Looking for one of these:
I know I can get one for $20 on Amazon but wondered if anyone had one they were planning to toss. I want to use it as a fridge for solder paste to avoid having to put lead and lead free solder paste into my food fridge…
I have something similar, but somewhat larger.
Not sure of cooling power, can bring in.
I had that exact USB fridge, also for solder paste storage. It lasted about a month before the fan died. It’s not made for continuous duty.
Even with the fan working, it wasn’t much of a fridge - and certainly not via USB power. Before it died, I’d changed it to be powered by a 5V/2A adapter to get a bit more power to the peltier cooler, but that was still only enough to bring it down to around 10C below the ambient temperature; too high to really be of much use in extending the shelf life of solder paste. From memory, the peltier cooler was capable of 12V, but I never got to try that before the fan died.
In the end I could’ve put in a 12V fan and upgraded the power supply again to be 12V at several amps… and insulated the compartment… aaaaand no. Might as well just build a custom solder paste fridge at that point, as there isn’t much left of the original.
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@rsim - That was my plan, from your experience it may not be worth the effort.
@wander gave me a larger 6 can size unit that may have a better fan but it will draw more power and is much larger than I need. However I may try giving it more insulation and give some smarts to it’s temperature controller to minimize energy use.
I’m working on a peltier-cooled mini kegerator, and have been researching this like crazy. Be warned that peltiers don’t like to be switched on and off (the thermal cycling is apparently hard on them) and don’t particularly like PWM either.
To be honest there’s a lot of conflicting advice out there on this though. If you’re serious about this project I could use some help figuring out controller options. I think it should be possible to use PWM with some smoothing.