While the 110V welders work for light welding, the will limit your ability to weld heavy stock. In addition, 15 amp circuits are much too common in most home wiring, which menas that you may have constant problems with tripping the breaker.
Because of this, I would recomend that you look seriously at a 220V single phase welder of similar capacity. They weill draw 1/2 the amperage from the source and usually feature a slightly higher duty cycle, which will permit welding heavier stock on occasion. When the company I work for first started up all we could afford was a cheap 220V Century from Sams Club. It used 0.024 wire, which proved very useful for welding light stock but also stood up to some pretty heavy use for 8 years. If we could purchase a new contactor for it, we would still use it. For a 300 dollar, reputed POS welder, that Century prooved to be an excellent value. Now we have industrial grade Millers that work great but there are times when that little Century would be nice to have. Plain truth is that smaller wire made it a lot easier to weld up sheet metal cleanly because it was a lot less prone to burning through than 0.035 wire.
BTW, whatever you choose, make sure that it's gas compatable. IMO flux core wire is terrible, it's messy and I don't like the weld quality. For laying down a clean looking, spatter free weld, nothing beats gas.
PS, we just started in a new area of welding for us, MIG welding with silicon bronse wire. I'll tell you that was a real "learning experience", as in I was nearly at the point of quitting and getting a job flipping burgers at McD's. I started out using our welding robot that has a Miller 350A Pulsed welding power supply using Millers recomended settings. Once I figured out that the "maintenace" person had mounted the spool holder in such a way that it was grounding out the weld wire things got a lot better but spatter was a big problem. Our welding supplier made some calls to customers who were using this process and that really helped. Turns out that straight MIG works much better than pulsed. Now I have a good, clean, bronze weld that we can sell and we will be starting production after the first of the year. Now, how does this relate, simple, the stock we are welding has a 0.026 wall thickness. So, if you find you need to weld some really thin decorative stock, look into using silicon bronze wire, it will really help prevent burn through. Gas is 50/50 Ar-Co2, voltage is 14.0, and wire feed is 150 ipm. The only factor I don't know about is the amperage, I'm using a 350 amp power supply and because the silicon bronze wire is more conductive than steel the current draw may be too high for a smaller welder. However, if your beating your head against a wall trying to weld something thin, it's worth giving it a try.
