I would check the temperatures. The KSGER temps are 50C off at 250C ( thermometer reports 200 ) on the D24... The Hakko 2.4D is flawless, except at 480C it is 479C... every other temp is spot on. And right now they are only $4.70 on the Hakko website. I would highly recommend stocking up. I bought 8 of them. If you consider the KSGER tips are about $2.50 to $3, give or take a little, and the Hakko one is better quality, and the temperature is flawless... it is definitely worth it, plus the better materials.
The KSGER tips are good, but the temps are just so far off... Also, when I tried to calibrate them, they would become even worse off.. I ended up using the Hakko tips to calibrate the KSGER tips and they became more accurate after doing that. Which is strange.
I know this is probably too late to be of any use but just in case you haven't already discovered this (and as a note to anyone else searching this topic thread for an answer), I thought I'd answer this question about the poor temperature stability of the KSGER branded T12 tips.
I bought my KSGER Oled T12 station with, specifically, the 'cheap plastic' 9501 handle (nice short tip to grip distance, lightweight and fast tip change) mid August 2019. I did a lot of research, mostly YT video reviews, before purchasing mine from Banggood and carried on researching afterwards.
I noticed almost everyone who had purchased the cheap KSGER T12 tips had experienced this temperature instability with every new tip they tried to calibrate. However, in every case, this strange instability would eventually clear up after a few minutes of run time, eventually allowing a successful calibration cycle to be completed.
This initial temperature instability with a brand new never ever previously used KSGER T12 tip would be worse the higher the initial selected temperature which is a bit of a nuisance when the calibration process starts with a 450 deg C setting, working down in 100 deg steps to a final 250 deg calibration setting making the initial calibration attempt impossible to achieve first time round.
The trick to getting unused new tips calibrated was simply to leave them idling at 300 deg for five or ten minutes before increasing the temperate in 50 deg steps for a few minutes at a time until finally arriving at 450 deg and allowing time for it to stabilise. Once that had been done, the calibration process would complete without any further problems (barring the odd defective tip).
I experienced the same issues with my own 20 dollar collection of ten KSGER T12 tips I'd bought with the soldering station. However, I've only calibrated the third of those I'd found an immediate use for, leaving the rest unused for further testing in the event that I were to actually shell out for a genuine Hakko T15 tip or two in the future, which I understand are free of this instability issue.
As hard as I searched for proof that genuine Hakko tips were actually free of this "instability from new" issue when used with a KSGER T12 soldering station which uses a PWM DC current rather than the PWM controlled 60 or 50Hz 24vac from a mains transformer used by the original Hakko soldering stations, I never did find any reviews that had confirmed whether this was actually true or just another unfounded myth.
In the meantime, my best guess at to what is happening with the clone T12 tips is that the residual moisture in the mineral insulation filling (allowing chemically driven galvanic effects to interfere with the thermocouple voltage used to sense the tip temperature) is being driven out by the heat, eventually putting a complete end to this electrochemical interference induced by the use of a PWM DC heater current in these Chinese microcontroller based designs.
It probably doesn't effect the genuine Hakko tips simply because they most likely included a final high temperature drying out cycle in their manufacture which the Chinese clone manufacturers simply skipped, leaving the end user to complete this final 'manufacturing step' using their own time and electricity costs.
Otoh, it's just possible that no such drying out process was ever needed when they were going to be used with genuine Hakko soldering stations which only used PWM controlled AC heating current from a 24v mains transformer so it's quite possible that brand new Hakko tips may also show exactly this same initial behaviour when used for the very first time with one of these KSGER T12 soldering stations.
As I've already mentioned, I couldn't find any reports of brand new Hakko tips being initialised with one of these Chinese clone T12 soldering stations with or without such initial symptoms so the question remained unanswered up to the time when I gave up the search some 6 to 10 months ago. Indeed, having just googled using the phrase "Hakko T12 tips versus clones" and similar search phrases, I still can't find any useful results that could answer this question.
I've been tempted to test this by using a bench supply (that I didn't possess at that time) to warm the brand new unused tips to around the 300 deg C mark for half an hour or so before trying to calibrate them with the soldering station itself. Now that I do possess a suitable bench supply, I can now try that (long forgotten) experiment sometime soon.
I'll post my test results here in the next few days. I made up a spare KSGER T12-9501 handle about six months ago from a DIY kit, along with a 3 metre length of silicone rubber cordage, both sold by Banggood (the only source I could find and even that required a google search to access where BG had hidden it almost out of sight of any reasonable search term put into their own execrable search engine!).
The handle kit which had cost me just under 7 quid, didn't include cordage and, since I wanted to extend the miserly 1 metre length of the original and the cost per metre is less for a 3 metre length, I took advantage of this opportunity to upgrade both to a 1.5 metre cordage.
This spare handle will make a handy test stand to cycle the unused tips through a 300 deg C heating cycle to test this drying out hypothesis of mine. Not only didn't I have a suitable bench supply at the time, I also didn't have a spare handle (and 5 pin socket) to facilitate such a test either but I do now!
Incidentally, If my moisture/electrochemical effect hypothesis is actually on the mark, I should imagine that the initial drying out process using DC won't be doing any favours to the life of the "hot junction" between the Ni-chrome heater wire and whatever is used for the return wire by reason of this chemical corrosion.
If nothing else, using something like a 12v ac voltage to drive out the moisture should eliminate this initial high rate of electrochemical corrosion in the cartridge heater assemblies used in these clone tips and help maximise their service life. The phrase "Electricity and water don't mix" is particularly true with DC but is far less so (for modest voltages at least) in the case of AC where the worst electrolytic corrosion effects are largely neutralised out, leaving essentially just that of self generated galvanic corrosion from dissimilar metals (the voltaic pile effect)..
If my initial testing using a DC voltage bench supply to dry out new clone tips proves successful, I'll be taking notes on the voltage needed to raise these 8 ohm cartridge tips to the 300 deg C target temperature with a view to using a low voltage mains transformer in place of the bench supply to eliminate this risk of accelerated chemical erosion through this unfortunate combination of DC current in a moisture contaminated electrical joint when relying on these T12 soldering stations alone to drive out the residual moisture from brand new clone tips.
A T12/15 soldering tip conditioning unit based on ac heating current should not only eliminate the frustration of the first time calibration and additional wear and tear on the soldering station but also improve the longer term reliability of the cartridge heater/thermocouple use in these T12/15 design of soldering tips. To what extent such an improved service life you might obtain however, remains an unquantified variable but at least it should eliminate the worst effects of driving out the residual moisture using DC current, besides which, using a basic low voltage output mains transformer for the job is just about as simple and cheap as it gets.
John
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