I use this hard and steadily, and the only thing it does is keep going and occasionally I hear the cooling fan come on. Mostly GMAW, a little SMAW, and tested to see if the remote works with GTAW but haven't welded with that yet. Nice butter smooth arc with 0.035 ER70S and the 6011 setting seems to actually dig like it should, although I haven't had to root a pipe with that yet for a real comparison. 7018s are smooth as well of course. I prefer to set everything manually, but the auto set is very easy, just pick material size and what you're welding with, and it gets it very close. Would highly recommend this machine for a portable. I do notice a slight difference in arc characteristic running SMAW on 120 vs 220, but that was also on a very old circuit that kept tripping the breaker so hard to tell if I can really blame the machine for that one.