Here’s a good 4th of July project: Chris Garrison sent in his portable peltier based beer cooler. He saw a cheap peltier junction for sale and decided to build a mini-fridge. It holds 14 cans and is portable enough to place wherever needed. He does comment that his power supply isn’t quite up to snuff, but it does a passable job for only spending $35 on the project.
The link is dead. Or an ad. I’m not sure which to say. Bad wiki, BAD!
Ahh, found it. Under
Gadgets -> Beer Cooler.
If it draws 12 volts then you could hook the fan up to a solar pannel, but that would increase the cost of the project by a ton.
Would two small peltier be better that one bigone? That way you could use two small power supplies instead of looking for a big one?
JUST BUY A BAG OF ICE!!!!
that’s not a hack unless you freeze the beer which take a extreme cold to do.
how about using an atx power supply and a whole load of resistors between the 12v rail and the peltier?
solar wouldn’t be useful at all as a peltier thats going to cool anything needs high wattage. for a beer fridge to keep say 1*c you’d probably need a 60watt or better peltier. I’d just hook it up to my car im sure 12-16v wouldn’t hurt it. I’ve been thinking about adding some small peltiers to my drink holders for years… then Caddilac stole my idea… bastards!
cool concept, i would def. hook up to my car, 12 volts is everywere in that thing.
you can buy automotive coolers with pelts for like $40
http://www.stud.ntnu.no/~arnesen/peltierbeer/
This one is much cooler. :)
http://www.target.com/gp/detail.html/ref=br_1_1/601-9533013-7445750?%5Fencoding=UTF8&frombrowse=1&asin=B0001DI44U
that costs about the same, holds several two liters, can be powered by AC or DC and won’t catch on fire when you forget to unplug it.
It’s been a while since we’ve heard anything on the CVS video camera.
I actualy allready did this, Works pretty good, dosent cool To to good…It works tho. I use an ATX Psu Btw
getting tired of these peltier beverage coolers.
$35 to build this
$35 for peltier based coleman cooler from Wal-Mart
Hmm…….
Well the point of a hack isn’t necessarily to make something cheaper than you could buy off the shelves. There’s a certain satisfaction to figuring out a project and putting it together out of parts, especially re-using stuff you already have.
Sorry about the website. Since it is a wiki, anyone can edit it, and someone seems to have tried to do so for spamming purposes. Thanks to all who have given me suggestions on improving the device!
Chris
chris at homebrew dot net.
I work for a company that uses these devices for heating and cooling seats, I have some advice on how to improve efficiency by using a cascade method in where you use two to three peltier in series fan->hot->cold->hot->cold->load and you will get a greater Delta/T, I have my fridge down to -40C with a three stage cascade system 10.5vdc 4.5amps 1 cubic ft volume, it takes about 2 hrs to get down to -20C with a .5k gm load in it. You can get the peltier cheaper if you buy them from Chinese manufacture, I paid $6,00usd each for 10 of them they measure 4.5cm x 5cm you can get them with or without copper coat(extra$1.20usd) (get the copper easier to work with)or the plain ceramic base.
Also get the peltier with higher quantity of small pellets than the fewer large pellets(I do mean pellets not peltier, there are pellets between the plates) they are more efficient and reliable.
Can I get a schematic and a picture of your fridge and the enhancement you built? -phil
i have experemented with peltier chips and noticed that when the heat output heatsync is bigger than the cooling heat sync you can easly reach a subzero temp.
second cheap dvd players have power supplys that output 5 volt and 12 volt each supplied by its own source (no voltage drop will occur)