Best Soldering Irons for Beginners and Hobbyists 2020

Soldering is an essential skill in electronics: whether you want to repair some electronic appliances or to create and solder your own circuits.

Soldering is not difficult and you can learn how to solder in less than an hour just watching a few tutorials and practice assembling soldering DIY kits.

In this article, we’ll show you the best soldering irons for beginners and hobbyists. The soldering irons we recommend are suitable for soldering electronics prototyping circuits or simple circuit boards joints.

Best Soldering Irons for Beginners and Hobbyists

Taking into account the features you should look for in a soldering iron, we compiled a list of the best soldering irons for beginners and hobbyists. Take a look at the following table to compare the soldering irons. Continue reading this post for a detailed description of each tool.

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Top 8 Soldering Irons:

1. Hakko FX888D-23BY Digital Soldering Station
2. X-Tronic Model Soldering Iron Station
3. Aoyue Soldering Station
4. Tabiger Soldering Iron Kit
5. Delcast 30 Watt Precision Tip Soldering Iron
6. TS100 Digital Smart Mini Portable Soldering Iron
7. MINI TS80 Digital OLED USB Type-C

Types of Soldering Irons

There are several types of soldering irons for electronics circuits.

• Pencil Soldering Irons – these connect directly into a wall socket and don’t have adjustable temperature.
• Adjustable Pencil Soldering Irons – these are similar to the pencil type but come with adjustable temperature.
• Cordless irons – these are a good choice when you need the soldering iron to be portable, or you need something small in your workbench.
• Soldering stations – these are made by two different parts: the base and the soldering iron itself; the base usually comes with a holder, a cleaning sponge and temperature dial.

Features You Should Look for in a Soldering Iron

What features should you look for when buying a soldering iron?

1. Wattage: you should pick up a soldering iron with at least 30 watts of power. Soldering irons with low wattage take longer to heat up and are not consistent holding the temperature.
2. Temperature control: this is a good feature because different soldering jobs require a different iron’s temperature.
3. Tip compatibility: the iron’s tips should be replaceable and the iron should be compatible with a wide variety of tips. There are different tips with different sizes for different types of jobs. When getting a soldering iron, you should also consider the price of the tips. Some soldering irons are only compatible with tips from the same brand (that can be expensive when compared with the soldering iron price).
4. Holding stand: this is important so that you have something where to place the hot iron while you work.
5. Application: do you need a soldering iron occasionally for small repairs/jobs? Or do you use the soldering iron often to build and solder your own circuits? Depending on the application and how often you’ll use the iron, you’ll should pay attention to different features.

You might also like: Best Multimeters Under $50

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Best Soldering Irons for Beginners and Hobbyists Comparison

Here’s a detailed description of each of the soldering irons. There are several soldering irons within different price ranges with their own features.

This Hakko soldering station is one of the best within this price range – it is rated 5 stars on amazon. It has everything you look for in a soldering station. The soldering iron heats up incredibly fast (about 10 seconds) and preserves the temperature while working. It offers temperature adjustment and a digital display, and comes with a cleaning sponge and a sturdy stand that doesn’t move around while working. You can also find this soldering station with 7 extra tips.

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This soldering station comes with a 75W soldering iron with an ergonomic grip and a sturdy stand with place for several accessories like a solder roll holder, brass sponge, tip tinner and cleaning flux.

The station comes with a digital temperature display – it can display temperature in Celsius or Fahrenheit. This is a nice feature so that you know when the iron is hot enough to start soldering. Additionally, it also comes with a 10 minute sleep function. This means that if you set the iron into the holder after using it, it will go into sleep mode after 10 minutes.

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This soldering station comes with a 60W iron with removable tip design. This iron is compatible with many different tips, which is convenient for replacements or if you need different tips for different jobs. The tip that comes with the iron is suitable for most of the soldering jobs in your electronics projects.

The pencil is very lightweight, which makes it easy to use. It has an on/off switch at the back of the station so that you don’t have to plug and unplug the iron from the wall socket every time you want to solder. It has a little LED that shows when the station is on and blinks when it is heating up. Some people say this LED could be bigger to be more visible, so that you don’t accidentally leave your iron on.

The iron temperature can be adjustable from 1 to 8 by rotating the a knob on the station. The stand comes with a cleaning sponge, a holder for the iron and a solder spool holder.

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Recommended reading: Best Helping Hands for Soldering

Low Cost Soldering Irons

If you won’t use the soldering iron often, if you’re on a low budget, or if you’re just getting started, you can take a look at the following low cost soldering irons.

This is a soldering kit that comes with lots of accessories besides the soldering iron. This is great for beginners that don’t have any of the necessary soldering accessories and are on a low-budget. The kit comes with a 60W soldering iron with adjustable temperature, solder, stand, a cleaning sponge, five different tips, anti-static tweezers and a case to store and carry everything.

Some people complain that the cleaning sponge is not very good and the stand is not very sturdy. However, it’s still a great kit for the price.

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If you’re looking for a cheap soldering iron to use ocassionally, this is one of the cheapest you can get. It only has 30W of power and it doesn’t have regulated temperature. This means that it may take a long time to heat up, and it will have a hard time holding the temperature. However, for ocasional works/repairs and for the price you pay, it does the job.  If you’re looking for a soldering iron to use in your electronics projects and to use more often, we recommend taking a look at other options.

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Best Portable Soldering Irons

The TS80 and TS100 soldering irons are probably the best portable soldering irons for its price at the moment! Better than many “regular” soldering irons within the same price range.

The TS100 is a temperature-controlled, cheap, lightweight, portable and high-quality soldering iron. It also has some awesome smart features like the sleep and stand-by modes. The iron heats up really fast (approximately 30 seconds with a 12V power supply), and works incredibly well. It is very small and doesn’t occupy much space. So, if you have a small workbench or you need to do soldering on the field, this soldering iron is the best choice.

Depending on where you get the soldering iron, it will not come with power supply neither a stand. Nonetheless, we really recommend this soldering iron and you can read our review of the TS100 portable soldering iron here.

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The TS80 soldering iron is the successor of the TS100. It is similar to the TS100 but with newer features and some improvements. The TS80 is an USB soldering iron and you can power it using a proper power bank. Replacing the tips is even easier as it uses a 3.5 mm plug (similar to the audio jack). Read our complete review about the TS80 soldering iron (my favorite at the moment).

Soldering Accessories

If you’re just starting into soldering, you may consider getting some accessories:

• Solder: the easiest type to work with is 60/40 lead/tin.
• Solder wick: the wick soaks up molten solder, so it is really useful to clean the excess of solder.
• Cleaning sponge: to clean the tip of your iron while soldering.
• Tip tinner: used to clean and re-tin the tip of the soldering iron when it is black and oxidized.
• Diagonal cutting pliers: useful to trim the leads after soldering.
• Helping hand: to hold your components together while you solder.
• Flux pen: the flux pen content aids the flowing of a lead-free solder.
• Solder vacuum pump: this tool helps you remove the solder left behind when desoldering components. Until now we haven’t had good experiences with solder pumps.
• Soldering mat to protect your workbench’s surface while soldering.

For more soldering accessories, take a look at the Top 10 Soldering Accessories and Tools.

Wrapping Up

In this post we’ve shown you the best soldering irons for beginners and hobbyists. The irons we’ve shown you are all good choices depending on what you want to do and depending on your budget.

If you are on a lower budget and you are an absolute beginner, the Tabiger Soldering Iron Kit is a good choice as it comes with a lot of useful accessories.

At the moment, my favorite soldering iron from the list is definitely the TS80 soldering iron. It is so easy and practical to use and doesn’t occupy any space on my desk. Read our review to learn more about the TS80 soldering iron.

We hope you’ve found this list useful. Do you already have a soldering iron or do you intend to buy one? Share your thoughts with us.

Thanks for reading and don’t forget to subscribe our newsletter.

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