I bought one of these [new] locally for <US$90 about a year and a half ago. I do a lot of soldering these days for my customers. It's mostly extremely small stuff and mostly using my customer's very high-end stuff (including microscopes). I've been doing plenty for about five decades. I don't do much around the home office, but enough that I decided to upgrade and buy something that would do the micro-SMD and also the large RF connectors I handle. Oh and of course e-bike stuff =]
I've gotten time enough on it to feel comfortable recommending it: https://www.hakkousa.com/products/so...g-station.html
It's a 70W unit and comes in a fisher-price blue and yellow color scheme. I understand they make a more subdued adult-themed color but it's not available anywhere I could find - overseas may be different. It has a digital readout and control. There are 29 different tips available for it and they are a very reasonable at $5 for most, $6 was the most expensive one I got for the micro work (it has a tiny little 0.125mm tip). On the large side I got a 3.2mm chisel and they offer a 5.2mm. I ended up with about five or six tips but for most folks two or three would likely be enough.
The stand has both a little sponge and a wire ball (think steel pot scrubber) for tip cleaning. Use the sponge unless it's stubbornly gummed up (or you forgot to wet the sponge =] ).
Setting the controls was not very easy - very convoluted "menu" but once setup it's very easy to use and after the initial setup and some minor tweaking, I haven't had cause to fiddle. I'd say this is the greatest foible.
It has five user-programmable presets. I set mine to:
P1 - 150°C - "sleep"
P2 - 250°C - tip tinning, standby
P3 - 350°C - low temperature soldering
P4 - 400°C - medium temperature soldering
P5 - 450°C - hot, hot, hot
Sorry, I don't do that oddly american thing of fahrenheit...
Changing the level is very easy, just push the up arrow to step up the level until you reach the level you want and hit enter. It then shows the setpoint temperature in the digital display and then rapidly changes to the real-time temperature.
Since it doesn't auto-sleep like the more expensive ones I set it to P1 when I want to just let it sit around but heat up quickly. It's too cool to melt solder here so the tip won't oxidize easily if you leave it there for a very long time. P2 is a reasonable standby for sitting around for under fifteen or twenty minutes or so and heats up to P4 (my normal) in 15-20 seconds - not as fast as the expensive ones but pretty darn reasonable. I use P2 to tin the tip before putting it away.
I've done very tiny work (0402 parts for those who know or care) with the tiny tip and done some 10AWG wires with the chisel and it works great.
BTW - Use flux!!! At some point I may post some soldering pointers but near the top is use flux! I much prefer a liquid flux dispensed with a little needle pointed flux bottle but for the big stuff a good electronic suitable paste will do.
Typically I run it on P4 which is on the hot side of things for the small stuff unless you are fast. But it allows you to be very fast so I run it there [as I do the high-end] with a SN63 solder and it's a good setting for those with practice. P3 is slower but less likely to damage... it's a trade-off between speed and overheating. P5 is for high-temperature alloys.
The heating element is economically replaceable too.
Anyway, I give this guy a thumbs up and would recommend it for a hobbyist that does more than once a year or just wants a "real" unit - i.e. a controlled temperature.
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