Good afternoon. I live in France. I'm a hobby welder who recently converted from arc to MIG after 40 years of the former. I am currently helping a friend to install a wrought iron staircase balustrade in his new office building after the blacksmith originally employed to do the job disappeared after making it (and three staircases and 20 window security grills). This was literally the first day that I tried welding with an argon/CO2 mix and it worked very well. However when I moved the welder upstairs, the socket that I was using eventually tripped the circuit breaker. Today an electrician checked out the circuit, opened the wall socket and found that the insulation on the earth wire had melted. The insulation on the live and neutral wires was untouched/apparently as they should be. When we checked the downstairs socket that we had been using, that showed signs of the same sort of damage. He's going to put in a dedicated circuit breaker and cable for use with the welder, but he's never seen anything like it before and as there's a whole load of other welding needed to install the grills, etc. we want to understand why. The only difference between the welding that we'd been doing previously and that upstairs is that the upstairs welding went on for considerably longer per session because we were making the balustrade "fit where it touched", which needed a lot of gap-filling on 5mm thick mild steel strip.
The welder is a 195Amp Chinese-made "own brand" bought from a Dutch company, VidaXL. According to the (very poor) manual that came with the machine, it was probably running at about 125A.
Thank you!
The welder is a 195Amp Chinese-made "own brand" bought from a Dutch company, VidaXL. According to the (very poor) manual that came with the machine, it was probably running at about 125A.
Thank you!