It must be a couple of months since the last post on this (-: I've been playing around with mine for the first REAL time this week-end. Two Walmart Marine MAXX-29 batteries rated at 125AH seem to work just FINE with the spool of supplied 0.035 flux core wire. I didn't measure the current, but subjectively I'll just say that on 24V a lot of it (CURRENT) comes at Ya a bit quick (-: This is obvious, but "DC" from lead/acid batteries REALLY IS "Dee Cee", as in NO RIPPLE ! NIiiiice.
The manual says I might get 45 minutes of heavy welding time from a pair of fully charged group 31 batteries, up to 4 hours on sheet metal. This is probably adequate for most of what I'm likely to do, but I've been thinking about those intense projects that have to be done THIS week-end and don't permit a 10 or 20 hour re-charge cycle, so... The next step I am considering is a 24 volt charger connected across the batteries while I'm welding. I'm thinking that this would probably give me close to a 100% duty cycle. There is a Northern Hydraulics
6/12/24 volt 200 amp charger for about $200 that would probably do the job. Too bad it doesn't also have taps at 18, 30 and 36. There might be cheaper and/or better ones. Has anyone here tried this ? What success/failure stories ? Another possibility could be a really cheap and nasty mig machine, it could be quite low current with lots of ripple... Harbor Fre**** comes to mind.