Friends, I welcome you to the channel for beginners in the garage and dacha self-taught welding. Here we share simple welding work tips, many of which are not found in books. Those who have been with us for a long time have significantly reduced their path to normal results.
Today there will be advice for those who are just thinking about buying their first welding inverter. The prices for household welding machines are quite reasonable. But I want to warn you that for active welding after purchasing the device, you will most likely have to spend a few thousand more so that your inverter becomes truly convenient for welding.
Here are 2 photos at the top, as they say, find the differences here. The red inverter is my machine, pay attention to its welding cables. These are not store-bought ones that come with the device, I have already made the elongated ones myself. Why and why?
Here is a photo of a typical household welding example for a novice user. Well, what's wrong with that, a person who does not yet have welding experience will think.
New inverters are sold with very short cables that go to grip and bulk. Their length is usually no more than 1.5 meters, very rarely a little more. With such cables, you will have to put your inverter close enough to the welding site every time. This is quite inconvenient and, if used frequently, is harmful to the device itself.
After all, the welding spatter scatters quite far, and you will not put the apparatus on these 1.5 meters of cable length. In operation, the cable cannot always be straight and taut, which means that the inverter is placed much closer to the cable length. The fan drives air into the interior of the unit for cooling, and at the same time can pick up small welding spatter. If this continues for a long time, it will in any case affect the resource.
Therefore, those who often begin to use welding for their garage and summer cottage purposes eventually make elongated cables. And here it will be much more convenient to work. There is no need to move the device to the place of the welding seam every time, it stands in one place, and you only carry a holder and a slag hammer.
But convenience and comfort don't come for free. We'll have to lay down a budget for the purchase of the device for normal welding cables. I extended mine many years ago to 10 meters, each cable for the grip and a mass of 10 meters.
But this is for constant work, for home, for comfortable welding, cables of 5 meters will be optimal. And how much will it be for the money? Let's take a look at the current prices in stores. Let it be a 16 square millimeter cable, this is optimal for household welding and inverters with a capacity of up to 200 amperes.
These are the prices, I have not looked for a long time, it turns out that normal cables will cost a third or half of the price of the inverter. Well, if normal cables went right with the inverter, then the price would be different. Plus, often on new inverters, the cables are not copper, but aluminum, such will break much more often.
But, again, this tuning will have to be done if there is a lot of welding to be done. So it is better to immediately estimate the real budget for the purchase of the device + welding cables. If you sparkle with an electrode once every five years, then I think it's not worth driving with elongated wires.