I haven't bought the materials to make to create the larger chamber to fit my 3 gallon fermentor because I want to get an idea on how one peltier device will perform. I placed the sensor in the box and cut a small hole for the cables to run through. I didn't add any other insulation nor did I seal the holes I made for wiring so it wasn't air tight. Rather than controlling the temperature in this case, I simply let the cooler run to see how cool it got. After about an hour, I didn't see anymore reduction in chamber temperature. Room temp when I started was about 75 F. After about an hour, it stayed pretty steady between 62-64 F which is over 10 F cooler than ambient. If I had a larger chamber, I'd have some more losses and it would take longer to even get near this chamber. I may try plugging up a few of the cracks and seal the lid to see how much impact that makes. This was a quick crude test. My plan was to use thick 2" thick insulation surrounded by a wood frame which will have better insulating properties than my cheap cooler. Made a graph of the temperature versus time.
I didn't loose hope but I think its important to do small scale tests to ensure your making progress. I still learned quite a bit from doing this project even up to this point so I'll try a few more things with my setup.
- Insulate/seal the chamber better
- Let it run longer
