Sunday, November 9, 2014

Burrrrr.....It's not that cold

Went ahead and tried a little experiment this weekend with putting my peltier chiller to a test. I took a medium sized foam cooler, modified the top of the cooler and hot glued the fan and cut some intakes out. The fan pushes cool air away from the cooling surface of the peltier.


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

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