Peltier Beer Cooler

beer cooler

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.

19 thoughts on “Peltier Beer Cooler

  1. 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!

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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)

Leave a Reply

Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.