Whether you work in a repair shop, research and design, or a hobbyist, you should gain reliable service from a branded soldering station under normal use. You may need to replace consumables like tips, heating elements, and even soldering iron handles while soldering, but the body of a good soldering station should last for years. There are several well-known brands of soldering stations - including Weller, AiXun (available on this site), Pace, JBC, Goot, and Hakko - that offer quality lead-free soldering stations.
When you're choosing the best soldering station, you need to consider what type of project you'll be working on.
For example, now you need to use lead-free solder on multilayer PCBs, and you need a soldering station with a fast ramp-up or fast recovery temperature to use lead-free solder. If you're trying to use lead-free solder on an old soldering station that has a slow recovery temperature, you'll need to increase the temperature to compensate for the time the station is slow to be efficient. While this will melt the lead-free solder, the temperature will drop and not recover fast enough, causing the solder to stop flowing. When this happens, the heating will be prolonged and such operations may damage the parts and PCB.
There are two basic ways to achieve fast temperature recovery when using lead-free solder.
One is to simply design the soldering station with a higher power heating element. Soldering stations used to be rated around 35 to 40 watts, but today's reasonably priced stations typically have at least 60 watts—although choosing a station with a 75-watt heating element would be better.
Another way is to put the heating element and soldering iron tip together before soldering. After the power is turned on, the temperature must be reached before the soldering can be performed directly. This method keeps the temperature of the tip very stable because the element can react very quickly and transfer energy to the tip almost instantaneously. The only downside to this design is that tips are significantly more expensive because you are buying an integrated tip/heating element assembly.
If you don't plan to use lead-free solder, also keep in mind that Europe now requires all electronic equipment to be RoHS compliant. The US has not yet implemented this requirement, but most electronics manufacturers are located in Asia, and they manufacture their equipment with European standards in mind. So you may need to use lead-free solder, even in the US, it's wise to choose a soldering station that can do the job when lead-free solder is required.
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