I’m Ana. I spent over a decade in the welding industry and the last four years in digital marketing, and this blog is where those two professions finally meet.
Neither of them is an accident. I studied journalism, and just as I was finishing, a position opened up at the company where my father and my uncle worked. I knew early on that I loved writing, but wanted to build my career in the industry rather than in a newsroom, so I took it. The company trained young welders (my uncle was one of the instructors) and sent them to power stations, petrochemical and oil plants across the world, alongside experienced welders, my father among them.
But my welding education started long before that. I grew up watching my dad weld in our yard, admiring the precision of the things he built. Now retired, he still repairs tools for half the neighbourhood. Some of my favourite memories are trailing him around tool and DIY shops while he explained why a particular ESAB machine was worth the money, what made the new helmets better, and what gear you actually need versus what just looks good on a shelf. And I never got tired of him coming home from the field, excited, telling us about some welding problem he’d solved that had stumped everyone else on site.
I should be clear about one thing: I’m not a welder myself. My years in the industry were spent on the business side, including equipment purchasing, so what I know best is which machines survive real use, which ones die in a drawer, and how much money gets wasted at the moment of a first purchase.
How I work
Every price and spec is checked against New Zealand retailers before publishing, and each article shows when it was last updated. Where hands-on experience matters, I lean on the welders in my family and on people who sell and service this equipment daily. If I can’t verify something, I say so. And nobody pays me to recommend their machine. If that ever changes for a specific link, it will be disclosed on that page.
Spotted a stale price or something you disagree with? I want to hear it. Get in touch through the contact page.