I have this small wine-refrigerator that is both old and not working.  I don’t really need it, but it’s nice to keep extra beers and wine in there.

My idea is to get a peltier cooler and convert this from a compressor cooler to a solid state cooler.  Of course it won’t be as efficient or cold – but as long as it gets just a little bit cooler I will be happy.

I ordered some coolers online (they weren’t super expensive) and they seem to work. It requires 12 volts and up to 5 or 6 amps – so the power supply might be an issue (it seems many people use a computer ATX power supply).  Actually, you can just connect it to a D-cell battery and put your fingers on each side of the cooler and easily feel a temperature difference (great for demos).

With a temporary power supply, I put the cold side of the peltier on a big aluminum block and then I put a cpu heat sink on the hot side.  This didn’t work – but here is a picture.

It turns out that the peltier cooler gets hot – but it keeps a temperature difference between the two sides.  So the key is to keep the hot side as cool as possible.  With this in mind, I switched it so that the hot side was on the block and there was nothing on the cool side.  I still didn’t work very well until I put some thermal paste between the peltier and the aluminum block for good thermal contact.

Here is what I get.

Pretty cool, right?

I will keep you updated.