diff --git a/httprl.module b/httprl.module
index e070611..19912e2 100644
--- a/httprl.module
+++ b/httprl.module
@@ -233,8 +233,9 @@ function httprl_request($url, $options = array()) {
 
   // Make sure the socket opened properly.
   if (!$fp) {
-    // Convert error message to utf-8.
-    $errstr = iconv('utf-8', 'utf-8//IGNORE', $errstr);
+    // Convert error message to utf-8. Using ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) as source
+    // encoding could be wrong; it is a simple workaround :)
+    $response->error = drupal_convert_to_utf8($errstr, 'ISO-8859-1');
     if (!$errno) {
       // If $errno is 0, it is an indication that the error occurred
       // before the connect() call. This is most likely due to a problem