wiretekaaron
New member
Hello everyone, I am a new person to this site and am hoping that someone here has some insight into a problem that I ran into this evening. We run a wire forming plant and one of our machines takes a wire form and welds to ends of wire together. Well tonight we had a welding error and I saw some smoke coming out of the control cabinet and opened it to get a huge plume of ugly smoke coming out! When everything settled down I was able to see that it was a very over heated ground wire coming off the secondary of the welding transformer. It had completely melted all the coating off the ground wire and I swear when I opened the cabinet, I saw the wire red hot (glowing). Anyway, does anyone know what would cause this?
The transformer has two inputs on the primary side and two outputs on the secondary side going to the welding electrodes. There is a 12AWG ground wire coming off one of the secondaries of the transformer that grounds to a lug on the cabinet that grounds back to the service panel. Other items also ground to the same lug. There is a breaker on the primaries to handle any incoming spikes. The machine has many CB's to handle spikes and nothing on the machine tripped... but that wire completely burned and amazingly didn't burn anything else. None of the other ground wires going to the ground lug burned, just the one from the transformer. The transformer is a 100:1 winding ratio and sees 440V and pulls around 5-7 amps on the primary side, when initiated.
So... I tried to outline everything here. Can anyone give me any info on this. The machine has run for quite a while without any issues and then this happens. Kinda baffled.
Thanks,
Aaron
The transformer has two inputs on the primary side and two outputs on the secondary side going to the welding electrodes. There is a 12AWG ground wire coming off one of the secondaries of the transformer that grounds to a lug on the cabinet that grounds back to the service panel. Other items also ground to the same lug. There is a breaker on the primaries to handle any incoming spikes. The machine has many CB's to handle spikes and nothing on the machine tripped... but that wire completely burned and amazingly didn't burn anything else. None of the other ground wires going to the ground lug burned, just the one from the transformer. The transformer is a 100:1 winding ratio and sees 440V and pulls around 5-7 amps on the primary side, when initiated.
So... I tried to outline everything here. Can anyone give me any info on this. The machine has run for quite a while without any issues and then this happens. Kinda baffled.
Thanks,
Aaron
