"Hi, I recently manufactured one of my project PCBs from PCB Power in India. It was a 4-layer PCB with a thickness of 0.5 mm. While manually soldering the SMD components, I faced an issue where the GND pad was not easily catching the solder, leading to a dry solder problem.
I have checked the solder material, and it complies with IPC guidelines, as I was using lead-free solder. I suspect this issue could be related to the solid fill of the GND plane. However, when I tried soldering on another PCB with a thickness of 1.6 mm, it worked fine.
Could this issue be due to the PCB thickness or the quality of the PCB manufacturer?"
Big (ground) planes will carry the heat away from your pad so either add thermals to the pad(s), use solder with a lower melting point or pre heat the PCB
Using thermal reliefs on your GND plane also helps. Other tricks are using a bigger tip for your iron, which improves heat transfer, first adding a tiny bit of solder to further improve heat transfer (before adding the correct amount for the complete solder joint and turning up the temperature of your Iron. I sometimes set my iron to 400c But be aware that this does increase wear a bit, and flux also evaporates quicker.
It’s related as far as bad PCB design goes. Thermal reliefs are certainly an issue in PCB layout and are available for use.
Borderline subject, I’d say…