From Hero to Zero: Thermal Hero Ultra and Thermal Hero Quantum – Pump-out, degradation and missing documents

Today’s article is based on various investigations in which I came across Thermal Hero products by chance. After more than 60 products, both the Thermal Hero Ultra and the much more expensive Quantum have remained in my memory as negative examples of how cheap products, which were only designed for the brief benchmark moment, can be brought to market in the most elegant way. You can squeeze the paste out of the tube and virtually watch it degrade. In addition, there is incorrect or missing data, missing safety data sheets and unsaleable products. If you are looking for the products tested today, it is no coincidence that they have disappeared from Amazon, as my articles are also read by the right people. The fact that the heroes have now switched to eBay speaks volumes, of course, but the Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (BAuA) is guaranteed to get in touch soon. And to prevent this from becoming reading material that is drier than nasty burnt-on thermal paste, I have a short, fictitious story for you as an introduction…

You might think that the Thermal Hero is an outcast scientist, a hero against his will who was accidentally transformed into a superpower. But the truth is far less glamorous and, frankly, rather pathetic. Because our new friend Thermal Hero, then still going by his real name Ali T. Grease, had recognized a golden business idea while making a packet soup: Sell people hot air in tubes, encased in a shiny Hero packet, and they’ll eat it up or smear it in their hair as a substitute.

The transition from powdered soups to stirred metal powders in thermal paste was not a gnarly Maggi, but a logical one. The Thermal Hero, who claims to be a world-leading “specialist” in thermodynamics and whose homepage boasts about its pastes in industry, aerospace and medical technology, ordered a batch of inferior instant thermal paste from China that nobody wanted to buy. A businessman with less vision would not have touched the garbage, but not our hero. He immediately recognized the parallels: Like packet soup promises to be nutritious, this paste promised to conduct heat – but both were in reality barely capable of doing what it said on the tin. While each tube promised a quantum of “superhero quality” for everyone, it also turned out that this paste conducted as much heat as a wet sock after just a few cycles.

But our Thermal Hero laughed all the way to the bank when he saw how his Quantum paste sold like hot cakes and the influencers and willing testers rejoiced. Like a packet soup full of preservatives, Thermal Hero kept his promises artificially alive and built himself a nice empire. And while he was sitting in his penthouse above a hip Hamburg bowl restaurant, always with the legendary ASTM hotwire bucket on his head, he was already planning after the “Quantum” his next coup: “Thermal Soup Ultra” – a vegan and woke thermal soup that was supposedly edible (and even cheaper to produce) because it didn’t use aluminum at all.

He could have them tested down in the Bowl and a few hipster influencers are sure to be found. Of course, the porridge in tubes is no more nutritious than a cheap packet soup, but that doesn’t really matter. It was never about the content, but always about the packaging and the naive hope of the paying public that even cold packet soup made from zinc oxide powder has a deeper meaning if you believe in it hard enough. Hence the lack of content information and safety data sheets. The main thing is “Engineered in Germany”, the “Made in” for his tin pastes had already recently been removed.

The Green Dot only costs 36 euros per year without testing and at least looks semi-official. RoHS and REACH documents are missing from the database. So Thermal Hero remains the master of deceptive promises, the king of rip-offs, in short: The Thermal King of (Th)eBay.

Ok, let’s stop here and move on to new shores. That’s why I’ll quickly return to the actual test, which already contains some of the results from a degradation article, but also reports on two products, one of which I’ve mentioned from time to time as a negative example. And as many readers have asked for an individual test, I am fulfilling your wish today. Even though I would like to give both pastes a “do not buy” recommendation in advance, as they come at an outrageous price.

The fact is that neither product has been registered with the BAuA and, as things stand at present, should not be placed on the market. The otherwise required registrations and certificates cannot be found either. And in case a competitor is (once again) reading this: Warning costs are always good for your own (cleanly managed) coffers.

Technical data

What is once again being sold as thermal paste lyricism has neither entertainment nor information value, but is simply the rest of the peasant and fool’s errand. I will show later that this paste still works quite passably in benchmarks when first applied, but then continuously degrades to disappear gallantly into nothingness together with the money paid. On the home page, it reads like this about the Thermal Hero Quantum hyped by influencers:

Sure enough. And as icing on the cake, there are two official “data sheets” for free:

And this sentence really takes the biscuit, because I would much rather know how long the manufacturer guarantees the use of the paste:

Thermal Hero offers for all it’s Thermal Paste and Thermal PAD products a Warranty of 5 Years (under unopen conditions).

Now let’s move on to the test setup, which I will no longer be including as text and images in the articles in future, but for which I have written extra basic articles, including a presentation of the equipment and the measurement methods, in order to save myself and you a little redundancy. If you would like to read up or refresh your knowledge, please use the following links to the two measurement setups for ASTM D5470-17 with the TIMA5 nanotest and LIBS including microscopy with the Keyence VX-7100 and EA-300:

After so much introduction, we now come to the practical side and the measurements, so please turn the page.