Tuesday, January 01, 2008

Fiddling

25 quid's worth of loopyness. Ever since I first heard about these things I have wanted to see what they can actually do. They are called peltier modules and they are each two slices of white ceramic material with about 256 tiny layer cakes of different metals lined up inside. The ceramic is what you can see and that is 4cm square in these units.
If you feed them electricity one side becomes hot and the other cold. If you heat one side and cool the other they make electricity. The former function has made them popular in the cooling of overworked CPUs in computers and other portable refrigeration, but the later function is what I am interested in. I bought them from an auction site in Japan, the seller chucked in one extra, so I played with that a bit by the stove when they arrived, it was fun to see the needle on the tester slide over the dial. I want to utilize the heat from the stove to make electricity. Either to power a fan to circulate hot air around our living space or to power a water pump to cycle hot water to the bath at the other end of the home. I know it is loopy, but these little fancies have to be attended to sometimes. I picked up the coils of copper shrouded in aluminium fins from a dumped air conditioner unit with the aim of making separate coils of hot water and cold so that I could sandwich these units in between. Today I began work on chopping that up into parts so that I may be able to put the plan into action. I shall have to work on my silver soldering or brazing skills. These units are only suitable for use up to 80 degrees centigrade, so I am not aiming to make steam or anything, I just want a sort of open system that will need topping up with water every now and then. With any luck I should be able to feed them a temperature difference near to their maximum of 68 degrees. The Stan Meyer concept of fracturing water is still appealing, after all, water is so much denser than oil, it makes sense that it must retain more energy. However all the science involved in that is a way off in the distance for me while fire wood and copper pipe is fairly comprehensible.
All in all a suitably crazy way to start off the new year.