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Staying cool without refrigerants: Next-generation Peltier cooling

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Re: Staying cool without refrigerants: Next-generation Peltier cooling

#301

Post by jmb99 »

ChoGGi wrote: post #261
jmb99 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which seems insane; it cannot add that much to the price. Be careful what you wish for. When buying my current fridge, I specifically tried to go out of my way to avoid complexity, but the opening for my fridge is an odd size so my choices were limited. The only fridge I could buy that didn’t have a bunch of crap that’s was guaranteed to break (ice maker, water dispenser [seriously? aren’t most fridges right next t…

> water dispenser [seriously? aren’t most fridges right next to a faucet? Same reason you'd keep a container of filtered water in your fridge.

...why would I keep a container of filtered water in my fridge? My water comes out of the tap already filtered at my municipal water supplier?

Maybe if I was on a well I would need to filter my own water, but then I definitely wouldn’t trust that job to a fridge.

Re: Staying cool without refrigerants: Next-generation Peltier cooling

#302

Post by dayjah »

madaxe_again wrote: post #67
dayjah wrote: post #18

I worked on a scientific instrument a while ago, it had a Peltier heater on it to raise the sample to 60c from whatever residual environment temp was (approx. 20c in a lab). It was pretty amazing to see my old overclocking cooling solution come back around and be used in my professional career some 20+ years later

And they couldn’t use a 100% efficient resistive element because…?

Honestly, I didn’t ever ask. As the SWE on the project I just had to switch a DIO on/off based on the reading from an AIO. I just trusted that the EE and ME folks were making smart decisions around BOM.

Re: Staying cool without refrigerants: Next-generation Peltier cooling

#303

Post by throwawayoldie »

renewiltord wrote: post #175

Much better British tech is the smearing of yogurt on windows https://fortune.com/2025/07/14/yogurt-on-windows-cool-home-b...

I'm really curious how it occurred to them to try this in the first place. Also I thought Brits spelled it "yoghurt"?

Re: Staying cool without refrigerants: Next-generation Peltier cooling

#304

Post by throwawayoldie »

SecretDreams wrote: post #285
TechDebtDevin wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine theres going to be an entire new class of intelligent humans powered by LLMs that learn this way, and they are going to be at such a disadvantage to the people that do it the old fashioned way and dont take shortcuts. The vast majority of humans are going to offload all their critical think skills to LLMs. I dont want to be friends with those people. I want to start a blog about these people called "Artific…

> I dont want to be friends with those people. That really limits the friendship selection pool :(.

Quality over quantity.

Re: Staying cool without refrigerants: Next-generation Peltier cooling

#305

Post by javiramos »

mort96 wrote: post #58
javiramos wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should buy a fridge with a fan in the cooling chamber. My Samsung fridge has a nice fan and associated ducting to circulate air and keep temperatures ~uniform.

I may consider that the next time I buy a fridge, but the reality is that this isn't something I care deeply enough about to buy a new fridge over.

Maybe you can retro a fan into your current fridge. Nice little project!

Re: Staying cool without refrigerants: Next-generation Peltier cooling

#306

Post by colechristensen »

bluGill wrote: post #294
colechristensen wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>for the vast majority we already get plenty of vitamin C This is highly dependent on the population you're talking about. There are plenty of people around the world who don't have great nutrition and don't eat large amounts of fortified industrial food. >for the rest of us massive doses just make our pee more expensive The study I linked reported ridiculous doses of vitamin C "dramatically improved the clinical sta…

The vast majority of people are not currently in an ICU though. That situation doesn't apply to us.

If your immune system was "boosted" and worked significantly better tomorrow than it does today, would there be large measurable outcomes? No, probably not. Unless you've got something wrong with you, day to day, it would be hard to detect a distinct improvement in an already working system. Getting a good signal-to-noise ratio for a healthy person getting slightly healthier is hard. The bias for not publishing negative results and various sorts of intentional and unintentional p-hacking means that small-effect-size research that showed say "1 gram of vitamin C per day improved x by 5% in healthy adults" wouldn't be that reliable anyway. "dramatic improvement" of ICU sepsis patients isn't something that suffers from p-hacking.

Someone dying of sepsis in an ICU though, there's a whole bunch of very clear signals whether something is meaningfully effective or not. What that result tells you is that megadoses of vitamin C are likely not bullshit and should continued to be studied in more and more difficult to detect cases.

What this tells me is that 1) because I know it's likely rather safe for me and 2) there's enough evidence to convince me it might help, I'll keep taking lots of vitamin C if I feel like I'm getting sick.

Re: Staying cool without refrigerants: Next-generation Peltier cooling

#307

Post by OkayPhysicist »

jmb99 wrote: post #301
ChoGGi wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> water dispenser [seriously? aren’t most fridges right next to a faucet? Same reason you'd keep a container of filtered water in your fridge.

...why would I keep a container of filtered water in my fridge? My water comes out of the tap already filtered at my municipal water supplier? Maybe if I was on a well I would need to filter my own water, but then I definitely wouldn’t trust that job to a fridge.

Many people prefer a cold glass of water compared to the cool to room-temperature water that comes out of the tap (Hence the refrigerator for cooling). Filtering at the individual level is typically done for flavor, because depending on where you live, while the water is probably safe to drink (assuming HN readership demographics), it may or may not be particularly pleasant. Even here in the Bay Area, where we have that sweet, sweet Hetch-Hetchy water, I know people who live in buildings with pipes bad enough that they filter their water.

Re: Staying cool without refrigerants: Next-generation Peltier cooling

#308

Post by ranger_danger »

okanat wrote: post #215
ranger_danger wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you implying that "normal refrigerant-based coolers" are somehow always the most appropriate solution for any cooling task?

Not the poster but yes. Compressors use phase change which is fundamentally better way of transferring heat. Solids like peltiers will always leak more heat than liquid to gas phase change. Peltiers cannot get the same efficiency because of physics.

So a compressor that's too big to fit and/or too noisy/vibrating for a particular application is still somehow the most appropriate solution?

Re: Staying cool without refrigerants: Next-generation Peltier cooling

#309

Post by madaxe_again »

nullc wrote: post #249
s0rce wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

typically only used if you need to stabilize the temp very close to room temperature or cool it below, unusual choice otherwise compared to a heater.

Even above ambient, being able to reverse direction allows limiting any overshoot.

Yeah, it occurred to me after asking that that’s likely why - with resistive heating you’re bound to have a fiddly time getting a stable temperature.

Re: Staying cool without refrigerants: Next-generation Peltier cooling

#310

Post by BearOso »

SchemaLoad wrote: post #146
gettingoverit wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually AI has a lot to do with material design. I can't do a proper explanation, so please bear with this information dump: - We don't have a strong physical theory for solid state physics. Quantum stuff doesn't scale well from 1 atom to a mole of atoms, because 10^23 goes into the exponent of number of energy levels in the system, and then we also have to model interaction of those levels. - Physical properties of…

What the article is talking about is using temperature probes and deciding if to run the compressor or peltier, or both depending on the temperature. That's what they are calling AI. Some if statements on a microcontroller.

In the article, the picture shows the peltier cooler is on top and the compressor is separate on the bottom. The "AI" is an adjective for the compressor only. There is little to no discrete logic in a compressor, so calling it that is nonsense.
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