Two soldering irons failed this week.

[treez]

Hi,
I’ve had two soldering irons stop working this week, and the fuse did not blow in either.
They are those soldering irons which are just basically a cylindrical resistor between live and neutral, and this cyclinder surrounds the iron and warms it up.
When I measure the resistance of a working one..its a couple of kiloOhms……a “dead” one measures open circuit between live and neutral…so obviously the connection of live and or neutral to the cylindrical resistor is somehow breaking.

Why is this happening?
These kind of irons have been fairly reliable for me in the past…..i wonder if it is the cold snap of weather that’s increasing the expansion/contraction and breaking the wire?

Here is the part number of one of the failed ones…
Duratool, DO1847-60 (60W)
https://www.farnell.com/datasheets/1595604.pdf
..this one failed after a few days

The other one was similar

 

[betwixt]

Those thing are horrible. Get yourself decent temperature controlled models, you can set the temperature you want and keep it fairly constant no matter how much heat your draw away from the tip. The also only draw current when needed so the overall power consumption is much less. I have a Weller temperature controlled (Curie point magnetic switch) iron here I purchased around 1975 which is still working perfectly. I also use a Chinese 'HQ-Solder/30' model with a digital readout which has been in operation for about 15 years.

Brian.

 

[BradtheRad]

Did your house voltage rise abnormally? That would be a common factor for your two irons. A 10 percent rise in voltage results in 21 percent greater power through resistive loads.