Shower water heat pump

[Mikesolar]

Originally Posted by Ormston

Peltier elements can work well in the right application.

I used some for cooling an overclocked pc processor several years ago, had a separate pc power supply just to feed the peltier which cooled the processor to around 5C with all the heat being dumped into a water cooling setup.

Very inefficient cooling setup, system would use just over 1KW when gaming and i'm sure the peltiers generated more heat than they actually moved.

It worked great for around 2 years until i used the pc and forgot to start the water pump, the acrylic plate on the water block melted and water leaked everywhere destroying the graphics card, sound card and motherboard

The point is, try to incorporate a fail safe control strategy to prevent freezing pipes or scalding hot water an peltiers can silently generate very undesirable temperatures.

Steve

But can you quantify how much heat was actually moved, for the cost of the peltiers? It may be that a very large number of units are needed to equal 3-4kw of elements.

[Ormston]

Originally Posted by Mikesolar

But can you quantify how much heat was actually moved, for the cost of the peltiers? It may be that a very large number of units are needed to equal 3-4kw of elements.

Yes it would take lots and lots of peltiers to move a few KW.
From what i remember mine was around 250W (power consumption) and was supposed to pump 150W of heat, so the processor had 150W of cooling and the water cooling system had to deal with 400W of heat. (it was far worse than that in that i also had a peltier on the GPU ).

Very inefficient cooing system but if it's heat you want then not too bad.

Steve