I just use Chemtronics, I tried some other stuff once and decided there’s no need to waste anymore time on other brands. For difficult jobs, add more flux.
It’s for heat dissipation.
Oh my goodness, I see now I typed Hot air “gun”. I meant the kind you use for soldering, ie the soldering station. Of course I already have a hot air gun, sommer a cheapie from Ryobi 
I would never dream of trying to use that for desoldering.
I have used those for desoldering a couple of times. Great if you are only interested in saving the component and don’t care about the PCB.
1 Like
Seems like a lot of hard work when one can simply use Local Tuya
I’ve tried the Tuya stuff for a bit, and I simply didn’t like having to use their dev platform, giving them an email address, registering my devices in order to get the values I needed to address things. That is of course less work than soldering stuff, I’ll give you that, but for the most part I avoid this at the buying stage: I buy stuff that I know will run Tasmota.
I did accidentally buy one switch that is Tuya only. It cost R200 or so. I will probably throw it away rather than waste time soldering chips or setting up LocalTuya for just one switch.