TOPIC:

It looks like its only up the north.
When you go onto the lidl page, <!-- w --><a class="postlink" href="www.lidl.ie">www.lidl.ie, you are given the option of rep of ireland or northern ireland.
Then it must use cookies to remember what you picked, so next time you go on to lidl.ie, you dont get this question. So if you have chosen rep of ireland already, you will prob never see the northern ireland question again (until you update your browser or delete the history or something).

But there is an option on the right of the rep of ireland page to switch to the northern ireland page.

These (and very small electric refridgerators) use "Peltier Elements" [url:2tr7b0di]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peltier_element#Peltier_effect[/url:2tr7b0di] which are effectively ceramic "wafers" that have electricity running in them and move heat from one side to the other so that one side gets hot and the other gets cold.

The cold side is often connected to a big metal plate that it cools and the hot side is usually connected to a heatsink that is passively cooled.

They're VERY inefficient and take quite a while to cool anything as their cooling wattage is generally pretty low, although I imagine on 240v power they should work twice as fast as I'm used to.

I've thought about buying a few large peltier elements, powering them off of a computer power supply and connecting them to my stainless conical fermenter, and then insultating the whole thing, but it would be quite a project, it would eat a lot of power, and I have no idea how to connect a flat peltier element to a conical surface with any sort of effeciency...


I think a 5L Keg would be about the level that these things would be practical at. (Blichman's high end conical fermenter is insulated and has a stand-alone cooling system, which seems much too small to be an actual refridgeration unit; it's my guess that it's peltier-based so there's obviously SOME WAY to use peltier elements on 20ish liters effectively.)

Adam

Interesting cos i often thought about how the cooling element worked.
There is a fan in there though, that must be to cool the warm side.

I was a bit of a computer hardware nerd a few years ago and I was into "overclocking" my computer to make it run faster than normal, after I started watercooling it, I was looking for the "next thing" and it involved putting a peltier element onto the CPU and then cooling the peltier element with the water cooling rig. -They're REALLY, REALLY simple things, they just have 2 wires.

I don't remember the exact numbers but to get 100w of cooling power on the cold side, you'd have to pump like 300 or 400 watt of electricity through one and have the ability to remove 200-300watt of heat from the hotside or something like that... -(Atrociously inefficient.)

But you can literally use an old computer power supply to power them, use "thermal adhesive" (the glue kind; not the tape kind) to attach a heat sink to the "hot side" and then affix the cold side to whatever you want to cool. -I would buy one and try it out in a heart beat if I could find a way to attach the flat peltier element to a clyndrical corney keg or fermenter. -I think you'd just need a big block of aluminum with the right curve on one side, and then the other side flat to accept the peltier and you could affix it with the same "thermal adhesive".

-IF anyone has access to a CNC and a small block of aluminum, I could send over the dimensions and the curve required to make one...


Adam