Peltier Beverage Cooler

peltier beer cooler

Hacked Gadgets pointed out this great peltier based beverage cooler. It has a pulse width modulation based controller driving a 12V 80W peltier. Alan also pointed out Hack-A-Day reader Chris Garrison’s peltier beer cooler from last summer. The Defcon cooling contest from last year also featured a peltier based cooler.

[UPDATE: Afrotech’s Snapple Cooler or How to enhance your beverage with iron oxide. Thanks liam]

[UPDATE: PeltierBeer cooler first seen on Slashdot [thanks Wiki Multipla]. Mattt’s Peltier Beer Cooler on Bit-tech [thanks dougedey].

20 thoughts on “Peltier Beverage Cooler

  1. It’d be nice if they built it so you could flip it and make it a heater as well. If you just flip the positive/negative, does that reverse the hot/cold sides of the peltier?

  2. as if he didnt expect that bolt to degrade.. as soon as i saw it i was like “well i hope he washes it, sterilizes it and coats it with sumthin” buuut nope.. well a little iron is good for ur diet

  3. a stainless bolt probly wouldn’t have been eaten away. says somthing about what is in our drinks, there was no electrical current passing through the fluid, yet it ate through zinc. mmm citric acid….

  4. well afrotech’s would of only been able to cool to room temp anyway.
    and i have been looking for this exact idea of using a pelter as a drink cooer. his looks almost exactly the same as the plans i drew.

  5. i did this 11 years ago – 1995! bought a surplus peltier from american sci & surplus on a trip through chicago. no pwm, just straight 12 volts. otherwise it was very similar to the design above. guess i could have made millions…

  6. just imagine the possibilities with this kind of set up. you could even build yourself a mini air con coat, with tubes running through the coat, filled with some coolant and then passing past these fans…

  7. I like this idea, however I think if I were to build one I would focus on the cupholder part a bit more. Being partial to cans, I would use a conductive material next to the peltier shaped to hold a fluid – probably water. The water would of course have excellent contact with the walls of its container, and would act very well as a regulator, absorbing heat energy from the can and slowly transferring that heat out through the peltier. A thermostat would allow you to leavet he peltier on all the time, keeping the water cool. When warm can was added, the water would be able to absorb heat more quickly than with the peltier alone. The buffering action would go a long way toward a faster result. Getting fancy, you could use salt water cooled to just below zero degrees celcius. If you wanted to keep the can dry, an inner sleeve would be simple enough to add.

    By separating the peltier from the drink to be cooled with a cooled fluid, you could quickly adapt the range of the machine. You could vary how fast the cooler could work as well as its can capacity by simply adding a larger supply of water and/or more peltiers since they wouldn’t need to be in contact with the can. A CPU water block and pump would be ideal for this purpose.

  8. @Comment #3 — re: 6 amps? — that’s 6 amps at 12v, or 0.6 amps at 120v. Most of the time when we’re dealing with 12v systems its easier to think in terms of watts. In this case, 80 watts which is roughly comperable your laptop block adapter (the one for my Dell i8200 is 96watts).

    Knowing the number of watts is going to be important when you pick a heat sink. This one ( http://www.nwca.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=products.showDetail&header=Closeouts&subheader=Fans%2FCPU%20Coolers&productID=2722&flag=Standalone ) is listed as up to 112.5 watts. You’ll need a pretty good heat sink to handle that. An Intel P4 EE at 3.x ghz can run about 110watts, and you’d be running this pretty hard. You’ll want to use a heat sink like this:

    http://www.zalman.co.kr/usa/product/view.asp?idx=202&code=005

    Alternately, use two CPU water blocks. On the hot side, use it with its CPU cooling kit as normal. On the Cold side, run the water from the water block to your can-cooler and let the water do the job of warming the can – use the water temp on the cold side to control the power to the peltier, and the water temp on the hot side to control the power to the CPU cooling system.

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