USB Soldering iron(ic) story
So I bought a new usb soldering iron online. It arrived all nicely packaged up in a display case.
Didn't use it for 3 weeks, and then went to use, plugged in light on - great - wait for 30 sec, tip still cold.
Plugged in a charge doctor (great little toy) and it showed 5.25V and 0A.
So complained and got a refund (in progress they refunded me less than I paid)
Anyway I though I would open it up and see if anything was obvious.
YEP a loose wire leading to the element +ve, so got out my 30W soldering iron and reconnect it. Result was fully working usb iron.
Irony is I had to use a soldering iron to FIX a soldering iron 
I bought two USB soldering irons a couple years back, and frankly, they're blummin' amazing (well, the 2nd one I pulled apart for something else, so I have a spare tip from that one)! I use mine on a USB power bank, which makes it portable, rather than a USB PSU or socket on a computer, but so far, I haven't much to complain about... 
The one thing I do complain about is the auto-shutoff feature, which requires the iron be tapped or the little dome thing touched (which never worked for me anyway!), so I modified mine by crushing the little movement sensor (also known as little can with a weighted spring in it) so it was shorted permanently so the iron stays on rather than shut off halfway through some delicate soldering...
My influence to buy them was of course BigClive's video on them:
An interesting video... but I am surprised that he did not use a Laptop to see how it worked from that.. what was more surprising was that he didn`t use a desktop or a tower system as the USB supply..
Really surprising
If you want to talk amazing usb / battery soldering irons, you can't go wrong with the parkside offerings from lidl.
On sale right now is this usb rechargeable 8W iron for £9.99:
Its amazing, chargeable via mains adapter (supplied) or via usb and then once charged, totally cordless. It also comes with a nice bright LED offering (typical of many parkside tools) so that you can see what you're doing. They have now vanished from the lidl website but there should still be a few knocking round various stores and failing that you can find them on ebay for a few quid more (worth paying IMO).
The previous one I had from the lidl parkside range is a 6W iron that takes 3 AA batteries:
Various alternative brands of this one can be found so it's not quite as rare or exclusive to lidl but still a grand piece of kit considering it runs off batteries! Even Maplin had their own branded version of it (though a lot more costly).
The cordless one doesn't seem to appear under other brands so may well be exclusive to lidl hence if you want one, grab one while you can.
The parkside soldering iron i would have liked is the soldering gun with a solder feeder for those annoyingly complex jobs but it was a bit steep and i couldn't justify that one.
You can't go wrong with lidls parkside range of power tools, they seem to be pretty good quality for their rock bottom prices and even if they don't live long, you usually get a 3 year warranty so you can send them away for repair or take back to store for a no quibble refund.
