I am not disputing you believe it.
Not sure I believe it.
Welding with 120A, 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week, 4 weeks a month, is about $25, maybe $50?
Moving assemblies/parts/cables/items/etc, fitting parts, rearranging, etc., be pretty lucky if an electrode was struck 1 hour a day? $3 to $6 a month. The bulb in the Coke machine uses more than that. The new guy they hired, a slacker, who spends half the day making fresh coffee, uses more than that, but he got hired and fired while you were using the spliced cables?
Or, a sustained 1440W power dissipation in 1~2" of cable is going to cause some issues before the electric bill arrives.
G-
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Actually Ghurd it did happen just like that. Myself and my guys were striking an arc much more than that, (every few seconds) and the company was particularly cheap: they watched every penny literally. To be fair, it was privately owned and not traded, and electric rates are fairly high here in upstate NY. I had to educate the big bosses about how to do things since welding was only a very small part of their business -- it was not the main thing. Even though I was the "leading man" in that dept.
We used anywhere from 120 to 500 amps of DC for at least 8 hours a day, 6 days a week. The building was fed with 600 VAC 3-phase and the welders used 480-volts 3-phase. It was difficult because be had to carry this current over a long distance, being a construction company basically.
If things were busy in the summer, then it added up fast and the big bosses would figure that into the bill. They had an 150-foot 3-phase 4-wire extension cord on a spool, and you had to drag that out to the site along with a few hundred pounds of welder machine.
I told them to get diesel generator-welders, but they never did. It was all about the up-front costs.