conical fermenter heater/cooler

[kshuler]

Can you measure both the heatsink contact base and the peltier size? I believe mine are exactly the same size, and I think that if the peltier is bigger than the heatsink base it isn't going to work as well.

 

[geoffey]

Not the best pictures, and I couldn't find a metric ruler but this gets you a good idea.

40mm comes out to just over 1.5 inches. That's what my Peltier measures at. The heat sink you can clearly see is not as big.


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[dmcman73]

You have far to much heatsink compound on there. Between the hot surface and the peltier it should be a thin layer. The compound is only to fill voids/gaps not actually be a thick blob on the surfaces. Also, the surface of the heatsink should be the same size or a little greater than the peltier. I'm in the IT business and it's the same rules with processors.

 

[bradford1]

Have anyone tried to use silver grade anti seize as the heat transfer paste? It is only a dollar for one of the small blister packs and a small bottle ( 5 oz ) is less than $10.


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[geoffey]

You have far to much heatsink compound on there. Between the hot surface and the peltier it should be a thin layer. The compound is only to fill voids/gaps not actually be a thick blob on the surfaces. Also, the surface of the heatsink should be the same size or a little greater than the peltier. I'm in the IT business and it's the same rules with processors.

Thanks, I'll try to reduce the amount of thermal paste. I initially put a lot on there because the way the heat sink is built keeps it from being screwed down tight on the peltier. But I've ground down the posts now so that that's not a problem.



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[dmcman73]

Thanks, I'll try to reduce the amount of thermal paste. I initially put a lot on there because the way the heat sink is built keeps it from being screwed down tight on the peltier. But I've ground down the posts now so that that's not a problem.



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FYI, I've found that rubbing alcohol removes heat sink compound very well and leaves no residue when it evaporates.

Again, the compound is not supposed to be part of the heatsink, it's supposed to only fill in voids to eliminate air pockets between the two surfaces. I usually will apply a small bead in the center of the chip and then use some heavy stock cardboard, or a business card and then smear a thin layer over the chip.

The fact that the heatsink was not sitting properly on the chip due to the posts you ground down could be part of the problem you were having.

 

[geoffey]

Resurecting this old thread to add the following info pertinent only to the Stout 7.3g conical which they offer peltier cooling "kits" for.

I recently discovered that Stout stopped offering the fan/heat sinks with their kits. I think it's because they had too many people reporting problems with the size of the heat sinks in relation to the 40mm x 40mm peltiers. This was definitely the issue for me. They replaced they heat sinks with ones that cover the entire peltier chip, and once I found a way to mount those so that the chip was tightly sandwiched in between the aluminum block and the heat sink, and once I changed the orientation of the fan to blow away from the conical, my system had immediate results.

I am pretty disappointed in that it took me a year and lots of trial and error to figure out that the problem was entirely caused by the size of the heat sinks. I went through about 10 peltiers in this process and bought two additional CPU power supplies, as well as forking over money for a couple of extra fans/heat sink combos.

But to their credit Stout sent me out all new harwardware, fans and aluminum blocks, once we figured out the problem.
Thanks to those on this thread for helping me out along the way.