Thermal adhesive for LEDs

[Stu]

I will hopefully be finishing up my LED build this weekend, and I have a question about thermal adhesive. About a month ago, I did a smaller build with 6 LEDs for a 3gal pico. Once I mixed the thermal adhesive, it seemed to cure very quickly. I mixed 2 separate batches (1 for the string of RBs and 1 for the string of NWs).

 

Because the build I'm doing has many more LEDs (30), I'm wondering if there is anything I can do to minimize waste. Seems like I mixed almost all of the compound on just 6 LEDs. Not to mention the little globs I put on the heatsink for each star were pretty messy and not the cleanest-looking things. Should I mix smaller batches? Anything I can do to make less of a mess?

[Guest thefishman65]

I personally like drilling and using screws. You can also use pads. If you use the epoxy the only thing I can suggest is smaller amounts of each.

[hypertech]

You can get adhesive compound to use instead of the epoxy. The trick there is pretty much all of it is conductive so you have to e real careful with it and make sure you are using an LED where the backplate is not connected to one of the terminals.

 

Drilling and screwing with something like Ceramique thermal compound is going to be the neatest solution. I don't know if I would do it for a fish tank, but I've been known to use a thermal compound and then just a drop of regular epoxy over the edge to hold it down.