Parkour is on the money.

But trying to shed a little more light, after stating we do not recommend running our units on generators. There are a lot of generators out there, generally the good ones cost a lot.

This thread is about the Everlast IMIG units (IMIG-200). Not our TIG or larger MIG units.

I'm not real sure why I would run a TIG on a generator unless I had a remote barn and no power to it (and I would probably be using a MIG in this case). Maybe working in a commercial kitchen that did not have 220vac, but I was inside. Most kitchen will have 220 for hot water and electric heating type machines.

Plenty of power and good regulation are about the same as long as you have a clean sine wave (a "sine" wave locked in at a fixed frequency between 50-60Hz). You do not want a generator that will DIP (drop in power or phase shift) when a load hits it.

On MIG units, it's a lot like stick welding and forgiving and 30 amps at 220vac is normally plenty for a small inverter MIG or stick unit (inverters welders only). If you have a much higher powered generator, say 220vac/50 amps and a nice stable "sign" wave out, you are probably in good shape with most of our units as it will look like what the power company provides. But you can not see this or know this is the case, why we say no to generators.

We can not recommend any generator and our engineers will say NO, no matter what, even if you have the specs..

In this case it's a low cost self regulating generator running a low power IMIG unit. That will work fine with enough power.

Most Generac generators have all that (power and AVR) but they have a high price tag. The Honda's are not bad either and have the high price tag, they are strong generators if you have the right watts for the jobs. In this case, the Porter Cable has enough power to power this smaller MIG.

If I needed to run a welder on a generator and wanted to take the chance. Total harmonic distortion being low, AVR and a lot of power would be my choice.

Also, our MIG power supplies and internal functions are nothing as complex as what goes on inside our TIG units.

The thing to take from this thread, "IMIGs" will run flux core wire. IMIGs will run on some less than stellar generators in this case.