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Originally Posted by Butcher
Generally the difficulty with TECs is keeping the hotside cool enough. If you have a 40C hotside, it starts to become quite difficult to get the coldside to stay cold. Even at 9V you're talking 100W for the TEC alone (at 9V a 226W TEC draws ~10.5A).
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I can verify this in practice. I built a pelt/water cooling system in the early days (circa 2000), and I speced out the parts with software from melcor.com I think. (or maybe tecooling.com or something, it was a long time ago) I ended up going with 4 172 watt pelts powered in series by a custom 0-120 V DC @ 25 amp switching power supply.
It was sick. Those pelts drew ~10 amps at 100 volts (~24 x 4) at peak power. Add that up and you'll see ~1000 watts plus whatever's pumped getting dumped into the radiator (dual heater cores and 120mm fans). Of course, I didn't see that very often, because the 15 amp house circuit breaker was always blowing. By cranking the power supply to max, it would blow a 25 amp breaker pretty quickly as well (switching power supply wasn't all that efficient). So much for practical.
Anyway, long story short, since the power supply was continuously variable, I could play with the input voltage for peak efficiency/min temperature. The radiators would not adequately dump any amount of heat without the T-hot side jumping way up. (Neither would a later-constructed water bong) I actually found that the system worked pretty well with the power supply turned of, i.e. just a plain water-cooling setup. That is just lame.
It was a helluva lot of money, but it was still fun. Nothing beats cranking the front rheostat and watching all the water lines literally wilt, followed by the house going dark.