Peltier fermenter cooling?

I was pondering, and I remembered peltier disks

http://search.ebay.com/search/searc...=1&from=R8&satitle=peltier+cooling&category0=

low power consumption, draws heat from things extremely well! I wouldn't want to glue one to my carboy since it would freeze the beer right there, but if I glued some onto a bigger bucket with water in it and a water pump to circulate the water I think it would work! Just a little pond pump, the power consumption would be low and I could use a thermoswitch if it was too cold...

has anyone done this?

Check this out.

http://www.brewboard.com/index.php?showtopic=50031

Sorry to link to a different homebrew site, but the link for the guys website doesn't work anymore.

I opt for the wet towel and fan. Peltier's are way too pee wee herman geek-o foi me

I can't resist, I'm going to build an external peltier cooling module.. i'll put pics and everything!

for the TRUE BEER GEEK (not a bad thing RELAX) that looks bitchen. for me I will stick with the fridgamenter (holy $#!& I think I just made up a word) untill I get some larger conical bottom fermenters.
JJ

im a beer geek, i'm a geek and i love beer! hehe

arnt we and dont we all
godblessya
JJ

ok I bought some stuff on ebay....

You might want to take a look at these cpu coolers about half way down the page. Heat sink & blower (not a fan) so you can direct the airflow easily. That's what I'm using.

david_42 said:

You might want to take a look at these cpu coolers about half way down the page. Heat sink & blower (not a fan) so you can direct the airflow easily. That's what I'm using.

Click to expand...

How are you using it?

I've worked with peltier coolers extensively for my astronomy cameras and i have some warnings for you. You MUST have a heatsink for the hot side. If you run current through the chip without a heatsink, the cool side will obviously cool, but at the expense of the hot side and without a heatsink it will become so hot that it will actually melt off the leads, and those cannot be soldered back on. I'd recommend taking a AA battery and finding out which side is hot and cold, add some thermal paste to both sides, attach a heatsink via zipties and then run it for 5 minutes and make sure it isn't overheating. They eat a lot more battery than you might expect.

That's just my .02

Cheers

My god. I had this idea a few months ago but never thought it through! Please update if you get it working. :rockin:

I built a fermentation chiller (search "son of fermentation chiller")

This bad-boy, with a 3" CPU fan, home thermostat and two gallons of ice, is keeping my beer (SF lager) at a cozy 60 degrees in a 78+ degree room (as cold as I've tried it so far, I could put four gallons ice in and set it even lower. It works GREAT.)

Can this peltier chip be submerged? Does anyone have more information about how it works? I think I may be onto something here.

Yeah, but what do you do when the ice melts?

simply replace it with another gallon jug frozen in the freezer !

Seriously, this thing is awesome. I have control over fermentation down to less than 3 degrees.

I was thinking if I put the peltier chip in a gallon jug of water, I wouldn't have to change the ice!

peltier chips cant be submerged. the way they work is they have two sides of silicone. one side with a trace amount of arsenic and the other pure. when you run a current through it, the electrons will naturually go to one side with extracting electrons from the other. this means one side gets hot while the other gets cool. simple thermodynamics. trust me, this isn't the way to go, otherwise i would have done this a long time ago. but this is just an invitation to prove me wrong. good luck.

cheers

Well, wouldn't you want to attach the peltier plate to the exterior of a metal bucket or something that your fermentation vessel sits in? Put a water pump near the area where the peltier pad connects for water circulation, and you should be fine, eh?

Hi everyone, got my stuff in and did some tests and it works great so far just cooling a bucket of water... i have a peltier disk that is sealed with a heat sink on each side. i submerged the cold side in water with a pump circulating the water and the hot side has a fan cooling it. after 10 minutes the water was 15f cooler than ambient, sitting out in the open totally uninsulated.

now for a real test, I am going to make an external tray with the cooling deviced in it and the water will pump into it from the bottom and flow out at the level of the top of the cold heatsink back into the bucket. the bucket will be super insulated so I dont absorb a lot of ambient heat.

I just need to find a big ass foam cooler that can hold the 6.5 gallon carboy.. any ideas?

thanks!

Okay, so peltier chips aren't the right choice for freezing a jug of water.

So, in my fermentation chiller, I have a place where up to four frozen jugs are placed. Instead of frozen jugs, I picture a bin of water with a Peltier chip in it - set to like 34 degrees.

If you read up on the chiller, you can understand the simple mechanics behind it. I think this Peltier chip could be gold in it.

IS there a way to set the temperature on these things? To make them shut down JUST ABOVE freezing? I don't want ice, I want nearly ice cold water.

I'm thinking a thermostat control, but I can't imagine a thermostat control that cold. Maybe a liquid metal one mounted at like 45 degrees off center.

This would let me lager in my fermentation chiller, without having to change the ice jugs every day. I'm trying to find a way to not have to open the fermentation chiller.

Edit: here is the fermentation chiller:

http://home.elp.rr.com/brewbeer/chiller/chiller.PDF#search="fermenter chiller"

I've been looking at these peltier chillers and such for a couple of days and I ran across this:

http://www.thermoelectric.com/2005/pr/cp/lhpcp.htm

These are "liquid cooled cold plates." It looks like you hook up your liquid to one side and cold water comes out the other. My thoughts were to fashion an imersion fermentation chiller using this device. You add a pump to run the cold water through a wort chiller submerged in the beer and attached to your fermentation lid. The whole thing is powered by one of those little jobs that turns on when your temp rises and off when your cold enough.

An alternate lagering technique I think I may try before buying one of these $300 things is to run your cooling liquid (probably just everclear or something else that won't freeze) through your standard garage beer fridge freezer, through your wort chiller in your fermenting beer, and then back out through the pump and all over again. I think that would be much simpler and safer than some of these labrotory devices. Again, powered by the thermo-probe on-off switch. The more cooling power you need, the more tubing you coil in your freezer.

Anybody got experience with this? Wholes to punch in my evil plan? This is, of course, if your fermenter is too large to just go right in your lagering fridge.

Focus

Hey guys...I'm just curious as my climate here is hot so I was planing on using a refer with a controller for my ferminting station...am I missing something here or are we talking about space problems?

Maybe its me but I like to keep things simple and maybe that's what I'm missing here.