Passive cooled pelts?
 

I'd like to introduce a water chiller into my watercooling setup. I was given a water-chiller off an aircraft. This is a custom built cylinder which contains 8 TECs in series which supposidly ran from 36V (unknown current). The TECs are the smaller type (like 3cm x 3cm) and I hooked 1 up and at 2V it drew 10A. At 12V the entire system was drawing 15A (maximum of my linear supply) and the 4 large heatsinks were finger burning hot. Even at this wattage water was not being chilled. I imagine that there was insufficient cooling of the heatsinks. I eventually toasted at least 1 of the TECs. They have 100C thermal resistors linking them.

My question is has anybody achieved a water chiller without fans? (since this is my aim of watercooling). I'm not looking for super-low temps just a little active cooling to further bring down my reservior water temperature.

I asked something very similar to this in another thread.

There it was said that cooling a TEC with anything less than watercooling would be a completly useless waste of enargy. BUT in the past though less powerful TEC were used with a HSF arrangement... and that was cooling a CPU die. so it stands to reason that a small low power TEC could be cooled by large heatsink alone.

Of course I don;t have anythig resenbling a TEC... but maybe you can test running the pelt on lower voltages I have a feeling there in lies the key.

~ Boli