I’m sensing some consternation in the comments, so I want to explain the scope of this video a little more explicitly: There are _absolutely_ applications for which Peltier elements make sense! But they’re mostly not stuff you or I are going to come across. Lots of people down below are highlighting the various pieces of scientific and medical equipment which use Peltier elements and the specific reasons they do… but that’s scientific and medical equipment! Not day-to-day life stuff. While those applications are all very interesting and highlight that there is value in the technology, they’re just way outside my scope here. I intended to keep this entirely in the scope of general-purpose cooling (and refrigeration), and in that context? Consumer products with Peltier elements in them are almost always terrible and a waste of money.
Agreed. I'm a PC cooling enthusiast, and it has never been a good cooling solution outside of extremely niche overclocking applications. And even in those applications, LN2 is usually a better solution. Thanks for making such an extensive video on this.
I am soooo going to invent a tiny clockwork heat pump that competes with peltier junctions. You guys want to hold part the patent? It might be a fun collaboration
I didn't feel like those comments were expressing consternation. I took them more as "fun facts." Both points ("crap in consumer electronics" & "useful in various technical items") came across fine, especially since you mentioned repeatedly that there were other use cases for them. I didn't think car cupholder gimmicks was an exhaustive list, lol
My company uses them to maintain temperature chambers to +/- 0.05 degrees F Way better than the more efficient refrigerant-based units and a million times easier to export.
Friend had one of those. Kept complaining about it, so I went over to improve it. Changed the Peltier from a 5A to a 10A Model (120W), changed the thermal paste to actual good one, added a bigger hot side heat sink and ofc upgraded the power supply. It worked much better afterwards! For the low price of doubling the electrical consuption, and almost trippling the original purchasing price 😂😂😂😂
@@jimmurphy6095 You wouldn't even peltier a CPU. Linus tried and it works just well, up until the peltier gets too hot and you cannot move the heat quickly enough anymore
What you want to do is use a peltier on top of a peltier You can get stacking temperature differentials up to a point Doesn't necessarily stop at 30° below ambient Adequate heat sinking the hot side is of course required.
We need to bring the rest of skirt terminology in here. The black one is a mini fridge, the red one is a midi fridge, the silver one is a maxi fridge, and the blue one is a micro-mini.
A bit tangential to the topic at hand, but I *hate* those temperature control dials in refrigerators. 0-6 is completely meaningless, so it requires trial and error (and a thermometer) to even know what they mean! Like...if they're gonna do that at *least* make it go to 11 so I can make Spinal Tap jokes.
Agreed! In Europe, I'm never sure if 0-6 refers to degrees Celsius, which means closer to 0 is colder, or cooling strength, which means further away from 0 is colder.
@@FlintlockYTThey usually aren't in degrees, it's mostly a measure of cooling power. Otoh, mine have a temperature setting since the early 2000s, and they aren't expensive ones.
In the right configuration, multi-stage thermoelectric coolers can achieve liquid nitrogen temperatures. I am curious how cold the cooler in a fridge would get.
@@Peter_S_Well they work on temperature differentials so you need a greater temperature difference between the inside cooling and outside temperatures... So you need really good cooling for the hot side otherwise the cooling side doesn't function very well. So if you use it in a hot enviroment the worse the cooler functions.... Though you can make it function better by putting a big fin cooler from a CPU cooler on it to make it work better.
as a hard of hearing fan, thank you for uploading your scripts as captions (and for the in-jokes in them) nearly everybody relies on the auto transcriber. It works sometimes but misses a lot of technical words. Really appreciate you making your videos much more accessible to folks like me, Thanks! P.S. I had a peltier cooler on my Celeron 300A processor back in the late 90s, what a time. 50%+ overclocks.
I also appreciate it as someone with deaf friends. I can share it without worry. Truly a shame more RUclipsrs don't do this. RUclips taking away the fan subs as well was so dumb.
Yeah, I watched a science video recently where the RUclipsr had trusted their transcription service a little too much and "ribosome" was butchered in several creative ways. One of the RUclips channels I follow (Evan and Katelyn) has said that the reason they captioned every video even at the start of their channel was that they wanted to treat their work as professional, and professional videos have captions as a rule. I think we should enforce that societally more. "Oh, you don't caption your videos? So you don't actually care if your videos are watchable or not? How unprofessional."
Yep, also useful for us foreigners who have English as a second language. Reading is often easier than listening so good quality captions really add to the viewing experience. And there's a clear difference in quality between real captions and auto transcriber, even if the latter has made enough progress to be reasonably useable (most of the time).
I know they are crap, but I was to use one of these to chill water for our garage aquarium. We raise our own tropical fish, but this last summer, the temperatures got too hot for even tropical fish and I seriously considered getting one of these, cutting holes in it, and stuffing it with tubing. The idea being that even a crap "refrigerator" would likely get the water back into the low 80's. Now that I know they also take forever to chill, you have saved me from indulging in that plan!
It would be kind of neat to drill a couple of holes in a non-critical part of a mini-fridge and run a cooling loop of water in that mini fridge. Cool drinks and cool fish!
@@em84c Not directly in the tank, as the odds of regulating the temperature are too low and it would only cool the water at the surface. However, running tank water through tubing in an ice bath might work if it you had a thermostat for the pump. The real issue there is it would create a whole new job of constantly checking the ice. It gets pretty hot, so the ice would be gone fast.
9:10 "Internationally recognized metric of cans of LaCroix per dollar." 9:50 "I've consulted with some math scholars who confirmed 45 is less than 55." What other RUclips channel has in depth reporting like this?
Another thing that Peltier Modules are used for is easy electrical generation, get one side cold and one side hot and it induces a voltage. This is actually used in space probes which have RTGs.
@@MarcABrown-tt1fp yes it can. But fridges generally don't like being moved around. Often it says that the fridge should be stationary for 24h before being turned on in the manual. There are special fridges that don't mind. But they are way more expensive than a cooler with Peltier. So if you just use it couple of times a year to keep pre-cooled beverages cool while travelling in your car, i'd say it's a good option. If you use it constantly or you want food safe grade, buy a proper fridge.
@27:00 Growing up in South Africa we always got told upo getting a new fridge that we must "wait a day before using it " due to the gas. I initially thought this was due to refrigerant but i am now guessing its for the lubricating oil. Brilliant video🎉
Another thing about the lubricant, is the longer a compressor runs, the more it "wears" both the lubricant and the refrigerant. This doesn't pose problems to normal operations, but it means that when you move it, if it doesn't stay upright the entire time, the mixing of the two fluids in the compressor can become permanent and completely ruin the compressor. So any fridges that have more than 5-ish years of use, are more likely to be completely ruined if they lose orientation in transit. But yes, at least with new refrigerators, letting them sit for at least a day is a safe bet. Older ones I would basically add a day per year of operation, just to be safe.
Ngl I watched this guys 40 minute video on dishwashers and I always thought he was just a dishwashing nerd not a full appliance nerd now I'm def gonna check out his other stuff. Great videos
Watching all theese fridge videos makes me realize that the old fridge I bought used for $20 a few years ago to keep my beer cold in the basement is a absolutely brilliant fridge! It fits perfectly in the space its in, uses next to no electricity, and has no issues with me loading in 3 cases of beer at once, automatically defrosts and well, just works! That's my hot tip of the day: if you just need a small cheap fridge for your beer (or whatever you like to drink) then just buy an old used one.
@@volvo09 Right? I like to buy frozen turkeys right after Thanksgiving and Christmas when the prices come down so the stores can clear their inventory. Frozen, they keep long enough I can have turkey and turkey sandwiches and turkey soup sometimes into February.
It almost works as a built in durability test, if a fridge has lasted long enough to be older and still work well enough to be worth selling. It probably has a pretty decent design/construction
and HOW ! ❤ swoon Also Tunable Lasers Not an oxymoron Which, I have no doubt are somewhat more common and everyday than we realize, However, are wholly under utilized to their potential. Well, and MEMS Thx for the geek out!
On the plus side, I have an Igloo ice-less cooler with this type of system. I hooked up a 12v receptacle to the trailer light connection in the bed of my truck. This enabled me to keep certain beverages cold that were not available while driving through Canada. I also used it powered off a car battery to keep my eggs, milk, and cheese after we lost power during a hurricane. True, it will not fully replace a regular refrigerator, but it does have it's niche uses.
Important caveat: Astrophotography is one of the rare use cases for Peltier coolers (TECs): you need a tiny little device to cool a CMOS/CCD with a form factor that can fit in a camera. And counter to what you suggested, frequent and long term use. Tiny surface to cool (35mm diagonal), lot of power to provide, and lots of environment (cold night) to dump excess heat into. My TEC coolers get my CMOS down to about -30C regularly! Wonderful for reducing (thermal) noise in astrophotos. They do make liquid cooled astrocameras, but those are very, very finicky to make work with all the movement of the telescope (but can use heat pumps). I love your videos, by the way! The deep dives and nerdy details (plus puns and jokes) are much appreciated!
Not just portable astrophotography, even semi-professional and small professional telescopes may use them if liquid nitrogen isn't practical - for example at teaching observatories at universities. Or telescopes located in poor-weather areas where the amount of nights lost to bad weather mean it's not worth maintaining a cryogenic system.
We use these quite often in professional astronomy as well, not just astrophotography. Of course many instruments are cryogenically cooled, but a lot of mid sized observatories are just using peltier cooled sensors. A lot of those liquid cooled ones are also just liquid cooling the hot side of a peltier module.
The mini fridge heat sink was waaaay too small considering it probably has a tdp of 75 watts. I'm curious how well it could do if designed even half way intelligently
We used a dew-point indicator using a Peltier cooler 35 years ago. The peltier cooled a mirror until it fogged up. It would cycle temperature up and down giving a very accurate reading of dewpoint. Much more accurate than a humidity sensor -- and having a price to match.
That's actually how dew point is measured in most official weather observations as well, especially for aviation weather because of its high accuracy compared to other humidity measurements. One very useful (but again, very niche) use for the Peltier cooler.
According to the weather report for where I live, the dew point is 31F and the current temperature is 86F... your dew point indicator would never work here.
@@misterkite Alec's "refrigerator" is rated to 30˚F below ambient temperature, but Peltier elements can be designed to reach arbitrarily low temperatures for these kinds of applications. The rated limit for accuracy in ASOS instruments (the kind used by the Air Force and National Weather Service in the US) are guaranteed accurate to dew point depressions (difference between temperature and dew point) of 63˚F (35˚C), but they will usually work far past that point.
My mother bought me one of these for my room in the late 90s/early 2000s. They were more expensive then, but not unaffordable for a middle class gift. This early model had it's heat sink just open to the air on the back with no fan. At some point, it got pushed back directly against the wall. I noticed it, probably a few days later, and when I pulled it away from the wall, it had burned a hole right through the drywall. Thankfully, there wasn't anything particularly flammable there so it just left a big scorch mark in the shape of the heat sink.
@@bigguy7353 Granted this is almost 30 years ago now, but from what I remember it had one of those square heat sinks with raised fins in a grate-like pattern. The high parts burned the holes, and the edges were scorched in the shape of the voids where no fins were. It's like burning a piece of paper with the hot tip of a lighter. A hole forms at the hottest part at the tip and around the edges you have scorch marks.
Handily one of the best explanatory RUclips videos I've personally seen. Peltiers were used for extreme overclocking in the past, but I just never realized its inefficiencies.
Thank you for that. I won one twenty years ago as a door prize. I used it once and went back to putting a scoop of ice into an Igloo cooler. After watching this video, I found that old fridge in a corner of my shop and stripped the parts out of it and threw the plastic in the bin. Keep them coming!
Exactly what I was thinking watching this, if I did have one I'd just strip out the component to play with. That fan was very much a basic laptop fan as well 😂
I'm so enamored with your anger towards the little fridge and the element. I love when scientists get emotional about their special interests, please never change.
If anybody's wondering about the size of the red fridge - it's typically called "apartment size" and you can find them readily. Most apartments in the US these days take house-sized fridges but a lot of old apartments only have space for one of those smaller ones in their very small kitchens.
It's really hard to find a decent apartment fridge and an apartment stove is almost unobtainable my grandmother's house is tiny and uses both 6-8 years ago she had me replace them and you just couldn't go buy them back then (I'm guessing with tiny homes that might have changed)
The main issue with the red fridge is the brand Galanz. They are decidedly low-end and fridges are not their specialty. They are a major microwave oven OEM. Another brand of fridge would probably work better.
Instead of this little blue box of stupidity at EVERY cubicle in the office. You would be better off with a cooler just a bit larger than the smallest soft side six can cooler and use one block ice pack and one (between six can) ice pack at each desk and have a fridge with a dedicated freezer to hold overnight and freeze an entire office staff’s icepacks … In my car i have two soft sided coolers and i will use 2 of the B6C icepacks in one to hold dive cans (three standing upright in the center, two on thier side above the B6C, and in the second cooler six cans around a single B6C … for food item i pack them into plastic jars of the same size as a soda can. In that manner I can keep easily keep an entires workdays worth of food and beverages at a safe and tasty temp using just three icepacks that take up less space in the freezer than a single tub of ice cream
Peltiers make for an awesome demo in digital electronics classes as a thermo quantum effect device, but unfortunately have incredibly specific use cases in real life.
I was about to ask. What are the real use cases? Research is required.
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Instead of projecting our failure of execution onto inanimate objects, let's consider the fact that nuclear isn't bad, it's how we use it. Oh, this is about Peltier chips. Well, same thing.
@@IntegerOfDoom well somewhat cooling in places where 12 volt is available and price is an issue for the device itself. cheap coolers, effectively, but the another problem comes that a power source will become too expensive for home use, but in car it's not a problem to have somewhat high current 12 volt. anyway you can use that kind of coolboxes inside too if you get a decent power supply for them, but it's not efficient. another is dehumidifiers. but if you have an aircon you don't need device for that anyway. then there's more specific use cases to keep sensors in specific temperature etc. ... i recently came across a crackpot channel trying to make an airconditioner with solar form a peltier unit, they thought it was viable because the cold side got cold.. back in the day there was a window when 226w peltiers were usable for overclocking with watercooling. but yes you'd need a kilowatt of peltier power to cool a modern processor.
I once had a very senior engineer at a military equipment manufacturer ask me to design a Peltier based air conditioner for use in extreme climates. It was an awkward conversation.
@@IntegerOfDoom I've seen them in extremely sensitive voltage meters to keep the sensitive components at very specific temperatures since you can change between cooling and heating quickly.
I was an ammonia refrigeration engineer for more than twenty years, and in that time, I froze millions of pounds of farm produce like corn, peas, beans, and other things. I really enjoyed working with ammonia and multi-stage refrigeration systems. Perhaps it is just the nerd inside me, but I find the whole process of evaporation and condensation to be fascinating!
I have the Frigidaire version of this product. Inside, I keep a two quart plastic container of Crystal Light. It does cool down the drink fine. There is a small square of ice buildup exactly in the same spot as the Peltier device inside the wall. I am fairly pleased with my arrangement given I cannot have a small fridge in my office. The price I paid for the unit gave me the idea I wasn't getting Arctic temps.
This video literally came at the perfect time for me, I feel so educated. It's important to note that some makeup/skincare products (not to mention medication!) need to be kept at specific temperatures so even for that the mini "fridges" are flawed.
There is a significant difference between thermoelectric cooling being good and a thermoelectrically cooled toy "refrigerator" being good. Thermoelectric cooling works to cool energy dispersive x-ray spectrometers (EDS) without transmitting vibrations (say, to the electron microscope to which the EDS is attached - electron microscopes do not like vibrations).
@@adaroben1104 if you have enough money it can be. It's not that you are not allowed to own one. Only you will need to be some very well of nerd to be willing to spent money on one.
Yeah - it's all in the application! I work for a company that makes electrical/optical measuring instruments and almost every one of them has TECs in them for keeping optical components, or the sample being measured at a stable cool temperature without introducing vibration.
@@adaroben1104 they are becoming more accessible! It might not be the exact type you want but I’ve seen more and more civilian gas chromatography spectrometers being made for the cannabis testing market (testing cannabis for active ingredient %s) I even saw someone is selling a mobile setup made to fit inside a pelican case and it has computing built into it, although the software is made specifically for cannabis testing market
I run a furniture store. We have some "gaming" desks that have Peltier coolers in them. The amount of energy to keep one drink cool, not cold, cool is insane. It would be cheaper over less than a year to put an actual fridge in the damn thing.
To be fair, it doesn't need to move much energy, since the drink is straight out of the fridge when placed on the Peltier cooler, so the Peltier cooler only needs to keep it from becoming not cool for 5 hours or so. Also, not everyone wants a mini-fridge under their desk taking up a ton of space and being a future repair liability. Even if they design a micro-fridge slightly larger than the cupholder, the repair liability and the risk of pump oil spillage are still there. So, I'd gladly take that "gaming" desk off your hands.
@@termitreter6545 Yeah. There's some gaming hardware that makes sense (gaming mice, gaming GPUs, etc.), but there's also a lot of stuff that's just pure marketing
One application where Peltiers are great is cooling mobile electronics, like the sensors in high performance digital cameras. When recording at 4k and higher resolutions they generate a TON of heat, and a Peltier can help move that out into the air. Not only does this prevent the camera from shutting down, but can actually increase image quality.
GoPro should include this into their terrible cameras, which constantly overheat and shut down while filming. They are such a crap product as they currently are.
We use these to not only cool but to provide temperature stability to ShortWave InfraRed (SWIR) imaging sensors. Even if it has cooling limitations, you can have discrete temperature set points around which to set calibrations.
The speed and reversibility advantages of peltier are pretty helpful in lab settings. When you need small amounts heated and cooled quickly and precisely, Peltier is your friend.
@@user-vo3st8kx7s Depending on the application, not really more than 100% efficient because the heat still has to come from somewhere. You wouldn't be able to, for example, heat a room with peltiers with over 100% efficiency unless you were sourcing the heat from outside like an actual heat pump, which wouldn't even be worth doing with peltiers because they are so inefficient that the ROI on such a system would be terrible.
Buy cheap. Get cheap. False marketing aside I would like to see a comparably priced. Not going to beat physics. But come on. Don't attack the tech which is useful.
So I fell asleep last night and RUclips decided this video was going to auto play. I ended up dreaming I was in some fucked up grocery store in the fridge and freezer aisles as some mad - and slightly camp - man goes off on one about the state of the storage of the products. It was something else 😂
A great application of peltier modules is on off-grid stove fans. You put them on your wood stove or other heat source and the built in module will create enough energy to power the fan turning it at a moderate speed which helps spread heat from the stove around the room much more efficiently.
I bought one of those because I didn't want to have to use the shared fridge in the office in a place where I worked, it was not intended to do anything more than just keep the lunch that I'd already packed cool for a while. I think I would have done just as well by getting a portable cooler and chucking a couple ice bricks in each morning. That's what I've been doing now that I have delivery work and honestly it is the same if not cooler by lunch time.
Coolers have stood the test of time for a good reason. Ice takes a good bit of energy to change phases. 1 pound of ice will absorb ~150,000 joules from its surroundings by the time it's completely melted to water. Ice is cheap, and with good enough insulation, it can last for shockingly long amounts of time.
Yeah, a cooler and a re useable ice pack is far better. The only thing I liked about the peltier coolers was the "hot" feature, so if I felt like warming up a lunch I could turn it to hot a few hours before I planned to eat. Was kind of a treat in winter to reheat leftovers in a delivery van.
Got one as a present when I was a teenager, you know, for all those Call of Duty and FIFA game nights with the boys where an unreasonable amount of energy drinks was consumed. The thing with it was, the drinks were never cold, it made a lot of noise, and as a teenager (not sure if id still be able to hear it) I could hear a constant high pitched frequency, so i had to turn it off at night. good times
The concept of having an object you weren't entirely certain was terrible even though it did nothing correctly and actually created completely new and separate problems but used it anyway regardless is such a strangely nostalgic feeling that I feel there has to be some heinously long, specific word for it in German or something
Honestly, they just kind of seem absurd to me. The most annoying part about fridges is having to stock them. At least with a proper mini-fridge, they can hold enough drinks you don't have to stock them too often.
The "how many cans of LaCroix it can hold" literally burned my old corporate heart. Oh the number of times I heard "we'll provide drinks", oh my god it was always LaCroix. For those that don't know the flavor is like it met a strawberry's cousin once in college.
@@SirJefferyRoss Perrier is also. And it's delicious. It doesn't taste like they forgot to clean their equipment. I expect it to not taste like I licked an alka-seltzer tablet.
I used a 12v Peltier cooler, for years, when I drove a truck in the 2000s. Had it in between the front seats, so I could keep snacks and drinks cold and within reach. Yeah, they weren't very good at keeping things cold and had to be constantly checked, to make sure the vent wasn't blocked. It did beat having to buy ice to keep in a smaller cooler, for this specific application.
My aunt had one of those that came with her Subaru, it was basically large enough to hold a 30 pack of beer cans and a small bag of ice. She used it for shopping, since she lived an hour from the supermarket she would use it to put meat in for the ride home. She started having battery and charging issues early on with that car (an 05 Outback). After they replaced several alternators and torn the dash and engine harness apart several times she brought the car to me here. To make a long story short, that cooler was killing the battery, and alternator. The car had full time live cigar sockets, and thus that thing was on all the time it was plugged in. There was no switch on the cooler. You simply reversed the plug to keep things hot or cold depending on polarity. It never got cold enough for drinks, but was cool to the touch. I never checked the temp but it wasn't very cold. I removed it from the car, removed all the thermal cooling parts, filled the hole in the side with spray foam with plastic on both sides and told her to just use it as a cooler. When I tore it apart, I could see where the fan motor had been wet. They put the fan motor at nearly the lowest point of the box, meaning that any leakage, condensation, or melting would run right through the motor. It was made by Igloo, with the Subaru Outback decals on the outside. That car is long gone, it wasn't much better than the cooler that came with it but I still have the cooler that i converted and after filling the lid with foam, and the elimination of the electrical parts, it makes a great little cooler for my lunch or drinks on the boat. For the $199 the thing cost new as an option, it was a total load of crap. I've never seen one of those that worked worth a dam.
In the US Army, they have these large medical fridges they deploy in field hospitals. The cooling chamber is incredibly well insulated, and holds a little more than the blue fridge. It has 4 peltier devices on each corner, which are each attached to their own *MASSIVE* heat sinks. Seriously, these boxes are 1/6 cool chamber, 1/6 insulation, and 4/6 heatsinks and frame! They worked pretty well, but they drew a ton of current. I can see how they would be more useful in a combat zone than a regular fridge.
Do they use fans ? Also are the heatsinks filled with anything to make them work like heatpipes or are they just metal ? I posted a long comment about a working peltier fridge that I got to fix a few years ago and it doesn't have any fan but its heatsink contains isobutane. And it works quite well without making any noise.
@psirvent8 They did not have fans, and were not filled with anything. They radiated heat like crazy, the metal frame (which didn't touch the heat sinks) was always uncomfortably warm to the touch!
the way I had heat pumps explained to me was that you're basically dipping a sponge in a bucket, pulling it out, squeezing it, and not letting it expand until it's back in the bucket. the sponge (refrigerant) moves the water (thermal energy) out of the bucket (fridge), and squeezing (compressing) dumps the water on the ground (in the air).
and if you can grasp that concept, then the next step to understanding why steam-power is a dead end, except in certain applications, is that you have to MAKE the sponge first... ie, by BOILING water to MAKE steam. a steam engine only gets to use the heat and pressure contained in the STEAM... not the energy required to simply boil the water. which amounts to about 4/5ths of the total energy input... completely unrecoverable. "so why do we use it in power stations"? because it can "transmit" a large amount of energy without requiring excessively high pressures or temperatures... its also non-toxic. when you get to the scale of multiple M-Watts, that means the machines can be relatively small and compact...
@@paradiselost9946 except you omit to mention the role/potential role of steam in preheating the boiler water. Obviously that's going to depend on whether the steam device has a pre-heater.... but the concept is great, and reduces energy loss hugely. Suggesting that the energy required to make the steam is completely unrecoverable is completely bollocks....
@@annpeerkat2020 you overlook the nature of heat flow. you cool the steam to 50C in the condenser... and a condenser it an absolute necessity on a steam turbine as the majority of work performed by the steam is at this "below atmospheric" stage... below 100C. you cannot preheat the feed water above 50C, either, on average, with a condenser. can heat it higher with the heat going up the chimney if its coal or gas fired, but not from the condenser. and as both approach that temperature, less and less heat is transferred. and the condenser still has to radiate a certain amount of heat to the atmosphere, otherwise... it stops condensing. the closer you can get to a hard vacuum, the more power you can extract. unfortunately reality gets in the way and prevents one from achieving such low pressures. 29 inches is considered the limit of practicality. and only so much feed water can be preheated. as the boiler only requires so much feed water. theres no point heating more than the boiler can consume. and then the water or condensate emerging from the condenser is already at that 50C region... and is the same amount of water the boiler requires, minus losses due to leakage... theres no gain in using the condenser to preheat feed water AT ALL. if you have the advantage of locating it in a subzero climate, all year round, sure, you can extract more, as you can achieve far lower temperatures in the condenser, with subsequently higher vacuums, but no matter what you do, the vast portion of thermal energy in the fuel goes to waste. regardless of what wikipedia leads you to believe when they claim "45% efficiency" or better. they choose to neglect various rather important factors to make things sound far better than they actually are. its called "cherry picking".
This channel has become one of my favorites to pass the time while learning a thing or two about stuff I didn't think I needed to. I like the bloopers at the end, really shows how many takes a video can have.
Not only are Peltier elements reversible in that if you reverse the voltage you can heat opposite sides, it's fully reversible in that if you have a temperature differential you can get voltage out of it! I've seen it be used for a cast-iron fireplace fan made to blow the hot air out into the room once it's hot
THAT'S how those fans I see sitting on the homesteaders stoves on youtube work. I knew it was the heat somehow, didn't know they had a peltier in them.
nah my boss has one, they're Peltier devices for sure. It's a two piece heatsink with one sandwiched between. The upper section dissipates sufficient heat for it to run a small DC motor
On paper, yes. But in the real world, to get any decent amount of power you need to get hot side up to a pretty high temperature - at least 200c. But the device is held together by solder.... which melts at that temperature. So it just falls apart. You can find ones made for generating electricity, made with high-temperature solder, but they are harder to find and cost more. Those are the ones you see on those stovetop fans.
Hey Alec. I started a career in HVAC engineering because of how much I enjoy your channel. Today I’m an energy engineer for a large company, getting to spend every day improving hvac systems. I must say thank you, for making these somewhat abstract concepts you cover clearer than any textbook has. Keep at it
As a retired HVAC & R technician I really enjoyed this video. I used a thermoelectric cooler/heater in my service van. The cost to me was zero because it ran on 12 volts. The company I worked for paid for the fuel so any extra draw on the alternator and drag on the engine needed to run that thing didn’t amount to much and didn’t cost me anything. The cooler/heater had a switch to make it a hot box so I could heat my lunch in it instead of cooling a drink. I found later that it was more efficient to wrap my lunch in aluminum foil and keep it on the manifold of the engine that worked much better. I had a service call once on a thermoelectric wine cooler sold by the company I worked for. The wine cooler was meant for a temp around 60 degrees. This new unit was unable to do that because the customer had it built into to his bar but he left a generous small vent hole in the back.
A metal toolbox under the hood can make a handy pie warmer... (A 12V element and thermostat, could make it perfectly food safe - for Alex's concerns..). One could go all fancy with a heater core...
Yup they are great for work, especially if you're a tech driving around. I work for Motorola, so I travel like 300 miles to my jobsite. My unit is AC or DC powered. So I can keep my drinks cold in the truck, then take the fridge out at the job site and plug it in. He doesn't understand what a nice luxury it is to have a cold drink and a sandwich when you're out in the middle of nowhere on a blistering hot day!
@@thedavesofourlives1 Tiny compared to what the A/C uses, plus a little portable cooler would be more like 4-5A. (As to the case where you're blasting the A/C on max and already using a lot of power, couldn't you run a bit of ducting from the vent to the open box and get faster cooling without any extra power draw?)
Basically a thermocouple in reverse. I looked into designing a "cold plate" around the Peltier junction. A nifty notion, but I determined that the heat generated by the process overshadowed any useful cooling effect. So much for my great idea. I could have left out the Peltier device and added a heating element and don a hotplate just fine ... AND USED LESS ENERGY! Side note: my father in law bought one of these Peltier junction cooler for my mother in law to keep her insulin in. The version was the 12V Travel Cooler version, and never worked, and ran down the car battery when they were parked. Carnot cycle fridges are a much better solution, as you showed. Nifty device, though, and have a (very narrow) truly practical applications, such as cooling something in tight places. And the Peltier junctions can be stacked (with in limits).
You're right about the need to let a refrigerator with a compressor stand for a few hours after being moved. When I worked for a UK white goods dealer in the 1970s, the majority of our replacement fridge sales were to people who had just moved house and switched the unit on as soon as it was in its new position. Often this was because the electrical socket was positioned behind the unit and they didn't want it standing in the middle of their kitchen.
You can move them, but they should stay upright as much as possible. Briefly tipping it over should be fine. Transporting sideways in a vehicle for 30 mins should get some time to let the oil settle back. If you start it up though, a lot of the oil will get pushed back to the compressor, but it will coat the lines on the way there and take a bit to get returned. This would be worse on the passive ones with the large backside coil compared to the fan cooled ones most are today.
Please don't ever stop including the "bloopers" at the end of your videos. The main content of the video is great, but then the bloopers at the end are the awesome cherry on top.
@@MrMoerli in Italy were I live we can easily reach 30-35 °C for most of the day during the summer. So in that situation they would at best cool the drinks to around 15-20°C 😂
I think the main draw of a fridge like Mr. Blue Toy over there is honestly the tiny size. You can literally have it just sit on your desk without it causing any issues or getting in the way and that's extremely convenient. I doubt you could fit a compressor that small into a fridge, and even if you could it's efficiency and noise probably suffer a lot. So I do think a very well insulated, temprature sensing little thermoelectic fridge has a place, it would probably cost quite a lot more to make a decent one, and it would still cost quite a lot to run but if the insulation was good enough it'd surely be at least acceptable, even though it's never going to be very efficient
Yes, this is why I have one. I have some skincare products that tend to oxidize before I finish the bottle. I just need them to be kept a bit cooler on my vanity without taking up much space, and it works perfectly for that.
@brittneyyyann You will spend so much money on electricity that you could buy new skincare products with it. And why not just pot them in a regular fridge?
I know this is a "bash Peltier cooling" moment, but I just want to say how absolutely crazy it is that those little things cool at all! In the lab I work at, we have a couple very-sensitive spectrometers, and the way they are so sensitive is by cooling the CCD cameras (less heat = less noise). For one system, there is a dewar that needs to be filled with liquid nitrogen in order to get it cold. The other, just a little Peltier cooler. And it is JUST AS EFFECTIVE! That little shit can get down to LN2 temps, it only takes a few minutes, AND there's no need for external coolant. It amazed me the first time I saw it work lol
For anyone else confused by the big "C-PENTANE" label on the back of his black fridge: That's not the refrigerant, it's the blowing agent used to make the insulation foam (cyclopentane). The refrigerant is listed on another label as R600a (isobutane)
Maybe they're doing this now after they were caught several years ago manuacturing shittons of CFC11 in Shandong province in flagrant violation of the Montreal protocol?
Thanks for this comment! I have a chest freezer that uses cyclopentane as the refrigerant, saw the C-Pentane label, but kept hearing isobutane. Later, I saw the R600a and began to think I was seeing two different units. But that would be uncharacteristic for Alec. I was left in confusion until i found your comment. Thanks again!
Having built scientific instruments using Peltier coolers, I found that the manufacturer's 'power rating' was calculated as the power level at which the efficiency dropped to zero, i.e. where the self-heating was equal to the cooling effect. However to run at maximum efficiency (COP) they had to be run at under 5% of the rated power. So to do anything useful you need a lot of elements, and a huge fan-assisted heat-sink, which ends up expensive. The standard '100W' 50mm elements rated for 24V need to run on about 4V (depending on temperature difference) to get a COP more than 1. So to make a car fridge run on 12V you need a minimum of three '24V' elements in series.
The best use case scenario for peltiers is in scientific or electronic equipment for cooling laser diodes, thermally stabilizing laser crystals, and reaching ultra low temps by stacking progressively smaller chips in a cascade arrangement.
thermocyclers in molecular biology also use these things and they're very effective in that context. the thermal mass it needs to cool is pretty minimal (even the larger units might only have to cool 10-20 mLs total) and it's in an insulated space, so it can achieve pretty precise temperatures with controllable temperature profiles. that said, people abuse the heck out of them. they'll do things like leave a near-freezing hold at the end of their programs for tasks that REALLY don't need to be kept cold, and then let it sit on that for hours.
They're pretty useful for isothermal calorimetry titration too, which is absolutely the slickest and most elegant method of determining enzyme kinetics.
@@timK0WTB Yes, another good example, cooling sensors to reduce noise. Basically, any application where you have to cool a very small mass, and the peltier has the versatility to achieve a wide range of temperatures.
I've gotta say this, I appreciate that you put the blooper reel at the end of each of these. It has made it much easier for me to show to my younger relatives to prove to them that you don't have to get things perfect on the first try to become popular on RUclips. That they shouldn't feel bad about having to retry things to get it how they want it.
This video made me realize that my parents own a cooling box for their car with a Peltier system in it, which is exactly the application you described. It is well isolated and does have the fan and heat sink on top of the box. it is useful to be able to hook it up to the car and just keep things cool for longer than they would normally be in a cooling box but yeah, i wouldn't use that as an actual fridge.
My dad's old camper van has a different kind of fridge that I'd never heard of before: an absorption refrigerator! It has the benefit of having no moving parts, but (as my dad found out) they kick out a lot more heat than a vapor-compression refrigerator. He dramatically improved the performance of his one by mounting a PC fan so that it forces some airflow over the radiator at the back.
I hadn't heard about that. I do know that if you want to cool a few cans, you can just set them on the propane cylinder and harvest some of the cooling when that phase change freezes the outside.
As I understand they are about as efficient as using the same amount of propane to run a generator to power a compressor fridge. I was looking at one that if run on electricity took 300 watts. However they seem to be able to withstand long periods of disuse, so they might be worth it at your standard house as an emergency spare.
@@thomaswilliams2273 There were some attempts at gas powered air conditioning which ran into the same issue, plus the ammonia is a major safety concern if it leaked.
Fascinating! I use a neck fan with cooling plates and for some reason I thought the plates were cooled by the air going past them on the inside. I completely skipped over the fact that turning the plates on is a separate setting, AND the fact that they can be used for heat if so desired. It's absolutely fantastic, but the battery life is pretty short if you're using the cooling plates. It takes a long time to recharge too. Makes sense now that I know about Peltier elements!
Probably the best channel on RUclips. It fills the niche of learning how things work without doing the research myself, being entertained by this particular sense of humor, and vicariously experiencing the coziness of Midwest values. Excellent work!
You must be new to this channel, I watch him all the time and that's basically what I said in my head when I saw the video pop up in my notifications, that's why I love this channel I'm nerdy and particularly fascinated by how things work and the science and engineering behind things, and nobody else understands. When I first discovered this channel I was binging later than I should and was tired the next day and ESPECIALLY by the time I got off work, my girlfriend was like "why are you so tired? Couldn't sleep?" I said I found a new channel I like. She was like oh about what? I said "you wouldn't like it but we're getting a sunbeam toaster." Of course she asked about it but when I informed her I watched his 6 part series about the sunbeam toaster, so like 6 hours about this particular toaster, she just didn't understand. Nobody does.
The only practical (and this word is carrying a lot of weight) use i've found so far for Peltier plates is as cooling for my Full-body future soldier armor LARP suit. It is water-cooled using a miniature immersion water pump in a camelback filled with water and some ice initially. The immersion pump feeds a 10m long 5mm inner diameter aquarium tube that goes on a wild ride up and down the inside of my chest piece to help cool me down and then the water comes back to the camelback (yes i technically drink my coolant; yes i clean it thoroughly after each use). After about two hours the water reaches more or less room temperature. I then have two manual switches, one to turn on the cooling fans on the backpack and the second to power up the Peltier plate. The fans are on aluminium heat-sinks that are on the aluminium casing in which i put my camelback. The two .25A fans are good enough if it's bellow 15C outside, otherwise the water will get warmer and warmer over time. That's when i turn the Peltier plate on, only then, maybe after 5 hours of continuously running around or physical activity. People that do LARP will tell you, you usually get some time to cool off between hectic running around periods so it's really a last resort or, if it's really warm outside, like 25C+. Mind you this feels hot because i'm wearing a full-body armor made from EVA foam sandwiched in thermoplastic, with a closed helmet, over an overall and hauling around this 10 kilos of gear, 3 kilos of water, 5 kilos of batteries and my 1m90 125 kilos self. And when i reach that point... it's not that great. Sure it makes a difference, a big one, but this is bumping my power consumption from about 3 A/h with the fans in the helmet and cooling running along the pump to a whopping 50 A/h with the Peltier on. Mind you i'm carrying a large 20 A/h 12v battery in my backpack, the single heaviest item in fact, and, while yes i can swap the battery and have two for the exact purpose of keeping one on charge, i'm going from about 8 hours of autonomy to about 20 minutes (this battery looses efficiency on high drain). So yeah, besides being basically a novelty that is kind of cool-if-a-bit-crappy, the only time i actually got some real use of it was when i almost got a serious heatstroke during a heat wave a few years back.
A small technical correction about heat pumps: You mention at 21:30 that they are better than running an electric heating element if the COP is greater than 1. It's actually better than that: Most of the energy going into running the heat pump is also rejected out the hot side, which means that they're better than running an electric heating element so long as the COP is greater than 0. Even a Peltier device, as bad as it is, will be more efficient than a heating element at heating things.
Fundamentally I would agree the statement. I couldn't help but that think practically that a Pelteir device would poorer at heating than a element because the distance between the cooling and heat side is so close with no insulation it would have significant losses. In addition I would think that the heat generated by the device isn't directional, further reduce its efficiency as it has to manage that additional heat as well. This is just conjecture so I wouldn't disagree with a explanation of why my reasoning could be wrong.
If we use the usual definition CoP of a heat pump in heating mode as energy output (Q) divided by work (W), then a heat pump that pushes all the energy used to do work into the output with 100% efficiency actually looks like this: CoP = Q/W = (X+W)/W. Where Q is the sum of the energy moved and the waste heat from doing the work, and X is the energy moved by itself. In fact heat pumps tend to have a higher heating CoP than cooling for the reason you state (the additive effect of using waste heat in addition to the heat moved boosts the CoP). An electric heater just emits whatever power is provided as heat, so CoP is W/W, or 1. As far as the Peltier, in principle the CoP can exceed 1, but that depends on how large your delta T is, and where you are operating compared to maximum current. It’s easy to undersize these elements, or overdrive them trying to deal with large temperature gradients and wind up with a CoP under 1.
@@williamnixon3994 No, it is saying that at a COP of 0, you only get the waste heat and no heat is moved from the outside. But as you want to heat your home anyway, that waste heat is useful for you. And as that waste heat is the exact same amount you would get from a resistive heater... PS: This assumes that the waste heat goes into the house. If the heatpump has its motor outside, it may very well escape into the environment and be lost. For a heatpump that can operate as an AC, that's not too unlikely.
@@HenryLoenwind CoP is only zero if *no useful work* is done. CoP doesn’t care how the energy enters (heating) or leaves (cooling) the system, just how much energy enters or leaves. Scavenging waste heat is still bringing energy into the system, and it counts. Someone talking about a real world heating device having a CoP of zero is misunderstanding something.
This explains SO much omg. My parenta got me one of the little can fridges and it worked for a bit before just dying completely LOL now its storage for trinkets
Lol yes! It’s stronger than the disdain some of us Canadians feel when Americans pronounce French. (Or how Parisians regard French Canadian for that matter 🏴☠️) That room ain’t a foy-"yurr" but a foy-"yay!" La Croix has nothing to do with the Croydon Facelift, but more in common with the Italian way to say "the water" (though perhaps not Italian Americans!)
I totally agree with the spirit of your video. After 20 years I'm on my second one (I think both Colmans). Did have to replace a plug in one. The old 12v "cigar lighter" in a vehicle is the absolute dumbest vestige of the past. 90% travel use 10% fridge expansion for, you know, sheltering hurricane evacuees. Pro Tip: take your pillows with you. Put pillows, blanket or jackets around the cooler (keep plenty of space for fan ventilation)
If you've gotta keep something at a quite specific temperature, the solid state reversible peltier is perfection. It's uniquely suited to keeping things precisely tepid, not getting too big for its britches and trying to be a fridge. I'm sure some scientist out there is using these things in their proper application. (Bulky compressors with brute force bang-bang relay operation will swing temps, but you can PID tune these piddly little TECs)
They are, in fact, being used to cool some spectrometer detectors, since they aren't generating a lot of watts of heat that need to be transported away, but do need to be kept very cold - and the cold side of a Peltier element can get very cold because you aren't limited by the refrigerant's boiling temperature.
Yup, peltiers are the way to go to stabilise temperature of lab laser diodes. Small size, bidirectionality and ease of control circuit are unbeatable, especially in cases of low power dissipated in the diode itself and wanting to keep the temperature just a bit higher than ambient. Peltiers scale very well into region of low power temperature control.
Seems to be a common problem with a lot of modern things, there is a small upfront fee to entice you but you'll be paying more in the long run. Especially with the proliferation of subscription, pay monthly and finance, even things like fast fashion.
It goes down to the very reason you could remove the battery from your phone 10+ years ago but can't now.. there is NO valid reason for it other than $$
One actual use for one of these. A car fridge. The proper rerigerator unit needs an inverter and a flat surface and enough space. A mini fridge will not fit through the door of most sedans. Hernia material. Then there is the matter of the inverter to run it. My MobiCool unit provides about a 40F differential which works just fine with a few freezer blocks. Keeps the milk and cheese from going bad over the three hour journey from the grocer to the house. Not much space but works pretty well until the interior of the car reaches more than 80F. Would never dream of using it in any other context. I put a thermostat control on the unit, like the temp readout in your video, so on a really cold day it will not freeze the lettuce! Love your videos. Keep up the great work.
@@anna-fleurfarnsworth104 Ahhh! You got me! I live on an island with a ferry service. The schedule is really just a suggestion in the summer , with all the tourists trying to get on and off the Islands around here. So departure times go out the window. I buy milk, eggs, cream, eggs, meats and they are taken out to the car just before leaving the supermarket. Add in ten minutes to the terminal, with a half hour advance check in time, and then begins the wait. Sometimes up to an hour. Then the sailing back to the Island for another hour and a half, with another ten minutes to get the stuff in the fridge, and you get the picture. Could use a big chiller chest with lots of ice, but then you need the ice, yes? Simpler to use the MobiCool and plug it in. A couple of ice thingies and it is done. Creates about a 40 F differential.
We did try using a peltier to build a cooling box for vegetables to survive at an overheating dorm and now I know why it didn't work! The tech still works well as a generator in my portable wood stove...
I was talking with my friends just today about how I save technology connections videos for when I'm having a particularly bad day. Lo and behold there was an upload and I'm having a particularly bad day. So thanks for cheering me up :)
I was a trucker and used an insulated top loading cooler with a Peltier element as a supplement to the miniscule drawer fridge in my tractor for easier access to beverages and to free up room in the actual fridge for temperature sensitive items. The larger cooler Peltier units are great for long road trips since residential refrigerators cant take the shaking and RV fridges need to be solidly installed.
One cool use of Peltiers is in PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) machines we have in the lab. The PCR process involves amplifying DNA by repeatedly heating and cooling it to copy the genetic material. One of the key advantages of Peltiers in PCR machines is that they can precisely heat and cool the samples to the exact temperature required for each step (within something like 0.1°C or so) - it's not about efficiency here, since samples are tiny, but rather the precision and reliability they offer.
@@andreahighsides7756are you a COVID conspiracy theorist or something? PCR isn't a COVID thing it's a powerful method of quickly replicating tiny amounts of DNA to make a larger sample. PCR is very reliable, the problems with COVID RT-PCR tests must be either the reverse transcription process or the method they use to analyse the amplified sample after PCR. I'd imagine it's the reverse transcription because any traces or errors in the sample will also be amplified by PCR. But it's wild that you know about PCR but only in the context of COVID tests.
@@andreahighsides7756ah yes, failing highschool biology / science (or you are just old enough that PCR wasn’t invented/well known when you were in highschool and you couldn’t bother looking into it beyond political headlines in 2020)
Just FYI, Peltier coolers CAN get COP close to 3, if you carefully control the current *AND* the temperature drop. This would require a cascade of several peltier modules in series, depending on the total temperature drop you're trying to accomplish. I designed a system to use peltier modules for dehumidification (welcome to Florida), because I wanted to use something quieter than a typical dehumidifier. In order to keep the modules operating in their peak efficiency, and match the moisture extraction of a 30pt/day dehumidifier... was going to cost me over $1k in JUST the modules. Power consumption would have been comparable, as would cooling capacity. These modules aren't bad... they're just... not used correctly, and horrendously expensive *TO* use correctly.
Yeah, you need the right kind of Peltier, you need stack them and you need to use the right thermal interface materials and good heat sinks on both sides. But at that point, you're talking like $200 just for the bill of materials plus like another $200 each for engineering cost and margin.
I have modded an electric cooler by stacking a second Peltier on top of the existing one and running both at reduced power. Ended up using 20-25W which was comparable to a compressor fridge of the same size, even had to add a small heater and thermostat to stop it from freezing when the room was cold. The compressor still wins if you want the capability to go below freezing, however.
If you'd have bet me that I would watch a full video on refrigerants tonight...I would have laughed. Turns out I would have lost that bet... and I also laughed! Well done sir, you have quite a gift.
To be honest, I believe your videos should be shown in schools. They are incredibly helpful, informative, and practical for our daily lives. Well done!
- its quite likely they are being used by some teachers, lord knows alec's videos are more interesting than tha crap videotapes I recall endureing! (maybe not an "official" part of the resources list) and home school is a thing now .
Unfortunately, that probably won't happen. The material is not on standardized tests and schools seem to overlook anything that will not improve scores, get teachers raises, and bring more status and money to the school system. Many schools have stopped requiring books to be read and instead focus on what questions about those books may be on the test.
@@mikemondano3624There are a good number of more specialised schools that may have an interest, and I can totally see my old science class putting one of these on on free days assuming they had a pre-lunch slot or a double class.
I used one of those small desk coolers when I worked in a call center. We could not have a mini fridge at our desk and we could not just get up and go to the kitchen whenever we wanted, so I got a Coke branded one for my desk. I would bring in pre-coold cans from home and put them in there. IT was much better at maintaining lower temps than getting things cold, but it would work well enough for four hours, then I would refill it from the big fridge at lunch.
I have absolutely no idea why this got recommended to me but i am unable to stop watching now. Something about the voice, the cadence, the sass, and the information being so interesting I'm hooked.
Are you telling me there’s more butane in a 6 pack of lighters than in my fridge and I’ve been living in mortal terror of my fridge exploding like a firebomb for no reason?
I had this exact discussion with my colleague once and his response on "get an actual fridge, within a year or two it will be cheaper!" was "But I dont plan on using this for two years"🤯 Some Mindsets just make it impossible to argue.
I love how after all is said and done, all these standard cooler replacements/portable fridges always end up not working nearly as effectively, but also end up costing significantly more than if you just used an insulated bag/cooler and fill it with ice. They can't even reduce the items in them to an acceptable temperature, let alone keep them there. VS. A regular ice cooler that will get your items to near freezing within an hour or so and keep them that way for most of the day (depending on how hot it is/how often it's opened).
Thanks to your video I now like my little toy. It’s always on in my office. But now I know it’s costing my employer more money than a mini-fridge! Glad to hear you saved big money at Menards.
Unbolting the compressor can make it run much quieter. Just avoid transporting the fridge with it unbolted, because it'll put a lot of stress on the copper tubes. I live in a 250sq ft apartment with my mini fridge less than ten feet away from where I sleep. Since doing this trick, and adding some extra gel pads under the rubber grommets, I can almost sleep without earplugs.
😮If you could re-design a mini fridge, so that the peltier device wasn't trying to cool the entire internal area, just a smaller area with a fan to blow the cold air around, they might be more efficient.
For a long time, I was interested about the prospect of mere peltier module for cooling my drinks. But this video made me scrap that idea. Thanks for not making me waste my time.
I remember when Peltier coolers were a big deal back in the early oughts for ekeing out an extra 1-2C of cooling a CPU. You'd have to carve quite the divot into your heatsink to fit the thing between the CPU and the heatsink, the power draw was ridiculous, and again, it'd only drop your temps an extra celsius or two, but these were the days when if you wanted water cooling you had to kitbash together your own system using aquarium hardware so it was regarded as a "safer" mod to perform.
They do exist now too but with how high modern CPU power draw is, they are essentially useless except for when you only care about single core performance. Which is almost never.
The only thing stupider than using a Peltier module to cool your PC is using *actual water.* What could POSSIBLY go wrong??? Yes I underclock, how could you tell?
Anyone remember when Dell sold a high end PC with Peltier cooling, 2006 or so? I wouldn't be surprised if it used more power than a similar era dual CPU rack server, even though the rack servers of that era were particularly power hungry.
@@omegahaxors9-11 My fully custom 4770k/R9 290x loop says not much in the last 10 years it's been running. As in it's totally silent on 100% of the original hardware, 100% of the time.
@@pafnutiytheartist they are not useless because you can easily make 2 copper plates 4x4 inches and stick 4x400 watts TECs between, and then stick these sandwiched TECs on top of your i9-14900ks, along with a liter of vaseline and foam to prevent condensation. You will of course need a hefty PSU to run it, since each needs 25-30 amps, and probably a water loop with a car radiator to cool the hot side, plus you need to make the waterblock yourself. But it would certainly allow that CPU to run at its best. This design has been used before. Phase change cooling would allow for colder temps and will run much more energy efficient.
honestly super grateful for this video, we just had a baby two weeks ago and were using a similar mini fridge to store breastmilk so we wouldn't have to go downstairs to feed the boy. he's been fine, but we're changing that up right away
We used one of those coffee cup warmers next to a stack of clean soft cloths for cleaning the babies bottoms with warm water. Much more comfy for the little one. Congratulations. I wish you much joy.
About a decade ago, I found out about Peltier modules and thought they were so awesome, I'd make a "plate cooler" to cool the bottom of pots super quick. It ended up being super power inefficient, needed huge finned coolers. I ended up taking out the PTE modules, butting the fins up to the cooling plate, then using a peristaltic pump to move water across the fins. It used significantly less power and was far better, all for an tiny increase in the height of the device.
Heat or cool "at will" is very cute. But to do it well, it takes time, resources and a heat pump.. (I was enamoured by the cold plates used to make Icecream / iced specialty foods. Sadly, to heat and cool - to extremes - with one device isn't quickly possible..
@@MrEazyE357 Cool it from cooking temperature to serving temperature more quickly. Those who have to prepare dinner after coming home from work (living single or partner also works) can certainly relate.
@@NiHaoMike64I can’t imagine anything being quicker or more convenient than just a dip in an ice bath in that scenario though. Maybe if your pot is super hot for some reason you’d have an issue with steam, but only if your pot doesn’t transfer heat well or you’ve boiled all the liquid out of whatever is in the pot.
At my work they banned personal mini fridges during Covid when few people were in the office for weeks at a time. I am 90% sure it’s because people leave food in them and if they break or the power goes out the frost build up melts and the water runs all over the floor which causes mold. They also often stank when opened unless the owners cleaned them and defrosted them regularly. When we were allowed fridges the majority of people left them behind when they left the job or didn’t dispose of them properly if they broke, leaving the company to deal with it. However we are allowed these electric TEG coolers at our desks. You can actually buy good ones that work way better, they still use way more power and are more expensive than a much larger mini-fridge.
Okay, challenge accepted. Now I want to make real, functional fridge of this size with the standard compressor system. I'm writing it down on "to-do" list. I love your passion about refrigeration, cheers!
...i think europeans thinking you called the red fridge a minifridge is very much down to your word choice. if you "put it in the same category as minifridges", that makes it... a minifridge. and if its "larger than your TYPICAL minifridge", that makes it... an atypical minifridge. extremely easy to interpret your words that way.
From a european perspective, the funny part is the red fridge is about the size we had as a family of 5. Surely bigger fridges are available, but that's pretty much the stadard you get in your average kitchen.
Yeah, I think the intent was to say it's not a minifridge when comparing it to "your typical minifridge" but I also interpreted that as meaning "this is a minifridge, just not a typical one". Implicative meaning is a tricky thing, where placing the terms together implies a relationship even when the direct semantic contents does not directly push that relationship. Overly focusing on the direct semantic content, rather than the wider context of placement in the script, is very relatable (I used to do it all the time, 5-10 years ago) but I did find the "you jumped to conclusions!" line a bit annoying. It's a perfectly valid interpretation, just not his intended one. He could've left it at the elaboration which preceded that conclusion.
Europeans are not always fluent in speaking English, and Americans sometimes overlook how common it is to speak a second or third language in other parts of the world. Additionally, U.S. citizens tend to use more energy, often due to personal choice and less stringent efficiency standards. This perception might indeed be influenced by confirmation bias, but referring to a larger fridge as "mini" is something that many Europeans might genuinely expect an American to think, given the average differences in household appliances. U.S. homes, cars, and appliances tend to be larger, a fact that’s often viewed critically and reflects a distinct lifestyle. In Germany, for example, grocery shopping is usually done on foot or by bike, often on the way home. Smaller supermarkets are common and easily accessible, making fresh grocery shopping two or three times a week a feasible option. Many people also purchase less processed food, which is easier when stores are close by. City planning plays a role here: when supermarkets are nearby, there’s less need to stockpile groceries out of fear of running out. On the other hand, when the supermarket is far away, people tend to buy in bulk, planning meals ahead and leaning toward long-lasting convenience foods. Different places each have their pros and cons, but these lifestyle differences, especially in grocery shopping and urban design, are some of the aspects that I think many U.S. cities could benefit from adopting.
I’m sensing some consternation in the comments, so I want to explain the scope of this video a little more explicitly:
There are _absolutely_ applications for which Peltier elements make sense! But they’re mostly not stuff you or I are going to come across. Lots of people down below are highlighting the various pieces of scientific and medical equipment which use Peltier elements and the specific reasons they do… but that’s scientific and medical equipment! Not day-to-day life stuff. While those applications are all very interesting and highlight that there is value in the technology, they’re just way outside my scope here.
I intended to keep this entirely in the scope of general-purpose cooling (and refrigeration), and in that context? Consumer products with Peltier elements in them are almost always terrible and a waste of money.
Agreed. I'm a PC cooling enthusiast, and it has never been a good cooling solution outside of extremely niche overclocking applications. And even in those applications, LN2 is usually a better solution.
Thanks for making such an extensive video on this.
I am soooo going to invent a tiny clockwork heat pump that competes with peltier junctions. You guys want to hold part the patent? It might be a fun collaboration
I didn't feel like those comments were expressing consternation. I took them more as "fun facts." Both points ("crap in consumer electronics" & "useful in various technical items") came across fine, especially since you mentioned repeatedly that there were other use cases for them. I didn't think car cupholder gimmicks was an exhaustive list, lol
My company uses them to maintain temperature chambers to +/- 0.05 degrees F
Way better than the more efficient refrigerant-based units and a million times easier to export.
Saw the title, upvoting on principle.
Friend had one of those.
Kept complaining about it, so I went over to improve it.
Changed the Peltier from a 5A to a 10A Model (120W), changed the thermal paste to actual good one, added a bigger hot side heat sink and ofc upgraded the power supply.
It worked much better afterwards!
For the low price of doubling the electrical consuption, and almost trippling the original purchasing price 😂😂😂😂
.. and you spent more money on the upgrade than what the fridge was worth :)
Treat it like a gaming machine's CPU and you're all set. Maybe go to liquid cooled.
@@jimmurphy6095adding liquid cool with a radiator is basically the same as an actual fridge at that point 😂
@@jimmurphy6095 You wouldn't even peltier a CPU. Linus tried and it works just well, up until the peltier gets too hot and you cannot move the heat quickly enough anymore
What you want to do is use a peltier on top of a peltier
You can get stacking temperature differentials up to a point
Doesn't necessarily stop at 30° below ambient
Adequate heat sinking the hot side is of course required.
The only man on the internet who can talk about refrigerators for over 30mns and keep me interested.
And more than once!
Yeah, it was interesting, and entertaining.
Or about any appliances for that matter 😅
Sad
too bad he misinformed everyone about efficiency side of peltiers.
We need to bring the rest of skirt terminology in here. The black one is a mini fridge, the red one is a midi fridge, the silver one is a maxi fridge, and the blue one is a micro-mini.
cant wait for a type-c fridge, and a propietary lightning fridge banned by the european union
Blue one could also be called a "tiny-mini," "itty-bitty," and a "you are not leaving the house dressed like THAT!"
Ultramini
@@quint3ssent1a we are now at a level where youtube (or the browser) offers to translate that to english :)
Nanofridge?
"even more quicklier" was for some reason what I needed to get out of a depressive funk this morning. Thank you. Cheers
I nearly spat my coffee
"Look closely. Look closelier."
A bit tangential to the topic at hand, but I *hate* those temperature control dials in refrigerators. 0-6 is completely meaningless, so it requires trial and error (and a thermometer) to even know what they mean! Like...if they're gonna do that at *least* make it go to 11 so I can make Spinal Tap jokes.
Agreed! In Europe, I'm never sure if 0-6 refers to degrees Celsius, which means closer to 0 is colder, or cooling strength, which means further away from 0 is colder.
@@FlintlockYTThey usually aren't in degrees, it's mostly a measure of cooling power. Otoh, mine have a temperature setting since the early 2000s, and they aren't expensive ones.
This is gold🥇,well done sir
@@FlintlockYT just as a spoiler alert, the numbers on toasters mean nothing either.
If they had degrees, then the dial would have to be calibrated.
My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.
You didn't test its performance while it's inside the mini fridge. It was crying out for it!
Connextras!
In the right configuration, multi-stage thermoelectric coolers can achieve liquid nitrogen temperatures. I am curious how cold the cooler in a fridge would get.
@@Peter_S_ I like the way you think.
Reviewbrah!
@@Peter_S_Well they work on temperature differentials so you need a greater temperature difference between the inside cooling and outside temperatures... So you need really good cooling for the hot side otherwise the cooling side doesn't function very well. So if you use it in a hot enviroment the worse the cooler functions.... Though you can make it function better by putting a big fin cooler from a CPU cooler on it to make it work better.
as a hard of hearing fan, thank you for uploading your scripts as captions (and for the in-jokes in them) nearly everybody relies on the auto transcriber. It works sometimes but misses a lot of technical words. Really appreciate you making your videos much more accessible to folks like me, Thanks!
P.S. I had a peltier cooler on my Celeron 300A processor back in the late 90s, what a time. 50%+ overclocks.
I also appreciate it as someone with deaf friends. I can share it without worry. Truly a shame more RUclipsrs don't do this. RUclips taking away the fan subs as well was so dumb.
Yeah, I watched a science video recently where the RUclipsr had trusted their transcription service a little too much and "ribosome" was butchered in several creative ways.
One of the RUclips channels I follow (Evan and Katelyn) has said that the reason they captioned every video even at the start of their channel was that they wanted to treat their work as professional, and professional videos have captions as a rule. I think we should enforce that societally more. "Oh, you don't caption your videos? So you don't actually care if your videos are watchable or not? How unprofessional."
Ive slowly come to realise that captions are a very simple and easy way to determine if a creator really cares about their product.
@aliengeo hey fellow Subject of Joob!
Yep, also useful for us foreigners who have English as a second language. Reading is often easier than listening so good quality captions really add to the viewing experience. And there's a clear difference in quality between real captions and auto transcriber, even if the latter has made enough progress to be reasonably useable (most of the time).
I know they are crap, but I was to use one of these to chill water for our garage aquarium. We raise our own tropical fish, but this last summer, the temperatures got too hot for even tropical fish and I seriously considered getting one of these, cutting holes in it, and stuffing it with tubing. The idea being that even a crap "refrigerator" would likely get the water back into the low 80's.
Now that I know they also take forever to chill, you have saved me from indulging in that plan!
It would be kind of neat to drill a couple of holes in a non-critical part of a mini-fridge and run a cooling loop of water in that mini fridge. Cool drinks and cool fish!
could you put ice cubes in the tank?
@@em84c Not directly in the tank, as the odds of regulating the temperature are too low and it would only cool the water at the surface. However, running tank water through tubing in an ice bath might work if it you had a thermostat for the pump.
The real issue there is it would create a whole new job of constantly checking the ice. It gets pretty hot, so the ice would be gone fast.
funnily enough a evaporative cooler might be your best option
9:10 "Internationally recognized metric of cans of LaCroix per dollar."
9:50 "I've consulted with some math scholars who confirmed 45 is less than 55."
What other RUclips channel has in depth reporting like this?
Techmoan😂
SuperfastMatt
LGR
Okay, actually I'm noticing a trend here.
All bangers.
Why does my phone get cold when I play that one thing on RUclips that goes brrrrrrrr
Another thing that Peltier Modules are used for is easy electrical generation, get one side cold and one side hot and it induces a voltage. This is actually used in space probes which have RTGs.
Hurrah for the Seebeck effect!
so all you need is a little plutonium and you have a nice little power supply.
Petier device are better power generators than heating or cooling.
@@5AndysaliveGood thing by now it's easily available in every corner drug store.
I see them in use atop wood burning stoves, using the generated power to run a fan.
You saved me from creating $30 of e-waste. I’d always been tempted to pick one of those up. I had no idea how bad they were.
It made me want one honestly, it sounds great for drinks on road trips in my car without having to deal with ice.
@@jimmjamme3067Problem is your car isn't running for 24 hours
it's good for keeping beverages cool in your car.
not for food.
@@svr5423 Well If your car alternator/battery can generate enough power for the peltier it can do the same for a mini fridge. :p
@@MarcABrown-tt1fp yes it can.
But fridges generally don't like being moved around. Often it says that the fridge should be stationary for 24h before being turned on in the manual.
There are special fridges that don't mind. But they are way more expensive than a cooler with Peltier.
So if you just use it couple of times a year to keep pre-cooled beverages cool while travelling in your car, i'd say it's a good option.
If you use it constantly or you want food safe grade, buy a proper fridge.
@27:00 Growing up in South Africa we always got told upo getting a new fridge that we must "wait a day before using it " due to the gas. I initially thought this was due to refrigerant but i am now guessing its for the lubricating oil. Brilliant video🎉
Another thing about the lubricant, is the longer a compressor runs, the more it "wears" both the lubricant and the refrigerant. This doesn't pose problems to normal operations, but it means that when you move it, if it doesn't stay upright the entire time, the mixing of the two fluids in the compressor can become permanent and completely ruin the compressor. So any fridges that have more than 5-ish years of use, are more likely to be completely ruined if they lose orientation in transit. But yes, at least with new refrigerators, letting them sit for at least a day is a safe bet. Older ones I would basically add a day per year of operation, just to be safe.
Ngl I watched this guys 40 minute video on dishwashers and I always thought he was just a dishwashing nerd not a full appliance nerd now I'm def gonna check out his other stuff. Great videos
That’s how I found his channel too!
Smart move!
He's excellent!
Wait till you find out he goes WAY beyond just appliances...😊❤
It's not just appliances either, he's done videos on everything from typewriters to Klaxon™ car horns.
He's an Everything-Nerd , thats why we love him
Watching all theese fridge videos makes me realize that the old fridge I bought used for $20 a few years ago to keep my beer cold in the basement is a absolutely brilliant fridge!
It fits perfectly in the space its in, uses next to no electricity, and has no issues with me loading in 3 cases of beer at once, automatically defrosts and well, just works!
That's my hot tip of the day: if you just need a small cheap fridge for your beer (or whatever you like to drink) then just buy an old used one.
The extra freezer space is nice too!
@@volvo09 Right? I like to buy frozen turkeys right after Thanksgiving and Christmas when the prices come down so the stores can clear their inventory.
Frozen, they keep long enough I can have turkey and turkey sandwiches and turkey soup sometimes into February.
as long as it's not too old, modern fridges use much less electricity and that cheap used one can end up costing you more over a year or two
It almost works as a built in durability test, if a fridge has lasted long enough to be older and still work well enough to be worth selling. It probably has a pretty decent design/construction
@@MonkeyJedi99 yes! Discount turkeys and chickens are awesome!
Same with pot roasts, and any cheap meat you can freeze.
RE: Heat pumps - "I could talk your ear off for hours on end..."
Me, who's watched this channel for a while - You already have...
and HOW ! ❤ swoon
Also Tunable Lasers
Not an oxymoron
Which, I have no doubt are somewhat more common and everyday than we realize,
However, are wholly under utilized to their potential. Well, and MEMS
Thx for the geek out!
Oh yes
"... the latent heat of vaporization."
Me: HE SAID THE THING! 🥳
On the plus side, I have an Igloo ice-less cooler with this type of system. I hooked up a 12v receptacle to the trailer light connection in the bed of my truck. This enabled me to keep certain beverages cold that were not available while driving through Canada. I also used it powered off a car battery to keep my eggs, milk, and cheese after we lost power during a hurricane. True, it will not fully replace a regular refrigerator, but it does have it's niche uses.
We love ours too! It comes real handy for roadtrips and camping!
Important caveat: Astrophotography is one of the rare use cases for Peltier coolers (TECs): you need a tiny little device to cool a CMOS/CCD with a form factor that can fit in a camera. And counter to what you suggested, frequent and long term use. Tiny surface to cool (35mm diagonal), lot of power to provide, and lots of environment (cold night) to dump excess heat into. My TEC coolers get my CMOS down to about -30C regularly! Wonderful for reducing (thermal) noise in astrophotos. They do make liquid cooled astrocameras, but those are very, very finicky to make work with all the movement of the telescope (but can use heat pumps).
I love your videos, by the way! The deep dives and nerdy details (plus puns and jokes) are much appreciated!
Any kind of sub-ambient component cooling where a compressor setup isn't functional or practical, really.
Not just portable astrophotography, even semi-professional and small professional telescopes may use them if liquid nitrogen isn't practical - for example at teaching observatories at universities. Or telescopes located in poor-weather areas where the amount of nights lost to bad weather mean it's not worth maintaining a cryogenic system.
We use these quite often in professional astronomy as well, not just astrophotography. Of course many instruments are cryogenically cooled, but a lot of mid sized observatories are just using peltier cooled sensors. A lot of those liquid cooled ones are also just liquid cooling the hot side of a peltier module.
The mini fridge heat sink was waaaay too small considering it probably has a tdp of 75 watts. I'm curious how well it could do if designed even half way intelligently
Also, when absolute silence is required.
And as a solar/wind dump load where rapid/systainable on/off and low capital cost are key.
We used a dew-point indicator using a Peltier cooler 35 years ago. The peltier cooled a mirror until it fogged up. It would cycle temperature up and down giving a very accurate reading of dewpoint. Much more accurate than a humidity sensor -- and having a price to match.
If there's an universal rule I've ever learned:
A tool or product is only cost effective when you use them for something they're not meant for
That's actually how dew point is measured in most official weather observations as well, especially for aviation weather because of its high accuracy compared to other humidity measurements. One very useful (but again, very niche) use for the Peltier cooler.
According to the weather report for where I live, the dew point is 31F and the current temperature is 86F... your dew point indicator would never work here.
@misterkite bro lives in the desert. I have always lived in humid places so I just assumed dew point could ever be subzero.
@@misterkite Alec's "refrigerator" is rated to 30˚F below ambient temperature, but Peltier elements can be designed to reach arbitrarily low temperatures for these kinds of applications. The rated limit for accuracy in ASOS instruments (the kind used by the Air Force and National Weather Service in the US) are guaranteed accurate to dew point depressions (difference between temperature and dew point) of 63˚F (35˚C), but they will usually work far past that point.
My mother bought me one of these for my room in the late 90s/early 2000s. They were more expensive then, but not unaffordable for a middle class gift. This early model had it's heat sink just open to the air on the back with no fan. At some point, it got pushed back directly against the wall. I noticed it, probably a few days later, and when I pulled it away from the wall, it had burned a hole right through the drywall. Thankfully, there wasn't anything particularly flammable there so it just left a big scorch mark in the shape of the heat sink.
A scorch mark isn't a hole. Which one was it?
@@bigguy7353bro literally who cares
@@somekid8014 I care :c
@@bigguy7353 Granted this is almost 30 years ago now, but from what I remember it had one of those square heat sinks with raised fins in a grate-like pattern. The high parts burned the holes, and the edges were scorched in the shape of the voids where no fins were.
It's like burning a piece of paper with the hot tip of a lighter. A hole forms at the hottest part at the tip and around the edges you have scorch marks.
Man I remember when the middle class existed, what a nostalgia trip.
Handily one of the best explanatory RUclips videos I've personally seen. Peltiers were used for extreme overclocking in the past, but I just never realized its inefficiencies.
Thank you for that. I won one twenty years ago as a door prize. I used it once and went back to putting a scoop of ice into an Igloo cooler.
After watching this video, I found that old fridge in a corner of my shop and stripped the parts out of it and threw the plastic in the bin.
Keep them coming!
Exactly what I was thinking watching this, if I did have one I'd just strip out the component to play with. That fan was very much a basic laptop fan as well 😂
I'm so enamored with your anger towards the little fridge and the element. I love when scientists get emotional about their special interests, please never change.
If anybody's wondering about the size of the red fridge - it's typically called "apartment size" and you can find them readily. Most apartments in the US these days take house-sized fridges but a lot of old apartments only have space for one of those smaller ones in their very small kitchens.
It's really hard to find a decent apartment fridge and an apartment stove is almost unobtainable my grandmother's house is tiny and uses both 6-8 years ago she had me replace them and you just couldn't go buy them back then (I'm guessing with tiny homes that might have changed)
i call em compact fridges but dorm fridge or appartment fridge is also popular
The main issue with the red fridge is the brand Galanz. They are decidedly low-end and fridges are not their specialty. They are a major microwave oven OEM. Another brand of fridge would probably work better.
@@sqike001ton The brand "Summit Appliance" out of New York never stopped making apartment size stoves and refrigerators.
Instead of this little blue box of stupidity at EVERY cubicle in the office. You would be better off with a cooler just a bit larger than the smallest soft side six can cooler and use one block ice pack and one (between six can) ice pack at each desk and have a fridge with a dedicated freezer to hold overnight and freeze an entire office staff’s icepacks …
In my car i have two soft sided coolers and i will use 2 of the B6C icepacks in one to hold dive cans (three standing upright in the center, two on thier side above the B6C, and in the second cooler six cans around a single B6C … for food item i pack them into plastic jars of the same size as a soda can. In that manner I can keep easily keep an entires workdays worth of food and beverages at a safe and tasty temp using just three icepacks that take up less space in the freezer than a single tub of ice cream
Peltiers make for an awesome demo in digital electronics classes as a thermo quantum effect device, but unfortunately have incredibly specific use cases in real life.
I was about to ask. What are the real use cases?
Research is required.
Instead of projecting our failure of execution onto inanimate objects, let's consider the fact that nuclear isn't bad, it's how we use it.
Oh, this is about Peltier chips. Well, same thing.
@@IntegerOfDoom well somewhat cooling in places where 12 volt is available and price is an issue for the device itself.
cheap coolers, effectively, but the another problem comes that a power source will become too expensive for home use, but in car it's not a problem to have somewhat high current 12 volt. anyway you can use that kind of coolboxes inside too if you get a decent power supply for them, but it's not efficient.
another is dehumidifiers. but if you have an aircon you don't need device for that anyway.
then there's more specific use cases to keep sensors in specific temperature etc.
... i recently came across a crackpot channel trying to make an airconditioner with solar form a peltier unit, they thought it was viable because the cold side got cold..
back in the day there was a window when 226w peltiers were usable for overclocking with watercooling. but yes you'd need a kilowatt of peltier power to cool a modern processor.
I once had a very senior engineer at a military equipment manufacturer ask me to design a Peltier based air conditioner for use in extreme climates. It was an awkward conversation.
@@IntegerOfDoom I've seen them in extremely sensitive voltage meters to keep the sensitive components at very specific temperatures since you can change between cooling and heating quickly.
I was an ammonia refrigeration engineer for more than twenty years, and in that time, I froze millions of pounds of farm produce like corn, peas, beans, and other things. I really enjoyed working with ammonia and multi-stage refrigeration systems. Perhaps it is just the nerd inside me, but I find the whole process of evaporation and condensation to be fascinating!
I have the Frigidaire version of this product. Inside, I keep a two quart plastic container of Crystal Light. It does cool down the drink fine. There is a small square of ice buildup exactly in the same spot as the Peltier device inside the wall. I am fairly pleased with my arrangement given I cannot have a small fridge in my office. The price I paid for the unit gave me the idea I wasn't getting Arctic temps.
This video literally came at the perfect time for me, I feel so educated. It's important to note that some makeup/skincare products (not to mention medication!) need to be kept at specific temperatures so even for that the mini "fridges" are flawed.
If you think larger refrigerators are consistent to within a degree, I have bad news for you...
@@halifornia2001 Pourquoi? Does your fridge not have a digital thermostat?
There is a significant difference between thermoelectric cooling being good and a thermoelectrically cooled toy "refrigerator" being good. Thermoelectric cooling works to cool energy dispersive x-ray spectrometers (EDS) without transmitting vibrations (say, to the electron microscope to which the EDS is attached - electron microscopes do not like vibrations).
I wish spectrometers were consumer electronics
@@adaroben1104 if you have enough money it can be. It's not that you are not allowed to own one. Only you will need to be some very well of nerd to be willing to spent money on one.
Yeah - it's all in the application! I work for a company that makes electrical/optical measuring instruments and almost every one of them has TECs in them for keeping optical components, or the sample being measured at a stable cool temperature without introducing vibration.
@@adaroben1104 they are becoming more accessible! It might not be the exact type you want but I’ve seen more and more civilian gas chromatography spectrometers being made for the cannabis testing market (testing cannabis for active ingredient %s)
I even saw someone is selling a mobile setup made to fit inside a pelican case and it has computing built into it, although the software is made specifically for cannabis testing market
@@adaroben1104 lol why would you want one?
I run a furniture store. We have some "gaming" desks that have Peltier coolers in them. The amount of energy to keep one drink cool, not cold, cool is insane. It would be cheaper over less than a year to put an actual fridge in the damn thing.
Man I love gaming, but a lot of that gaming hardware is just cringeworthy xD
@@termitreter6545almost everything marketed as "gaming" sucks. Including chairs.
@@termitreter6545 I buy almost nothing gaming related- office chair gamers unite!
To be fair, it doesn't need to move much energy, since the drink is straight out of the fridge when placed on the Peltier cooler, so the Peltier cooler only needs to keep it from becoming not cool for 5 hours or so. Also, not everyone wants a mini-fridge under their desk taking up a ton of space and being a future repair liability. Even if they design a micro-fridge slightly larger than the cupholder, the repair liability and the risk of pump oil spillage are still there. So, I'd gladly take that "gaming" desk off your hands.
@@termitreter6545 Yeah. There's some gaming hardware that makes sense (gaming mice, gaming GPUs, etc.), but there's also a lot of stuff that's just pure marketing
After watching your video, I became interested in the blue fridge and wanted to buy one now.
You just missed the whole point of the video
@@imaginoss2468 thats the joke
One application where Peltiers are great is cooling mobile electronics, like the sensors in high performance digital cameras. When recording at 4k and higher resolutions they generate a TON of heat, and a Peltier can help move that out into the air. Not only does this prevent the camera from shutting down, but can actually increase image quality.
GoPro should include this into their terrible cameras, which constantly overheat and shut down while filming. They are such a crap product as they currently are.
We use these to not only cool but to provide temperature stability to ShortWave InfraRed (SWIR) imaging sensors. Even if it has cooling limitations, you can have discrete temperature set points around which to set calibrations.
@@hyperturbotechnomike it will discharge gopro battery in few minutes
@@hyperturbotechnomike it has terrible efficiency, in gopro it will discharge battery in few minutes
We used to use them stacked to cool klystrons in radar systems back in the 80s. I believe things have moved on somewhat
The speed and reversibility advantages of peltier are pretty helpful in lab settings. When you need small amounts heated and cooled quickly and precisely, Peltier is your friend.
I was wondering what 'real' uses there are. Thanks. 😊
I guess Peltier can be a heat element with more than 100% efficiency.
qPCR is one use. Repeated heat cycles to specific temperatures and cool cycles to halt reactions.
@@user-vo3st8kx7s Depending on the application, not really more than 100% efficient because the heat still has to come from somewhere. You wouldn't be able to, for example, heat a room with peltiers with over 100% efficiency unless you were sourcing the heat from outside like an actual heat pump, which wouldn't even be worth doing with peltiers because they are so inefficient that the ROI on such a system would be terrible.
Buy cheap. Get cheap. False marketing aside I would like to see a comparably priced.
Not going to beat physics. But come on. Don't attack the tech which is useful.
So I fell asleep last night and RUclips decided this video was going to auto play. I ended up dreaming I was in some fucked up grocery store in the fridge and freezer aisles as some mad - and slightly camp - man goes off on one about the state of the storage of the products.
It was something else 😂
Do not mix RUclips and Pinkie's special cupcakes.
Did you work in a grocery store by any chance?
I watched it while high. What a trip.
A great application of peltier modules is on off-grid stove fans. You put them on your wood stove or other heat source and the built in module will create enough energy to power the fan turning it at a moderate speed which helps spread heat from the stove around the room much more efficiently.
32 minutes about thermoelectric cooling?
We eatin' good tonight.
just don't get food poisoning
hopefully whatever you are eating is not being cooled by thermoelectric "cooler"
Half hour on thermoelectric cooling is great and all, but it's got nothing on 6 and a half hours on North Korea
how'd you get out the cage! get back to making 10 hour videos on the media produced by parisian arthouse movements or something
Loved the NK media vid! Happy to see we enjoy the same content lol
I bought one of those because I didn't want to have to use the shared fridge in the office in a place where I worked, it was not intended to do anything more than just keep the lunch that I'd already packed cool for a while.
I think I would have done just as well by getting a portable cooler and chucking a couple ice bricks in each morning. That's what I've been doing now that I have delivery work and honestly it is the same if not cooler by lunch time.
Coolers have stood the test of time for a good reason. Ice takes a good bit of energy to change phases. 1 pound of ice will absorb ~150,000 joules from its surroundings by the time it's completely melted to water. Ice is cheap, and with good enough insulation, it can last for shockingly long amounts of time.
@@whatbroicanhave50character35 cheap, AND you can literally make it at home.
Basically a thermal energy battery, negative polarity one at that.
Yeah, a cooler and a re useable ice pack is far better.
The only thing I liked about the peltier coolers was the "hot" feature, so if I felt like warming up a lunch I could turn it to hot a few hours before I planned to eat.
Was kind of a treat in winter to reheat leftovers in a delivery van.
The do have coolers with compressor cooling too.
@@chaos.cornerYes, I have one with a compressor and it's awesome!
The "I've got a giant american fridge" thing legitmately jump scared me
I would have expected Alec to keep his food cool by storing it in some underground cellar.
That part was funniest thing I have ever saw on this channel!
@@kyx5631he tried but HOA wouldn't allow it
Even worse when you are napping listening to this video (I didn't sleep well last night).
14:28 For anyone that wants to watch this beauty again
i adore your subtitle-work, especially in the blooper-reels. you go just that little extra mile to make it *that* much funnier
Got one as a present when I was a teenager, you know, for all those Call of Duty and FIFA game nights with the boys where an unreasonable amount of energy drinks was consumed.
The thing with it was, the drinks were never cold, it made a lot of noise, and as a teenager (not sure if id still be able to hear it) I could hear a constant high pitched frequency, so i had to turn it off at night. good times
The concept of having an object you weren't entirely certain was terrible even though it did nothing correctly and actually created completely new and separate problems but used it anyway regardless is such a strangely nostalgic feeling that I feel there has to be some heinously long, specific word for it in German or something
Good times😂
shitty high frequency harmonic in the power supply for sure
@@WC3fanatic997 The german word you're looking for is "Scheißteil"
Honestly, they just kind of seem absurd to me. The most annoying part about fridges is having to stock them. At least with a proper mini-fridge, they can hold enough drinks you don't have to stock them too often.
The "how many cans of LaCroix it can hold" literally burned my old corporate heart. Oh the number of times I heard "we'll provide drinks", oh my god it was always LaCroix. For those that don't know the flavor is like it met a strawberry's cousin once in college.
LaCroix is for people who value looking trendy more than taste. LaCroix is a fashion trend. Not a beverage.
Yeah it's flavored sparkling water, what'd you expect? Pepsi??
@@SirJefferyRoss Perrier is also. And it's delicious. It doesn't taste like they forgot to clean their equipment. I expect it to not taste like I licked an alka-seltzer tablet.
@@SirJefferyRossI dunno, maybe some FLAVOR?! 😂
I've always said they must just whisper the flavor names over the vats of sparkling water.
15:04 I have never seen Alec so unhinged. And I love it. We need to make this into a sound bite.
I could feel the Tim Robinson creep through there for a bit.
I liked learning that cool volumes are measured in liters and very cold volumes are measured in litres.
The delivery reminded me of Daniel Thrasher 😂
Hahah 😂😂😂 100%
Unhinged or not, I don't think there's any guy on this earth who's more adorable than Alec is... ❤🔥
I used a 12v Peltier cooler, for years, when I drove a truck in the 2000s. Had it in between the front seats, so I could keep snacks and drinks cold and within reach.
Yeah, they weren't very good at keeping things cold and had to be constantly checked, to make sure the vent wasn't blocked. It did beat having to buy ice to keep in a smaller cooler, for this specific application.
12v car fridge with a compressor. Its a life changer
Your dedication to refrigeration is astonishing, in the best way, brovo sir, this is one of the many reasons I love your videos!
My aunt had one of those that came with her Subaru, it was basically large enough to hold a 30 pack of beer cans and a small bag of ice. She used it for shopping, since she lived an hour from the supermarket she would use it to put meat in for the ride home.
She started having battery and charging issues early on with that car (an 05 Outback). After they replaced several alternators and torn the dash and engine harness apart several times she brought the car to me here. To make a long story short, that cooler was killing the battery, and alternator.
The car had full time live cigar sockets, and thus that thing was on all the time it was plugged in. There was no switch on the cooler. You simply reversed the plug to keep things hot or cold depending on polarity.
It never got cold enough for drinks, but was cool to the touch. I never checked the temp but it wasn't very cold.
I removed it from the car, removed all the thermal cooling parts, filled the hole in the side with spray foam with plastic on both sides and told her to just use it as a cooler.
When I tore it apart, I could see where the fan motor had been wet. They put the fan motor at nearly the lowest point of the box, meaning that any leakage, condensation, or melting would run right through the motor. It was made by Igloo, with the Subaru Outback decals on the outside. That car is long gone, it wasn't much better than the cooler that came with it but I still have the cooler that i converted and after filling the lid with foam, and the elimination of the electrical parts, it makes a great little cooler for my lunch or drinks on the boat.
For the $199 the thing cost new as an option, it was a total load of crap. I've never seen one of those that worked worth a dam.
In the US Army, they have these large medical fridges they deploy in field hospitals. The cooling chamber is incredibly well insulated, and holds a little more than the blue fridge. It has 4 peltier devices on each corner, which are each attached to their own *MASSIVE* heat sinks. Seriously, these boxes are 1/6 cool chamber, 1/6 insulation, and 4/6 heatsinks and frame!
They worked pretty well, but they drew a ton of current.
I can see how they would be more useful in a combat zone than a regular fridge.
Do they use fans ?
Also are the heatsinks filled with anything to make them work like heatpipes or are they just metal ?
I posted a long comment about a working peltier fridge that I got to fix a few years ago and it doesn't have any fan but its heatsink contains isobutane.
And it works quite well without making any noise.
@psirvent8 They did not have fans, and were not filled with anything. They radiated heat like crazy, the metal frame (which didn't touch the heat sinks) was always uncomfortably warm to the touch!
@@Sirgeshko Thank's !
No fan makes sense in a combat zone I suppose, as to not make any noise.
I'd imagine they exist almost entirely because compressors and violent vibrations don't go well together
@@noobulon4334 I imagine they exist because military-spec actually stands for "cheapest manufacturing for the performance"
the way I had heat pumps explained to me was that you're basically dipping a sponge in a bucket, pulling it out, squeezing it, and not letting it expand until it's back in the bucket. the sponge (refrigerant) moves the water (thermal energy) out of the bucket (fridge), and squeezing (compressing) dumps the water on the ground (in the air).
Nice explanation.
and if you can grasp that concept, then the next step to understanding why steam-power is a dead end, except in certain applications, is that you have to MAKE the sponge first... ie, by BOILING water to MAKE steam. a steam engine only gets to use the heat and pressure contained in the STEAM... not the energy required to simply boil the water. which amounts to about 4/5ths of the total energy input... completely unrecoverable.
"so why do we use it in power stations"?
because it can "transmit" a large amount of energy without requiring excessively high pressures or temperatures... its also non-toxic. when you get to the scale of multiple M-Watts, that means the machines can be relatively small and compact...
@@paradiselost9946 except you omit to mention the role/potential role of steam in preheating the boiler water. Obviously that's going to depend on whether the steam device has a pre-heater.... but the concept is great, and reduces energy loss hugely.
Suggesting that the energy required to make the steam is completely unrecoverable is completely bollocks....
That's a really cool analogy, thank you for sharing it!
@@annpeerkat2020 you overlook the nature of heat flow.
you cool the steam to 50C in the condenser... and a condenser it an absolute necessity on a steam turbine as the majority of work performed by the steam is at this "below atmospheric" stage... below 100C.
you cannot preheat the feed water above 50C, either, on average, with a condenser. can heat it higher with the heat going up the chimney if its coal or gas fired, but not from the condenser. and as both approach that temperature, less and less heat is transferred.
and the condenser still has to radiate a certain amount of heat to the atmosphere, otherwise... it stops condensing.
the closer you can get to a hard vacuum, the more power you can extract. unfortunately reality gets in the way and prevents one from achieving such low pressures. 29 inches is considered the limit of practicality.
and only so much feed water can be preheated. as the boiler only requires so much feed water. theres no point heating more than the boiler can consume. and then the water or condensate emerging from the condenser is already at that 50C region... and is the same amount of water the boiler requires, minus losses due to leakage... theres no gain in using the condenser to preheat feed water AT ALL.
if you have the advantage of locating it in a subzero climate, all year round, sure, you can extract more, as you can achieve far lower temperatures in the condenser, with subsequently higher vacuums, but no matter what you do, the vast portion of thermal energy in the fuel goes to waste. regardless of what wikipedia leads you to believe when they claim "45% efficiency" or better. they choose to neglect various rather important factors to make things sound far better than they actually are. its called "cherry picking".
This channel has become one of my favorites to pass the time while learning a thing or two about stuff I didn't think I needed to. I like the bloopers at the end, really shows how many takes a video can have.
Not only are Peltier elements reversible in that if you reverse the voltage you can heat opposite sides, it's fully reversible in that if you have a temperature differential you can get voltage out of it! I've seen it be used for a cast-iron fireplace fan made to blow the hot air out into the room once it's hot
THAT'S how those fans I see sitting on the homesteaders stoves on youtube work. I knew it was the heat somehow, didn't know they had a peltier in them.
@piquat1 Those little homestead stove fans are probably Stirling engines, actually. They have more moving parts, but use zero electronics.
nah my boss has one, they're Peltier devices for sure. It's a two piece heatsink with one sandwiched between. The upper section dissipates sufficient heat for it to run a small DC motor
I have those fans, and they do use a Peltier device
On paper, yes. But in the real world, to get any decent amount of power you need to get hot side up to a pretty high temperature - at least 200c. But the device is held together by solder.... which melts at that temperature. So it just falls apart. You can find ones made for generating electricity, made with high-temperature solder, but they are harder to find and cost more. Those are the ones you see on those stovetop fans.
Hey Alec. I started a career in HVAC engineering because of how much I enjoy your channel. Today I’m an energy engineer for a large company, getting to spend every day improving hvac systems. I must say thank you, for making these somewhat abstract concepts you cover clearer than any textbook has. Keep at it
That's amazing! Good on you Mate. ❤
As a retired HVAC & R technician I really enjoyed this video. I used a thermoelectric cooler/heater in my service van. The cost to me was zero because it ran on 12 volts. The company I worked for paid for the fuel so any extra draw on the alternator and drag on the engine needed to run that thing didn’t amount to much and didn’t cost me anything. The cooler/heater had a switch to make it a hot box so I could heat my lunch in it instead of cooling a drink. I found later that it was more efficient to wrap my lunch in aluminum foil and keep it on the manifold of the engine that worked much better. I had a service call once on a thermoelectric wine cooler sold by the company I worked for. The wine cooler was meant for a temp around 60 degrees. This new unit was unable to do that because the customer had it built into to his bar but he left a generous small vent hole in the back.
A metal toolbox under the hood can make a handy pie warmer... (A 12V element and thermostat, could make it perfectly food safe - for Alex's concerns..). One could go all fancy with a heater core...
I've even seen people cook food on long road trips using that method.
Yup they are great for work, especially if you're a tech driving around. I work for Motorola, so I travel like 300 miles to my jobsite. My unit is AC or DC powered. So I can keep my drinks cold in the truck, then take the fridge out at the job site and plug it in. He doesn't understand what a nice luxury it is to have a cold drink and a sandwich when you're out in the middle of nowhere on a blistering hot day!
if you have a commercial alternator yes, but in a small car the 10-15amps can heat up the alternator quite a bit leading to premature failures.
@@thedavesofourlives1 Tiny compared to what the A/C uses, plus a little portable cooler would be more like 4-5A. (As to the case where you're blasting the A/C on max and already using a lot of power, couldn't you run a bit of ducting from the vent to the open box and get faster cooling without any extra power draw?)
Basically a thermocouple in reverse. I looked into designing a "cold plate" around the Peltier junction. A nifty notion, but I determined that the heat generated by the process overshadowed any useful cooling effect.
So much for my great idea. I could have left out the Peltier device and added a heating element and don a hotplate just fine ... AND USED LESS ENERGY!
Side note: my father in law bought one of these Peltier junction cooler for my mother in law to keep her insulin in. The version was the 12V Travel Cooler version, and never worked, and ran down the car battery when they were parked.
Carnot cycle fridges are a much better solution, as you showed.
Nifty device, though, and have a (very narrow) truly practical applications, such as cooling something in tight places. And the Peltier junctions can be stacked (with in limits).
You're right about the need to let a refrigerator with a compressor stand for a few hours after being moved. When I worked for a UK white goods dealer in the 1970s, the majority of our replacement fridge sales were to people who had just moved house and switched the unit on as soon as it was in its new position. Often this was because the electrical socket was positioned behind the unit and they didn't want it standing in the middle of their kitchen.
They weren't smart enough to turn the thermostat to off ?
@@Kris_M Not all Fridges have that setting. I have a cheap one that doesn't and worked at place that sold fridge.
So, it worked. They didn't had them standing in the middle of the kitchen, after all 🤣
You can move them, but they should stay upright as much as possible. Briefly tipping it over should be fine. Transporting sideways in a vehicle for 30 mins should get some time to let the oil settle back.
If you start it up though, a lot of the oil will get pushed back to the compressor, but it will coat the lines on the way there and take a bit to get returned. This would be worse on the passive ones with the large backside coil compared to the fan cooled ones most are today.
Anything using a compressor with oil should stand for a coupleo fhours after being moved/bounced.
Please don't ever stop including the "bloopers" at the end of your videos. The main content of the video is great, but then the bloopers at the end are the awesome cherry on top.
And the subtitles at the very very end too...
"skibidi heat pump"
@@re57k skibidi beep beep beep beep (open fridge warning sound) yes yes
6:35 - For my fellow Metric friends:
60°F = 15.6°C
48°F = 8.9°C
46°F = 7.8°C
Thank you! 🙏
30°F difference are ~16.7C°
Wanted to add that as I was wondering how much it can cool.
Ah, actual useful numbers
@@MrMoerli in Italy were I live we can easily reach 30-35 °C for most of the day during the summer. So in that situation they would at best cool the drinks to around 15-20°C 😂
Thanks
I think the main draw of a fridge like Mr. Blue Toy over there is honestly the tiny size. You can literally have it just sit on your desk without it causing any issues or getting in the way and that's extremely convenient. I doubt you could fit a compressor that small into a fridge, and even if you could it's efficiency and noise probably suffer a lot. So I do think a very well insulated, temprature sensing little thermoelectic fridge has a place, it would probably cost quite a lot more to make a decent one, and it would still cost quite a lot to run but if the insulation was good enough it'd surely be at least acceptable, even though it's never going to be very efficient
Yes, this is why I have one. I have some skincare products that tend to oxidize before I finish the bottle. I just need them to be kept a bit cooler on my vanity without taking up much space, and it works perfectly for that.
@brittneyyyann You will spend so much money on electricity that you could buy new skincare products with it. And why not just pot them in a regular fridge?
I know this is a "bash Peltier cooling" moment, but I just want to say how absolutely crazy it is that those little things cool at all! In the lab I work at, we have a couple very-sensitive spectrometers, and the way they are so sensitive is by cooling the CCD cameras (less heat = less noise). For one system, there is a dewar that needs to be filled with liquid nitrogen in order to get it cold. The other, just a little Peltier cooler. And it is JUST AS EFFECTIVE! That little shit can get down to LN2 temps, it only takes a few minutes, AND there's no need for external coolant. It amazed me the first time I saw it work lol
This is the main use for peltier cooling I'm familiar with. Dedicated astrophotography cameras have them to combat read noise.
I love how you consider valid criticism "bashing" because you have absolutely *ZERO* context whatsoever for what word means.
I wonder what the power draw on that stack would be (edit: also that's really cool, I just think it'd a whole lotta watts)
@@tim3172 it's only valid for the marketed mainstream use case, not the actual technology
We use them in an asphalt lab to cool air and thus draw moisture from a vacuum (pump saver) and I agree it works very very well.
For anyone else confused by the big "C-PENTANE" label on the back of his black fridge:
That's not the refrigerant, it's the blowing agent used to make the insulation foam (cyclopentane). The refrigerant is listed on another label as R600a (isobutane)
Thanks for the info. My organic chemistry brain was having a fit over it.
Maybe they're doing this now after they were caught several years ago manuacturing shittons of CFC11 in Shandong province in flagrant violation of the Montreal protocol?
Thanks for this comment! I have a chest freezer that uses cyclopentane as the refrigerant, saw the C-Pentane label, but kept hearing isobutane. Later, I saw the R600a and began to think I was seeing two different units. But that would be uncharacteristic for Alec. I was left in confusion until i found your comment. Thanks again!
Btw. Is that another America/Europe difference? I've never heard of R600a as a refrigerant before. Fridges here use R290 (propane).
I graduated this spring with a bachelors degree in microbio and a minor in chemistry and you finally helped me understand how fridges work.
Having built scientific instruments using Peltier coolers, I found that the manufacturer's 'power rating' was calculated as the power level at which the efficiency dropped to zero, i.e. where the self-heating was equal to the cooling effect. However to run at maximum efficiency (COP) they had to be run at under 5% of the rated power. So to do anything useful you need a lot of elements, and a huge fan-assisted heat-sink, which ends up expensive. The standard '100W' 50mm elements rated for 24V need to run on about 4V (depending on temperature difference) to get a COP more than 1. So to make a car fridge run on 12V you need a minimum of three '24V' elements in series.
That's what I thought...
The best use case scenario for peltiers is in scientific or electronic equipment for cooling laser diodes, thermally stabilizing laser crystals, and reaching ultra low temps by stacking progressively smaller chips in a cascade arrangement.
...like the way the pyramids are stacked?
thermocyclers in molecular biology also use these things and they're very effective in that context. the thermal mass it needs to cool is pretty minimal (even the larger units might only have to cool 10-20 mLs total) and it's in an insulated space, so it can achieve pretty precise temperatures with controllable temperature profiles.
that said, people abuse the heck out of them. they'll do things like leave a near-freezing hold at the end of their programs for tasks that REALLY don't need to be kept cold, and then let it sit on that for hours.
They're pretty useful for isothermal calorimetry titration too, which is absolutely the slickest and most elegant method of determining enzyme kinetics.
Deep space astrophotography cameras also utilize peltier coolers to bring their CMOS sensors down between -10C and -20C.
@@timK0WTB Yes, another good example, cooling sensors to reduce noise. Basically, any application where you have to cool a very small mass, and the peltier has the versatility to achieve a wide range of temperatures.
I've gotta say this, I appreciate that you put the blooper reel at the end of each of these. It has made it much easier for me to show to my younger relatives to prove to them that you don't have to get things perfect on the first try to become popular on RUclips. That they shouldn't feel bad about having to retry things to get it how they want it.
This video made me realize that my parents own a cooling box for their car with a Peltier system in it, which is exactly the application you described. It is well isolated and does have the fan and heat sink on top of the box.
it is useful to be able to hook it up to the car and just keep things cool for longer than they would normally be in a cooling box but yeah, i wouldn't use that as an actual fridge.
The way he becomes increasingly angrier with the mini fridge 😄
Counterpoint: I don't pay the electricity at the office
Depending on brand you can change the fan out for a quieter one from any pc store.
@@Bortnmyeah you’re right, i’m gonna go buy one of these.
Exactly 😅
My dad's old camper van has a different kind of fridge that I'd never heard of before: an absorption refrigerator! It has the benefit of having no moving parts, but (as my dad found out) they kick out a lot more heat than a vapor-compression refrigerator. He dramatically improved the performance of his one by mounting a PC fan so that it forces some airflow over the radiator at the back.
I'd love to see a video on those. There's some you can use on gas, 12V and 230V, all just heating the refrigerant in different ways.
I hadn't heard about that. I do know that if you want to cool a few cans, you can just set them on the propane cylinder and harvest some of the cooling when that phase change freezes the outside.
As I understand they are about as efficient as using the same amount of propane to run a generator to power a compressor fridge. I was looking at one that if run on electricity took 300 watts. However they seem to be able to withstand long periods of disuse, so they might be worth it at your standard house as an emergency spare.
@@thomaswilliams2273 There were some attempts at gas powered air conditioning which ran into the same issue, plus the ammonia is a major safety concern if it leaked.
Yup, super common, every old school RV has one. Also the plot of the movie mosquito coast with Harrison Ford.
Fascinating! I use a neck fan with cooling plates and for some reason I thought the plates were cooled by the air going past them on the inside. I completely skipped over the fact that turning the plates on is a separate setting, AND the fact that they can be used for heat if so desired.
It's absolutely fantastic, but the battery life is pretty short if you're using the cooling plates. It takes a long time to recharge too. Makes sense now that I know about Peltier elements!
Probably the best channel on RUclips. It fills the niche of learning how things work without doing the research myself, being entertained by this particular sense of humor, and vicariously experiencing the coziness of Midwest values. Excellent work!
I really like this channel, too, but for me the best channel on RUclips is Project Farm for information I really need about the stuff I use.
@@xbubblehead We nerds all seem to hang out in the same corners of RUclips xD
"fridge guy shits on small ""fridge"" for thirty minutes"
*metaphorically
more like heat pump guy actually
🤣👍
@@timewave02012 1 Man 1 Fridge
You must be new to this channel, I watch him all the time and that's basically what I said in my head when I saw the video pop up in my notifications, that's why I love this channel I'm nerdy and particularly fascinated by how things work and the science and engineering behind things, and nobody else understands. When I first discovered this channel I was binging later than I should and was tired the next day and ESPECIALLY by the time I got off work, my girlfriend was like "why are you so tired? Couldn't sleep?" I said I found a new channel I like. She was like oh about what? I said "you wouldn't like it but we're getting a sunbeam toaster." Of course she asked about it but when I informed her I watched his 6 part series about the sunbeam toaster, so like 6 hours about this particular toaster, she just didn't understand. Nobody does.
The only practical (and this word is carrying a lot of weight) use i've found so far for Peltier plates is as cooling for my Full-body future soldier armor LARP suit. It is water-cooled using a miniature immersion water pump in a camelback filled with water and some ice initially. The immersion pump feeds a 10m long 5mm inner diameter aquarium tube that goes on a wild ride up and down the inside of my chest piece to help cool me down and then the water comes back to the camelback (yes i technically drink my coolant; yes i clean it thoroughly after each use). After about two hours the water reaches more or less room temperature. I then have two manual switches, one to turn on the cooling fans on the backpack and the second to power up the Peltier plate. The fans are on aluminium heat-sinks that are on the aluminium casing in which i put my camelback. The two .25A fans are good enough if it's bellow 15C outside, otherwise the water will get warmer and warmer over time. That's when i turn the Peltier plate on, only then, maybe after 5 hours of continuously running around or physical activity.
People that do LARP will tell you, you usually get some time to cool off between hectic running around periods so it's really a last resort or, if it's really warm outside, like 25C+. Mind you this feels hot because i'm wearing a full-body armor made from EVA foam sandwiched in thermoplastic, with a closed helmet, over an overall and hauling around this 10 kilos of gear, 3 kilos of water, 5 kilos of batteries and my 1m90 125 kilos self. And when i reach that point... it's not that great. Sure it makes a difference, a big one, but this is bumping my power consumption from about 3 A/h with the fans in the helmet and cooling running along the pump to a whopping 50 A/h with the Peltier on. Mind you i'm carrying a large 20 A/h 12v battery in my backpack, the single heaviest item in fact, and, while yes i can swap the battery and have two for the exact purpose of keeping one on charge, i'm going from about 8 hours of autonomy to about 20 minutes (this battery looses efficiency on high drain).
So yeah, besides being basically a novelty that is kind of cool-if-a-bit-crappy, the only time i actually got some real use of it was when i almost got a serious heatstroke during a heat wave a few years back.
A small technical correction about heat pumps: You mention at 21:30 that they are better than running an electric heating element if the COP is greater than 1. It's actually better than that: Most of the energy going into running the heat pump is also rejected out the hot side, which means that they're better than running an electric heating element so long as the COP is greater than 0. Even a Peltier device, as bad as it is, will be more efficient than a heating element at heating things.
Fundamentally I would agree the statement. I couldn't help but that think practically that a Pelteir device would poorer at heating than a element because the distance between the cooling and heat side is so close with no insulation it would have significant losses. In addition I would think that the heat generated by the device isn't directional, further reduce its efficiency as it has to manage that additional heat as well. This is just conjecture so I wouldn't disagree with a explanation of why my reasoning could be wrong.
If we use the usual definition CoP of a heat pump in heating mode as energy output (Q) divided by work (W), then a heat pump that pushes all the energy used to do work into the output with 100% efficiency actually looks like this: CoP = Q/W = (X+W)/W. Where Q is the sum of the energy moved and the waste heat from doing the work, and X is the energy moved by itself. In fact heat pumps tend to have a higher heating CoP than cooling for the reason you state (the additive effect of using waste heat in addition to the heat moved boosts the CoP).
An electric heater just emits whatever power is provided as heat, so CoP is W/W, or 1.
As far as the Peltier, in principle the CoP can exceed 1, but that depends on how large your delta T is, and where you are operating compared to maximum current. It’s easy to undersize these elements, or overdrive them trying to deal with large temperature gradients and wind up with a CoP under 1.
I presume this is running with the idea that you're going to also use the Cold side for something to take advantage of the listed efficiency?
@@williamnixon3994 No, it is saying that at a COP of 0, you only get the waste heat and no heat is moved from the outside. But as you want to heat your home anyway, that waste heat is useful for you. And as that waste heat is the exact same amount you would get from a resistive heater...
PS: This assumes that the waste heat goes into the house. If the heatpump has its motor outside, it may very well escape into the environment and be lost. For a heatpump that can operate as an AC, that's not too unlikely.
@@HenryLoenwind CoP is only zero if *no useful work* is done. CoP doesn’t care how the energy enters (heating) or leaves (cooling) the system, just how much energy enters or leaves.
Scavenging waste heat is still bringing energy into the system, and it counts. Someone talking about a real world heating device having a CoP of zero is misunderstanding something.
This explains SO much omg. My parenta got me one of the little can fridges and it worked for a bit before just dying completely LOL now its storage for trinkets
Power supply probably crapped out.
Your absolute disdain and thorough destruction of the crappy little fridge's reputation is a sight to behold. Thank you for your service.
Lol yes! It’s stronger than the disdain some of us Canadians feel when Americans pronounce French. (Or how Parisians regard French Canadian for that matter 🏴☠️) That room ain’t a foy-"yurr" but a foy-"yay!" La Croix has nothing to do with the Croydon Facelift, but more in common with the Italian way to say "the water" (though perhaps not Italian Americans!)
I totally agree with the spirit of your video.
After 20 years I'm on my second one (I think both Colmans). Did have to replace a plug in one. The old 12v "cigar lighter" in a vehicle is the absolute dumbest vestige of the past. 90% travel use 10% fridge expansion for, you know, sheltering hurricane evacuees.
Pro Tip: take your pillows with you. Put pillows, blanket or jackets around the cooler (keep plenty of space for fan ventilation)
If you've gotta keep something at a quite specific temperature, the solid state reversible peltier is perfection.
It's uniquely suited to keeping things precisely tepid, not getting too big for its britches and trying to be a fridge.
I'm sure some scientist out there is using these things in their proper application. (Bulky compressors with brute force bang-bang relay operation will swing temps, but you can PID tune these piddly little TECs)
Thermo-electric Dehumidifiers!
They are, in fact, being used to cool some spectrometer detectors, since they aren't generating a lot of watts of heat that need to be transported away, but do need to be kept very cold - and the cold side of a Peltier element can get very cold because you aren't limited by the refrigerant's boiling temperature.
Bang-bang relay make arcy-sparky fun times. Magic square not fun times. Don't want.
Yup, peltiers are the way to go to stabilise temperature of lab laser diodes. Small size, bidirectionality and ease of control circuit are unbeatable, especially in cases of low power dissipated in the diode itself and wanting to keep the temperature just a bit higher than ambient. Peltiers scale very well into region of low power temperature control.
Seems to be a common problem with a lot of modern things, there is a small upfront fee to entice you but you'll be paying more in the long run. Especially with the proliferation of subscription, pay monthly and finance, even things like fast fashion.
Welcome to the Shitthropocene.
It goes down to the very reason you could remove the battery from your phone 10+ years ago but can't now.. there is NO valid reason for it other than $$
One actual use for one of these. A car fridge. The proper rerigerator unit needs an inverter and a flat surface and enough space. A mini fridge will not fit through the door of most sedans. Hernia material. Then there is the matter of the inverter to run it.
My MobiCool unit provides about a 40F differential which works just fine with a few freezer blocks. Keeps the milk and cheese from going bad over the three hour journey from the grocer to the house. Not much space but works pretty well until the interior of the car reaches more than 80F. Would never dream of using it in any other context. I put a thermostat control on the unit, like the temp readout in your video, so on a really cold day it will not freeze the lettuce!
Love your videos. Keep up the great work.
Genuine question, where do you live that the grocer is 3 hours away?
@@anna-fleurfarnsworth104 Ahhh! You got me!
I live on an island with a ferry service. The schedule is really just a suggestion in the summer , with all the tourists trying to get on and off the Islands around here. So departure times go out the window.
I buy milk, eggs, cream, eggs, meats and they are taken out to the car just before leaving the supermarket. Add in ten minutes to the terminal, with a half hour advance check in time, and then begins the wait. Sometimes up to an hour. Then the sailing back to the Island for another hour and a half, with another ten minutes to get the stuff in the fridge, and you get the picture.
Could use a big chiller chest with lots of ice, but then you need the ice, yes? Simpler to use the MobiCool and plug it in. A couple of ice thingies and it is done. Creates about a 40 F differential.
Still inferior to an Igloo cooler and going to the gas station for ice and drinks...
We did try using a peltier to build a cooling box for vegetables to survive at an overheating dorm and now I know why it didn't work! The tech still works well as a generator in my portable wood stove...
Yeah I run my stove fan with one.
I was talking with my friends just today about how I save technology connections videos for when I'm having a particularly bad day. Lo and behold there was an upload and I'm having a particularly bad day. So thanks for cheering me up :)
please notice me
Hope tomorrow's even better!
I was a trucker and used an insulated top loading cooler with a Peltier element as a supplement to the miniscule drawer fridge in my tractor for easier access to beverages and to free up room in the actual fridge for temperature sensitive items. The larger cooler Peltier units are great for long road trips since residential refrigerators cant take the shaking and RV fridges need to be solidly installed.
One cool use of Peltiers is in PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) machines we have in the lab. The PCR process involves amplifying DNA by repeatedly heating and cooling it to copy the genetic material. One of the key advantages of Peltiers in PCR machines is that they can precisely heat and cool the samples to the exact temperature required for each step (within something like 0.1°C or so) - it's not about efficiency here, since samples are tiny, but rather the precision and reliability they offer.
Ahh yes pcr tests the super usable and accurate science we must trust
@@andreahighsides7756are you a COVID conspiracy theorist or something? PCR isn't a COVID thing it's a powerful method of quickly replicating tiny amounts of DNA to make a larger sample. PCR is very reliable, the problems with COVID RT-PCR tests must be either the reverse transcription process or the method they use to analyse the amplified sample after PCR. I'd imagine it's the reverse transcription because any traces or errors in the sample will also be amplified by PCR.
But it's wild that you know about PCR but only in the context of COVID tests.
@@andreahighsides7756 I mean, yes? It's a common lab technique used for many different things, including genetic analysis and forensics.
@@andreahighsides7756ah yes, failing highschool biology / science (or you are just old enough that PCR wasn’t invented/well known when you were in highschool and you couldn’t bother looking into it beyond political headlines in 2020)
@@palmberry5576 what does the inventor of the PCR test say about its recent usage
Just FYI, Peltier coolers CAN get COP close to 3, if you carefully control the current *AND* the temperature drop. This would require a cascade of several peltier modules in series, depending on the total temperature drop you're trying to accomplish. I designed a system to use peltier modules for dehumidification (welcome to Florida), because I wanted to use something quieter than a typical dehumidifier. In order to keep the modules operating in their peak efficiency, and match the moisture extraction of a 30pt/day dehumidifier... was going to cost me over $1k in JUST the modules. Power consumption would have been comparable, as would cooling capacity.
These modules aren't bad... they're just... not used correctly, and horrendously expensive *TO* use correctly.
Yeah, you need the right kind of Peltier, you need stack them and you need to use the right thermal interface materials and good heat sinks on both sides. But at that point, you're talking like $200 just for the bill of materials plus like another $200 each for engineering cost and margin.
@@hammerth1421 For the little minifridge? I could see that, easily.
I've found peltier powered electrical cabinet dehumidifiers in industrial machine tools.
I have modded an electric cooler by stacking a second Peltier on top of the existing one and running both at reduced power. Ended up using 20-25W which was comparable to a compressor fridge of the same size, even had to add a small heater and thermostat to stop it from freezing when the room was cold. The compressor still wins if you want the capability to go below freezing, however.
Dehumidifiers are so quiet nowadays. Mine literally about the same as my laptop it's very quiet you can't hear the compressor at all.
"Inefficiently smooth jazz" is a beautiful touch in the captions.
agreed, I turn on the captions at the end of each of his video to see how he describes the jazz that time
If you'd have bet me that I would watch a full video on refrigerants tonight...I would have laughed. Turns out I would have lost that bet... and I also laughed! Well done sir, you have quite a gift.
To be honest, I believe your videos should be shown in schools. They are incredibly helpful, informative, and practical for our daily lives. Well done!
- its quite likely they are being used by some teachers, lord knows alec's videos are more interesting than tha crap videotapes I recall endureing! (maybe not an "official" part of the resources list) and home school is a thing now .
Unfortunately, that probably won't happen. The material is not on standardized tests and schools seem to overlook anything that will not improve scores, get teachers raises, and bring more status and money to the school system. Many schools have stopped requiring books to be read and instead focus on what questions about those books may be on the test.
@@mikemondano3624There are a good number of more specialised schools that may have an interest, and I can totally see my old science class putting one of these on on free days assuming they had a pre-lunch slot or a double class.
I was just thinking to myself, you know, before yt, this guy would have made an excellent physics teacher! 😊😂
@@markgado8782 His background is in science education.
I used one of those small desk coolers when I worked in a call center. We could not have a mini fridge at our desk and we could not just get up and go to the kitchen whenever we wanted, so I got a Coke branded one for my desk. I would bring in pre-coold cans from home and put them in there. IT was much better at maintaining lower temps than getting things cold, but it would work well enough for four hours, then I would refill it from the big fridge at lunch.
I have absolutely no idea why this got recommended to me but i am unable to stop watching now. Something about the voice, the cadence, the sass, and the information being so interesting I'm hooked.
Are you telling me there’s more butane in a 6 pack of lighters than in my fridge and I’ve been living in mortal terror of my fridge exploding like a firebomb for no reason?
Uhhhhh yes
You could probably still make your fridge explode, but you'd have to try really, really hard.
So you’re telling me its possible to make a fridge heat exchanger using 6 lighters?
it's still quite a lot actually, 56 g is about 22.6 liters in ambient pressure.
@@paradoxcorporated2906 I was thinking there was gallons of the stuff in the fridge. A few liters of gas is going to be a fwoosh not a boom.
I had this exact discussion with my colleague once and his response on "get an actual fridge, within a year or two it will be cheaper!" was "But I dont plan on using this for two years"🤯
Some Mindsets just make it impossible to argue.
Peak consumerism
Wait, you're telling me his whole style of "maintaining" refrigerators is to rotate every so often? And finds nothing wrong with that?
I love how after all is said and done, all these standard cooler replacements/portable fridges always end up not working nearly as effectively, but also end up costing significantly more than if you just used an insulated bag/cooler and fill it with ice.
They can't even reduce the items in them to an acceptable temperature, let alone keep them there. VS. A regular ice cooler that will get your items to near freezing within an hour or so and keep them that way for most of the day (depending on how hot it is/how often it's opened).
Thanks to your video I now like my little toy. It’s always on in my office. But now I know it’s costing my employer more money than a mini-fridge!
Glad to hear you saved big money at Menards.
Unbolting the compressor can make it run much quieter. Just avoid transporting the fridge with it unbolted, because it'll put a lot of stress on the copper tubes.
I live in a 250sq ft apartment with my mini fridge less than ten feet away from where I sleep. Since doing this trick, and adding some extra gel pads under the rubber grommets, I can almost sleep without earplugs.
😮If you could re-design a mini fridge, so that the peltier device wasn't trying to cool the entire internal area, just a smaller area with a fan to blow the cold air around, they might be more efficient.
For a long time, I was interested about the prospect of mere peltier module for cooling my drinks. But this video made me scrap that idea. Thanks for not making me waste my time.
I remember when Peltier coolers were a big deal back in the early oughts for ekeing out an extra 1-2C of cooling a CPU. You'd have to carve quite the divot into your heatsink to fit the thing between the CPU and the heatsink, the power draw was ridiculous, and again, it'd only drop your temps an extra celsius or two, but these were the days when if you wanted water cooling you had to kitbash together your own system using aquarium hardware so it was regarded as a "safer" mod to perform.
They do exist now too but with how high modern CPU power draw is, they are essentially useless except for when you only care about single core performance. Which is almost never.
The only thing stupider than using a Peltier module to cool your PC is using *actual water.* What could POSSIBLY go wrong???
Yes I underclock, how could you tell?
Anyone remember when Dell sold a high end PC with Peltier cooling, 2006 or so? I wouldn't be surprised if it used more power than a similar era dual CPU rack server, even though the rack servers of that era were particularly power hungry.
@@omegahaxors9-11 My fully custom 4770k/R9 290x loop says not much in the last 10 years it's been running. As in it's totally silent on 100% of the original hardware, 100% of the time.
@@pafnutiytheartist they are not useless because you can easily make 2 copper plates 4x4 inches and stick 4x400 watts TECs between, and then stick these sandwiched TECs on top of your i9-14900ks, along with a liter of vaseline and foam to prevent condensation. You will of course need a hefty PSU to run it, since each needs 25-30 amps, and probably a water loop with a car radiator to cool the hot side, plus you need to make the waterblock yourself. But it would certainly allow that CPU to run at its best.
This design has been used before. Phase change cooling would allow for colder temps and will run much more energy efficient.
honestly super grateful for this video, we just had a baby two weeks ago and were using a similar mini fridge to store breastmilk so we wouldn't have to go downstairs to feed the boy. he's been fine, but we're changing that up right away
Yeah, just get a traditional mini fridge.
I just drove by one for free.
@@volvo09 - or a wet nurse...
We used one of those coffee cup warmers next to a stack of clean soft cloths for cleaning the babies bottoms with warm water. Much more comfy for the little one.
Congratulations. I wish you much joy.
A warning, these fridges contain cancer causing materials. be safe. Good luck to you and the kid
@@EverDodd found the Californian!
About a decade ago, I found out about Peltier modules and thought they were so awesome, I'd make a "plate cooler" to cool the bottom of pots super quick.
It ended up being super power inefficient, needed huge finned coolers. I ended up taking out the PTE modules, butting the fins up to the cooling plate, then using a peristaltic pump to move water across the fins. It used significantly less power and was far better, all for an tiny increase in the height of the device.
Heat or cool "at will" is very cute. But to do it well, it takes time, resources and a heat pump.. (I was enamoured by the cold plates used to make Icecream / iced specialty foods. Sadly, to heat and cool - to extremes - with one device isn't quickly possible..
Why were you trying to cool the bottom of pots? You peaked my curiosity.
@@MrEazyE357 Cool it from cooking temperature to serving temperature more quickly. Those who have to prepare dinner after coming home from work (living single or partner also works) can certainly relate.
@@NiHaoMike64I can’t imagine anything being quicker or more convenient than just a dip in an ice bath in that scenario though. Maybe if your pot is super hot for some reason you’d have an issue with steam, but only if your pot doesn’t transfer heat well or you’ve boiled all the liquid out of whatever is in the pot.
@@BobbyHill26 That's if you have an ice bath ready. Simplest would probably just be a heatsink and fan.
I’m currently in school to be a mechanical engineer, and all of your fridge business really gets me going
At my work they banned personal mini fridges during Covid when few people were in the office for weeks at a time. I am 90% sure it’s because people leave food in them and if they break or the power goes out the frost build up melts and the water runs all over the floor which causes mold. They also often stank when opened unless the owners cleaned them and defrosted them regularly. When we were allowed fridges the majority of people left them behind when they left the job or didn’t dispose of them properly if they broke, leaving the company to deal with it. However we are allowed these electric TEG coolers at our desks. You can actually buy good ones that work way better, they still use way more power and are more expensive than a much larger mini-fridge.
Okay, challenge accepted. Now I want to make real, functional fridge of this size with the standard compressor system. I'm writing it down on "to-do" list. I love your passion about refrigeration, cheers!
...i think europeans thinking you called the red fridge a minifridge is very much down to your word choice.
if you "put it in the same category as minifridges", that makes it... a minifridge.
and if its "larger than your TYPICAL minifridge", that makes it... an atypical minifridge.
extremely easy to interpret your words that way.
Thank you I was looking for this comment
From a european perspective, the funny part is the red fridge is about the size we had as a family of 5. Surely bigger fridges are available, but that's pretty much the stadard you get in your average kitchen.
"In the same category as mini frifges" for insulation...
Yeah, I think the intent was to say it's not a minifridge when comparing it to "your typical minifridge" but I also interpreted that as meaning "this is a minifridge, just not a typical one". Implicative meaning is a tricky thing, where placing the terms together implies a relationship even when the direct semantic contents does not directly push that relationship.
Overly focusing on the direct semantic content, rather than the wider context of placement in the script, is very relatable (I used to do it all the time, 5-10 years ago) but I did find the "you jumped to conclusions!" line a bit annoying. It's a perfectly valid interpretation, just not his intended one. He could've left it at the elaboration which preceded that conclusion.
Europeans are not always fluent in speaking English, and Americans sometimes overlook how common it is to speak a second or third language in other parts of the world. Additionally, U.S. citizens tend to use more energy, often due to personal choice and less stringent efficiency standards. This perception might indeed be influenced by confirmation bias, but referring to a larger fridge as "mini" is something that many Europeans might genuinely expect an American to think, given the average differences in household appliances. U.S. homes, cars, and appliances tend to be larger, a fact that’s often viewed critically and reflects a distinct lifestyle.
In Germany, for example, grocery shopping is usually done on foot or by bike, often on the way home. Smaller supermarkets are common and easily accessible, making fresh grocery shopping two or three times a week a feasible option. Many people also purchase less processed food, which is easier when stores are close by. City planning plays a role here: when supermarkets are nearby, there’s less need to stockpile groceries out of fear of running out. On the other hand, when the supermarket is far away, people tend to buy in bulk, planning meals ahead and leaning toward long-lasting convenience foods.
Different places each have their pros and cons, but these lifestyle differences, especially in grocery shopping and urban design, are some of the aspects that I think many U.S. cities could benefit from adopting.