Okay, we all know what thermoelectric coolers and warmers are. You put your favorite drink there, or your catch, or whatever you want to keep at the right temperature. Long story short, coolers are amazing pals for heatwave times. Nevertheless, you may wonder what to do if your cooler is not cold enough? How to increase the low efficiency of the device? Here is my list of actions for making the fridge colder.
Tips And Tricks For The Coldest Cooler
The easiest ways are:
- Create additional insulation by wrapping the cooler or the content inside the appropriate material. Insulate not only the ingress but also the walls of the structure.
- Replace the Peltier element with a more powerful one. Moreover, cooling will take much less time.
- Increase the amount of thermoelectric cooling elements. This option is preferable if you are faced with the task of removing BTUs from the cooler. For example, when you need to cool something warm or cannot add more insulation quickly. Physically connect in parallel. Also, use the serial connection, if you need a big difference between warm and cold sides.
- Basically, if you want to cool something, you need to heat something. Provide decent airflow. Make sure that air is coming in from each side. If you allow the hot side to warm above ambient significantly, the cold side will react correspondingly and increase the temperature. If the cold side suffers from a lack of airflow, the inside of the cooler can cool just as poorly.
- Clean the cooler properly. Often, a dirty fan can degrade the cooling properties of the device by several degrees, or even a dozen.
- Improve the cooler. Sometimes a bigger fan or a bigger hot-side heatsink might help. By adjusting the temperature of the hot side, you can control the heat transfer rate.
Other Things To Know
Make sure the element is being driven with the right voltage before you get a new chiller. The insufficient voltage will provide a lower differential temperature.
Do not place a small fan on a cooling radiator. What could happen in this case?
- Condensation from the radiator will fall on the fan, and it will soon fail
- If water gets in, shorting of the wiring may occur and may result in a fire
- The fan gives heat during operation; this is a loss of cold. Therefore, the fan must compensate for the heat from its work.
There is another recommendation for your actions to be taken in order to save the coldness. Take a few bottles of water or green tea and freeze them properly. It is enough to put the bottles overnight in the freezer before the trip. Then lay them at the bottom of the portable electric cooler and cover with a towel folded in several layers. Place your drinks and foods on top of this outline.
The frozen liquid will work as a refrigerant, and the cooler will maintain the desired temperature. For the first two days, you can keep the cooler off altogether using this technique. Instead of bottles, you can use special rigid cold batteries.
