboden wrote:Lightning:

Is the welder and lights sharing fuse/line?
Thats the case in my shed.

Well, both circuits come out of the same sub-panel, but the welder is on a 240V circuit and the lights were on a 120V circuit.

As I said, replacing some of the failing fluorescent fixtures solved the problem. Now there are LED and some still-good fluorescent fixtures on the lighting circuit, and no problems anymore with either the LEDs or the fluroescents.

Lightning:

Ok. Nice to know. Won't hazzle with installing another breakerbox then.

Thanks for the reply.

Regards.