On 1/19/2011 2:25 PM, Meat Plow wrote:

Great dollops of that white goo between metal to metal thermally
conductive surfaces.

Overuse of that stuff is worse for thermal conductivity than none at all.
I've clean up gobs of it since they started using it decades ago.

This is something I'm currently wondering about. I have a fridge-like
thermo-electric cooler than has two sections, top and bottom, with
different temperatures. The top suddenly stopped getting cool at all, so
I took it apart to figure out why. The fans and voltages were all there
so I broke down the heat sinks on the bad one to get to the Peltier
device. With it isolated, I powered it up briefly and much to my
surprise the Peltier device got hot real quickly with the opposite side
getting cooler. So the device works, it has to be something with the
heat sinks?
They did use white goop on both sides, but very little and it was
already dried. The heat sinks are milled flat where they make contact
with the Peltier device, so my thinking is they need new goop.
Looking around I found that Star heat sink compound is about the best
you can get, so I ordered some. It just arrived the other day so I'm
planning to clean up the old goop, put on some new goop and hope for the
best. I don't think too much would be an issue in this case, I want it
as cold as possible.





--
-Scott