280plus:
I worked on cooling water systems for electronics in the Navy. I like the Peltier thing but I imagine it is very inefficient?
Seems that way:
A coworker of mine had a little ~1cu ft Peltier 'fridge for keeping sammiches and pop cool at the office and was very dissatisfied with it, so I bought it from her for $5 just to be able to poke a stick at it.
It took 4 amps at 12 volts to run it off its rather large wall socket power supply and would not go below 44dF inside, with about 1/2" of foam insulation in the walls and door all around. I opened up the back side and you could see they had a
lot of trouble isolating the heat generated by all that wattage from the cold "generated" by the Peltier "chip" and it even had a 100% duty cycle fan in it to reject that 48 watts it took to run it, plus whatever heat it sucked out of the storage volume. (Plus the fan power, too.)
The basic problem was the heat conduction path from the cold surface of the Peltier junction to the hot rejection surface worked both ways, so it was sort of like trying to reverse the flow of a big river with an irrigation pump.
You would've done better by keeping your pop in a wet sock with a fan blowing across it.
I now use it just to store a couple of cans of King Black.
I just took it out to look at it for this post, and it doesn't have a brand name on it, but it says "Model 1115" on the back. I didn't want to open it up to get a mfr's name.
Terry, 230RN
