I know, this comes up quite often, but, well I thought that I knew what I was going to do and after I stopped at the store to get parts I have no clue, and I don’t know that any of these have been covered exactly

The welder in question, Syncrowave 180SD (rated at 54A draw), my Hobart handler, plasma cutter and I don’t know if my compressor is staying in the garage or not yet. My original thought was to make a big cart to hold the TIG, MIG and plasma, run a 60A, 3 conductor (plus ground) circuit up to the garage and then give the cart sort of a plug in center, where the TIG is wired straight to the cart, the plasma gets it’s 20A, 240VAC outlet, and then I’d split off 1 hot and use the N and G in the 3 conductor setup to provide a 20A, 120VAC outlet for it.

Problems with that:

- I can’t find a 60A plug/outlet anywhere, 3 or 2 conductor

- Would I have to run a 20A breaker on the cart, between the 60A in and the 2 20A outlets? It would suck to have to run a breaker box on the cart.

- Lowes had a “sub panel” that had a 50A plug, a ganged breaker (unfortunately I couldn’t see the value, and couldn’t find any anywhere except on the display about 10’ up in the air to get a good look at) and then 2 lesser, looked like 20A outlets. Any idea how these are wired? I would assume that you need to put a 50A breaker in your main panel and connect the subpannel to that?

That cart with a bunch of plugs on it idea is starting to look complicated and like it’s going to cost more then it needs to, so I’m debating doing something different, just running a single circuit out for the big welder and use the existing circuits that I have already to run the plasma and MIG. But even that raises a few other questions:

- how big a breaker do I really need here? It seems that most people run even larger welders off of 50A circuits, I keep getting “yea, I didn’t have any issues running a 250 or 300 off of a 50A circuit.” OTOH, both lowes and HD had charts that showed type of load and rated draw ranges and according to them for my 54A max I need a 70A circuit… FWIW, I’ve been running it off of one of the existing 30A circuits and so far I’ve had it as high as 140A and haven’t blown the breaker.

- Assuming that a 50A is enough (makes things much simpler since I can get plugs and sockets for that everywhere), what’s the difference between the ones with angled blades and straight ones (we’re talking the 50A “range plugs” which appear to be identical to the 50A welder plugs that Hobart sells)? They seem to be rated for the same power handling, but the sockets run about $5.xx VS. $11.xx and I really can’t tell why one would be more expensive then the other.

- What gauge wire do I need??? Miller wired the synchrowave with 8ga, and in the instructions recommends 8ga for runs up to 120’ (I need to run 44’ of wire to get from the main box to the spot that I have my outlets in the garage, yea I’ve made the run a few times now). OTOH, the charts at the stores all show 6ga (which ends up doubling he cost of t his whole project and I really don’t want to do for a lot of reasons) for >10’ with a 50A circuit. OTOH, one had a Lincoln tombstone sitting there, clearly showing that it needs a 50A circuit on the front cover and it had a 12ga (!!!) power chord on it.

- Is there any way that I could just legally run a 60A breaker and use one of those 50A plugs? I’d be tempted to normally since I’m sure that most of the time that circuit will be seeing less then 30A load and never a sustained load above 50A, but in this case I’ve decided that I’m going to do everything “legally” in case it ever becomes an issue with insurance or whatever.

 

I read most of your post..its late ..but anyways 50 amp is more than enoguht becuase you will never use any 2 at the same time..which is why you would need such a big breaker in the first place.... and by the way the ..im only donting this becuase you own a crossfire and I feel very sorry for you.....I know I had one..

 

8ga. wire will run the 50 amp receptacle installed to a 50amp breaker. Legally you can't install a 60 amp breaker on 8ga. wire. (60amp = 6ga.). Lowes & HD under rate the wire so you think you have to buy the next size up = more $$$. Truth be told, electrical wire is already under rated for max. capacity. A 50amp receptacle is a 50amp receptacle. Typically, a 50 amp welder plug has a straight blade meaning, the 2 hot blades = !!. Where as a range receptacle has angled blades = / \. Doesn't matter which you use as long as the plug matches the receptacle.

 

i bought a whole replacement dryer cord at home depot, opened up my mig and swapped the cord. $11, problem solved.

 

Well… I talked to an electrician and also confirmed in a few other locations:
- 8ga is sufficient for a 60A circuit (the miller manual lists it as sufficient for up to a 140’ run, I only have about 47’ to go)
- The electrician was saying that I can downrate the plug based on the duty cycle of the machine at the full power use, in other words, I could wire a 60A circuit and breaker and still use the 50A plug if the welder doesn’t deliver a 100% duty cycle at over 50A.

So I got the plug, socket, box/plate (I was going to buy a wall mount socket but I noticed that all of them are designed to mount upside down of the plug which I felt would put unnecessary strain on the cord probably to mount them on a baseboard or bottom of a wall or something, so using the separate box I could mount the outlet upside down and have the cord hang off the plug), 55’ of 8ga (the extra bit so that I don’t run out, it would suck to have to mount another box just to splice the wire, or worse, another $100 of wire just because I was a few inches short)…

All I have to do is find the time to do the wiring.