Finally, an usecase for USB irons!
I’ve had a similar experience as a child. I live in Germany and found this voltage switch on a hair dryer. My thoughts were like: Switching it to less couldn’t possibly hurt, could it? Well it could. It was super efficient though but only for a few seconds before it self destructed.
Shoudn’t it be 25%?
Current is not controlled here, resistance (aka the soldering iron) and voltage are.
Power = Voltage ^ 2 / Resistance. Double the voltage, that quadruples the power. So you only want to plug in 25% of the time to get the equivalent power of 120V.
But it might not melt at double power? Maybe the extra heat helps, I can’t find a resistance/temperature curve for a soldering iron…
Source: EE dropout.
nnnNNEEEEEEERRRRRRRRRd!
Right you are. Oops.
Hey. If it works, it works.
Any port in a storm right?
There are gas powered soldering irons that are essentially lighters with metal around the flame. Real life savers
There are also battery powered soldering irons.
I like the pinecil, usb-c powered soldering iron with temperature control. If you are not doing anything intensive any fast smartphone charger will power it.
Don’t they have switches?
No.
Seriously, many soldering irons don’t have a switch. Fancy soldering stations have switches, temperature dials, etc. But basic ones are just a resistive load wired directly to the plug.
Sounds like a cheap portable soldering iron, which just heats up to some roughly usable temperature whenever it’s plugged in.
Every one i’ve owned has and I get the cheap ones. I guess you can find them for under a dollar or something
Ive seen some really cheap irons that have zero controls, you plug them in and they operate at max power. Basically a wood burning pencil, really.
An engineer that has a project to show off at a trade show will have will have both a power switch and a temperature control on their soldering iron.
I’m an engineer that’s been in that sort of situation. If it’s planned, you have the tools. Unfortunately, sometimes these things happen and it’s not planned. At that point it’s taken what you can get. A cheap fire stick will still do the job better than no fire stick.
Why plug and unplug? Doesn’t the wall outlet have a switch?
They need a 1/4 duty cycle.
It’s only stupid if it doesn’t work
Person Wait Modulation.
Sounds super safe.
there’s the STEM bell curve. XKCD shows the axes as ‘how well your computer works’ vs ‘how well you know computers’. that is accurate.
but if you’ve ever known serious engineers who didn’t just live boring white collar work-home-work-and-some-marvel-shit lives, you’ll have seen things that make this look mild.
edit: and it gets really crazy when you’re talking about a civil engineer. closest thing you’ll ever find to an eldritch location.
So we’ve officially gone meta around here lol, we did it Lemmy!
Should have just left it in, and been able to get the soldering done twice as fast.
I had the opposite problem, I brought a soldering iron from Europe to Canada, and despite using a step up transformer, it just couldn’t get hot enough to melt the solder!
