ToAuto DS90 Soldering Station Review

ToAuto DS90 Soldering Station Review

Buy it at Amazon: ToAuto DS90 Soldering Station [Affiliate Link]

Takeaway: Simple setup, heats up quickly, easily and accurately set temperature with digital LCD.

A big thank you to today’s sponsor, FastToBuy, for sending out this complimentary unit for my unbiased review. Be sure to check out their upcoming Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales for a great deal on this soldering station and other cool DIY and hobby tools.

You’ll receive the soldering station, solder tin roll caddy with pre-installed roll, iron handle seat, solder sucker, grounding wire, tweezers, 5 additional tips, and an instruction manual. Assembly is really quick and straightforward -- just install the iron handle and solder roll caddy to the left-hand side. Along the right-hand side you can store your extra tool tips. The unit comes with a knife, chisel, beveled, wide, and fine conical tips. To change the tip just unscrew the metal tube and remove the tip which exposes the ceramic heating element; just be careful not to damage this. Slide the tip you want to use over the heating element, then replace and tighten the tube. On the front of the unit you will find a small LCD, analog temperature control dial, lock button, cleaning wool, and sponge in an ESD-safe trough. On top is the power rocker and the soldering iron is stored in the seat installed during setup. The cord length of the permanently attached soldering iron is about 3 feet long. At the back of the machine you have a 3.5 foot grounded power cable, and right next to it is the ground port for the grounding cable. Just plug the prong of the grounding cable into this port and the alligator clip on the other side can be clipped to whatever you need to ground, like a grounding wrist strap or your PCB. I used a multi-meter on the continuity setting and verified that the ground wire, ground plug and soldering iron tip all had continuity and were therefore properly grounded.

When you turn the power switch on, the iron tip will start to heat up immediately and you can see the temperature climb on the LCD. The red temperature shown on top is the current temperature in Fahrenheit and the blue line on the bottom is the temperature in Celsius. The lowest setting is 150°C or 302°F and the highest is 450°C or 842°F. To adjust the temperature, simply turn the analog dial to your desired temperature. While it's a bit tricky to set an exact value, it generally doesn't matter if you're off by a couple degrees. If you press the lock key, the word lock will appear on the LCD and the machine will hold this temperature setting and turning the dial up or down will not change the temperature. Pressing the lock key again will unlock the setting. If you find that the tip temperature is not accurate, you can adjust it using an offset by long pressing the the lock key. This will allow you to increase or decrease the temperature of the tool to match what is shown on the LCD by up to 99°C. For example, if when set to 200°C you find that the tip is really only 180°C, you can set the offset to +20°C to add 20° to the tip so that it matches the value on the LCD.

When using the soldering iron, I found that after setting the temperature, the tool heated up quickly to the desired setting. The soldering iron temperature is super simple to set accurately to get the tip hot enough to melt your tin but not too hot as to damage surrounding components. The handle also does not get hot during operation. The included solder sucker also works well to remove solder from existing joints, though takes a bit of practice to use in order to extract the solder while it is still molten, as it solidifies quickly when the iron tip is removed. After use, cleaning the tool tip is quick and easy by lightly pushing it into the cleaning wool a couple times and wiping the tip on the wet sponge until all the remaining solder is removed. If you leave the iron in the holder for 10 minutes or more, the unit will go into standby, indicated by the letters ‘STB’ on the LCD, and lower the temperature to 200°C to keep it warm. However, if you leave the iron alone for 20 minutes or long, it will go into sleep mode indicated by the letters ‘SLP’ and the iron heat will be shut off completely. To wake the unit up from either standby or sleep modes, just pick up the iron and shake it gently, or turn the temperature adjustment dial.

Overall, this soldering station is really easy to use, set the temperature, and adjust the correction offset for accurate heating. There’s very little setup involved and you can get started soldering out of the box with the included roll of tin (Sn99.3 Cu0.7, 0.8mm diameter). The standby and sleep mode along with the grounding wire, add additional safety measures that a basic soldering iron wouldn’t have. I hope you enjoyed this review, you can ask me any questions in the comments. I’ll put a link to the product in the description below. Don’t forget to subscribe to my channel and join me next time.

Buy it at Amazon: ToAuto DS90 Soldering Station [Affiliate Link]