Munkul
Jack of some trades, Master of none
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- Cumbria
You might not have, but plenty others have...And as for reliability, are they actually unreliable? I haven't seen any evidence to suggest so. Same goes with this condensation/moisture getting to the electronics myth. The only ones that seem to be hanging on are the ones that can't/won't educate themselves.
Put it this way - we had 7 Kemppi 230a inverter TIGs and two big 400a Kemppi transformer MIGs brand new about 12-13 years ago now.
Out of the TIG sets, only 2 of them are still in the shop.... one of them was written off and DIY-fixed, and 4 of them were declared uneconomical repair.
Oh, and we had a new Lincoln TIG set. Failed catastrophically just before it went out of warranty. They had to replace nearly every component.
The MIGs are going as well as they did on day 1... better if anything, now they have proper volts/amps readouts. They've had, to date, a single set of new drive rolls, and that was only because the service tech thought they were a bit loose.
Now there's horses for courses, and in my own shop, I have a 25 year old Miller multiprocess inverter... it's going as well as it did on day 1 too... My old Esab TIG inverter was 20+ when I moved it on (moisture was really starting to cause intermittent problems). I'll always have inverters, I like the benefits they give. But I'm not kidding myself. They're more of a gamble than a transformer, over the lifespan. If the Miller let the smoke out tomorrow, I would be sad, but not overly surprised.
It's not exactly a myth that moisture affects inverters, and it's not a myth that they are less reliable.