I recently purchased a used lincoln power wave 455m inverter welder. The price was right for the machine, I paid $1000 for it and they were originally 10k up. I didn't think to check the input power requirment since all the newer inverters that I've looked at run on 1 or 3 phase. If your not familiar with an inverter welder they rectify the incoming ac to dc then back to high frequency ac in order to reduce the size of transformer required.
Anyways I have turned the machine on from single phase power on 2 of the input legs. It does turn on but I cant test it out yet because all the controls are on a seperate wire feeder that needs to be attached. Being that the first thing the machine does is convert the incoming ac to dc I don't see why it would know/care too much that the incoming power is single phase. The biggest difference I could see is that the dc ripple from 3 phase would be a lot less then that of single phase. So Im thinking of adding some large capacitors to the output of the rectifier to reduce the ripple to at least something close to what 3 phase would have. I have no idea how to calculate this though. Could someone help me figure out what size caps to add. The machine would probably see something like 50 amps max draw on the input.
Anyways I have turned the machine on from single phase power on 2 of the input legs. It does turn on but I cant test it out yet because all the controls are on a seperate wire feeder that needs to be attached. Being that the first thing the machine does is convert the incoming ac to dc I don't see why it would know/care too much that the incoming power is single phase. The biggest difference I could see is that the dc ripple from 3 phase would be a lot less then that of single phase. So Im thinking of adding some large capacitors to the output of the rectifier to reduce the ripple to at least something close to what 3 phase would have. I have no idea how to calculate this though. Could someone help me figure out what size caps to add. The machine would probably see something like 50 amps max draw on the input.