Inverter Technology

Most of your answers are here

http://www.lincolnelectric.com/knowledge/articles/content/inverter.asp

They take the incoming Ac power and then rectify and filter it to make a clean high voltage DC. The it hat get ran thought a solid state inverter that uses various methods of frequency and pulse width modulation in order to get the corresponding constant current or constant voltage out put needed for welding.

I personally worked as a service tech at a big welding supply change store and have much hands on experience with the inverter welders. Honestly as and experienced welder and service tech I would never own one!

Miller make several models and if someone even just gave me one I would take it apart and scrap it! They are junk and a half!

Lincolns units are no better.

Thermal-dyne rates only slightly better as that I would probably sell one of theirs if it was given to me. I Still wouldn't keep it and I would sell it as, is where is, and no guarantee that it will work for any period of time.

Inverter welders are amazing and great as portable welding power supply's go! But thats it. The failure rates are incredibly high and most non warranty repair costs are near the purchase price of a new machine!

If you have one that is still under warranty keep trading it in off every year or two and buy new ones. As long as your still inside the warranty period your good! Once the warranty is up just buy a new one when the old on fails. You will be money ahead! I promise!

We have quite a few Kemppi Master series inverter machines, and the performance is more than satisfactory. Of course they are not yet old enough, the oldest is about 3 years now. But no complaints from out put or reliability still

We are using Kemppi, Lincoln, Miller Inverter welding machines at our technical training institute and use them in SMAW. GTAW training more than 5 years and added few Chinese make ( price advantage) and all the machines are giving satisfactory performance as on date and we have not spent anything big for its maintenance. In fact they occupy very low space compared to conventional machines. Provides smooth and beautiful weld bead-ripples and also our power bill has come down due to its low input KVA factor. We recommend these machines to replace all the old bulky, high KVA rating machines. Sridhar.