Peltier wine cooler

[shanes696]

Got called to have a look at a small wine cooler today in a Hotel in Canterbury that wasn't doing it's stuff. At the rear it had what I thought was a convection-type condenser exactly as you'd get on a domestic but where was the bloody compressor? O.K., it must be an absorbtion sytem & the heater element's probably gone tits up thought I. I took off a large plastic panel at the rear & was confronted with a P.C.B. measuring approx. 30cm by 10cm. with small-gauge wires dissapearing into the blown foam insulation. There was a tiny circulating fan inside but not much else as it appeared to be a sealed unit. As far as I could work out it was a Peltier heat pump as used on those little portable fridges you can buy to plug into the cigarette lighter socket in the car. I remember that they can generally only cool to about 10 degs. below ambient at best so I wasn't expecting much. I replaced a miniature fuse that'd blown on the board & bugger me, it pulled down to 3 deg. C in the space of 10 minutes. I assumed that the 'condenser' is actually full of some sort of fluid & takes the heat away from the hot end of the Peltier unit by way of the syphon effect that was used on the engine cooling systems on cars before they started fitting waterpumps to circulate the water? Anybody else come across one of these?

[frank]

Haven't come across these but what caused the fuse to blow?

[chemi-cool]

Hi shanes696




check this out http://www.te-design.com/

Chemi

[shanes696]

Haven't come across these but what caused the fuse to blow?

No idea, it was a 20mm 2.5 amp fuse, I relaced it & away it went. No recall on it so far. There was a 5 amp fuse in the plug but that was intact.

[shanes696]

Hi shanes696




check this out http://www.te-design.com/

Chemi

Yep, that's very similar to what I was looking at. Looks like us fridgies might have to go on a training course to gen up on these if they become more common

[star882]

It's probably a combination of TECs and heat pipes, like what's used in some car A/Cs. Apply power to a TEC and the hot side gets hot and the cold side gets cold very quickly. While compressors use AC, TECs use DC. Therefore, TECs are very common in cars but uncommon in AC powered equipment. Some additional benefits include lower cost (particularly for DC powered devices) and silent operation. I actually have a LG refrigerator that uses TECs. When I first installed it, I thought that it was broken because I didn't hear it start! It dimmed the lights for a second, so I just waited and it got cold, so it works.