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DIY Solar Powered Hot Water Heater: Peltiers work great for heating!
The Peltier isn’t a good cooler, it’s is a pretty good DIY offgrid heat pump with minimal moving parts that’s easily repaired and serviced. Imagine being able to take a hot shower using a 48v lawnmower battery or small solar panel system as the power source.
When inventing, sometimes you have a realization. I’ve spent a lot of time experimenting with my Peltier-based Air Conditioner, moving from air-to-air heat transfer to air-to-Phase Change Material transfer. Each time I’m disappointed by the Peltier’s ability to move enough of a temperature differential to be useful. It’s possible, I think — but requires enough extra gimmicks (swamp cooling, etc) that I was about ready to hang up the whole project. But when I was playing with the Phase Change “Joule Box” in my last article, I noticed that the material got EXCEPTIONALLY hot. like 140F (60C), very easily. This taught me two things:
- If I build an A/C, I need to focus on 3:1 cooling of the hot side. It will take a LOT of fast cooling if I’m going to have the cold side be anything close to a 50–55F (10–13C) output temperature.
- I could easily use this as a way to store heat! It’s not an A/C, it’s a water heater!
I’ll probably revisit #1 when I’m able to build a ground loop heat sink, but for now, let’s…
