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No, I'm not talking about one of
those dopey mini-swamp coolers
that use a fan to blow air across a
wet wick here. I'm talking about the
real thing. Where I live, the summer
humidity is too high for those to
work anyway.
Refrigerant based ones like regular
air conditioners aren't
practical at
this size, but Peltier solid state ones
certainly are.
With the usual arrangement of a heat
sink on each side of the Peltier
device, air would be directed away on
the hot side and forward on the cool
side. Simple as that.
The only problem here is efficiency.
Basically Peltiers generate 1 - 2 watts
of waste heat for each watt they
pump, and of course all this heat
gets dumped back out into the room.
Oops.
Even so, if it's warm in there again
this year I may just hack one together
and see if it's worth the effort....
The waste heat problem has the
potential to be solved soon with
CoolChip technology
(www.coolchips.com), a vacuum
diode that may someday be the best
way to move heat around. No, I don't
have any association with them but
it's cool stuff (no pun intended)....
[link]
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You still have to put the heat somewhere... are you planning on running a pipe out your door or something? |
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Actually the CoolChip technology won't fix your waste heat problem if you're just dumping heat into the room. It will reduce the severity of the problem, but if the room is closed, the average temperature of the room will rise even with CoolChips. |
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Now if the room is well ventilated (you keep the windows open all day and there is a bit of a breeze), dumping the waste heat into the room might not be that huge of a problem, and the cool breeze on the face might feel good; However, you'd probably be much happier if you bought a length of dryer duct and a small fan so you could dump that heat somewhere else. |
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Quit your bitching and buy yourself a block of dry ice. There's worse things than steam. |
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Forget the heat pump and just use a cold source (like a block of dry ice) to cool a water reservoir. Pump this cold water through a small radiator in front of a fan pointed at your face. Granted, it'll cost a bit for the dry ice, but you won't have to worry about dumping more heat back into the room. |
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OK, so that's a bit impractical. Small air conditioners are available (you can even get lunchbox-sized units for camping tents), but without a way to move the waste heat out of the area, you're running a losing race. In terms of scale, especially for a large office (or even a small office) the cost of running one large air conditioner will be much less than the cost of several small air conditioners. |
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There's nothing technically wrong with this idea, it's just very impractical. |
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