I have a Jackson NexGen EQC, which always seemed fine until I started doing a lot of aluminum work for my TIG class. I found that I had to keep cranking the shade up higher and higher, and even at the maximum it still bothers my eyes, which doesn't seem to make any sense. And so while welding tonight, I started paying closer attention to what exactly it was doing. It seems to darken to a proper level at first, but then after a few seconds it drops to a lighter shade... maybe about a 10 or 11, which is just too light for me. I had the sensitivity at 9, which gets triggered if I look at the fluorescents in the shop, so it shouldn't be that... but as an experiment I set it to 10, which caused it to be dark all the time, yet after I welded it started responding as though it were set to about a sensitivity of 4 or 5 even though it was still set to 10. The arbitrary lightening effect seemed to go away sort of, though not completely. This is all with a fresh set of batteries, by the way.
I noticed an old post in Google about NexGens having trouble if they're too close to the arc, and I suppose it could be that, but my face really doesn't seem to be terribly close to the arc at all. And this is on 1/8th inch aluminum, putting out maybe 90 or 100 amps or so at points, so I wouldn't think it would be a sensitivity issue. But whatever the case, it's really annoying.
Does this sound like a characterization of problems others have seen with these units? I'm definitely not $300 worth of happy with this device, but if I'm just not using it correctly or there's some known problem I'd like to get that rectified before I consider myself to have made a bad purchasing decision. Thanks in advance for any help that can be provided.
Bryan