Iron trials

I've recently replaced my steam iron... long story.

Until several months ago, I had a Black and Decker Classic F65D.

B&D F65D

I had it for years. I'm guessing at least twelve. Someone can fact-check me on that if they know when that exact model number was produced, but in any case, it was a long time. It also got dropped on the floor several times, no thanks to my tippy ironing board, and in the last couple of years that floor was hard (laminate over concrete, I think). I brought it to Germany with me and ran it on a step-down transformer, which seemed to work fine. It was a nice iron: no auto shutoff, and relatively hot, heavy, and steamy, so to speak. But eventually it must have been dropped one too many times, and among other things, it stopped heating. I ended up taking it to the recycling center before I moved, though in some ways I wish I still had it, if only to take apart.

Once that iron started becoming iffy, I bought a Severin 3256, or something very like it, at Kaufland. It cost me €15 at most, and was also a decent iron. No auto shutoff, rarely if ever had any problems with dripping, had a self-clean option, etc. All around a good iron, especially for the money; the only annoyance was the small water tank. I probably had it around 2 years; I hope it's now continuing to work for someone else. I gave it away before moving since it was, of course, for 230V, and I didn't have a transformer big enough for it, even if I'd wanted to bring one back.

So I got back to North America and made do with my dry irons for a few months.

Continental dry iron. These aren't the easiest things to find but I think they are still made. This one was from Vermont Country Store. It gets hotter than most household irons I've used. It's also very small and light, which can be good or bad.

Old Sunbeam Ironmaster A-9. A lot of these still exist and work, though they may need new cords. The main reason I have both this and the Continental is this one's bigger and heavier.

These are decent irons IMO and this is a doable thing — you can use damp press cloths and spray bottles and such — but I did find it tiresome after a while, especially for ironing new yardage.
So first I tried a Sunbeam iron that I happened to find on sale at London Drugs. And I had two main problems with it. First, it felt a little unstable and top-heavy when set down on its heel. Add that to my rickety ironing board and it did not inspire confidence. I could have mitigated this somewhat by setting up my ironing board in a very stable, out-of-the way place, but I didn't get around to that until later. The second problem was the dealbreaker, though: I could not get it to stop dripping, even on the highest setting, and with the tank half-empty... yes, I did let it heat up properly. I liked how smooth the soleplate was and how much water the tank held, but I couldn't deal with the dripping, so I took it back.

Then I found this T-fal steam station on sale at a pretty good discount. It was nice in several ways. Like any steam station should, it generated lots of hot, pressurized steam that was very effective. Old creases that just would not have come out even with the Black & Decker came out easily with this. The advertised 2-minute startup time was not accurate in my experience; it took more like 5, but that's still none too shabby for one of these things. The tank was huge. The steam was a bit loud, so I didn't really want to use it late at night, but I could have lived with that. The pump to circulate water into the boiler part was also loud; I hear this is variable, with some individual units being louder than others. But the problem with this one was: almost every time that pump turned on, it would start pumping scalding hot water out of the iron, as if it were trying to do some sort of self-clean (which is apparently not an intended feature of this model... and in any case, you would want it to happen when you chose to, not randomly.) As far as I could tell the only way to make it stop was to switch it off, and then of course you'd have to wait 5 minutes for it to declare itself ready again. Out of curiosity I did try holding the iron over a trash can once to see how long it'd go, but I ran out of patience after a few minutes. I wanted it to work, and I gave it several tries to see if it would think better of doing this, but no such luck. It would do this at least once or twice an hour. So I took it back too.

At that point I was seriously considering buying the current model of the Black and Decker Classic, and I probably would have, if it had been sold in any nearby stores. A downside would have been that (as far as I know) it now has auto shutoff; I'm not sure it's even possible to buy a household iron in Canada these days without it. I realize some people like it, but I don't find it necessary, and I feel it just adds more components that can fail.

Instead I ended up settling on a gravity-feed iron, like the ones I used at school, though not the same model or brand name. The specific one I got was determined just by local availability.

Ace-Hi AH-100G

So far I'm quite happy with it. It doesn't produce as much steam as a steam station would, but more than any of the others I've mentioned; it heats up nicely, so it doesn't drip; and it's extremely quiet. The main downside, as with any other gravity-feed, is you have to hang the tank from somewhere, so unless you have one of those IV poles, you'd better be pretty sure of where you want to be ironing. I've now rearranged the sewing room with the ironing board in an out-of-the-way corner where it's unlikely to get knocked; I also pile up my free weights on its feet when I'm not using them, which helps a whole lot too... of course if I am using them, then I'm not ironing.