I didn't realize they've come down so much in price. Another really useful application would be to hook it up to pads used to ice joints post joint surgery. I was sold a $100+ dollar medical device which was basically a water pump in a cooler chest (like one of those Polar ones) that circulated water through some pads. I had to refill it every hour or so with ice. This is right after a knee surgery so caring the cooler around was literally painful. Having it connected to the aquarium chiller would have been great.
I'd love to be wrong about this, but I'm very skeptical that the aquarium chiller pictured in the post can move enough heat to cool a human. As mentioned in the article, it uses thermoelectric coolers which are extremely inefficient.
I see at least one aquarium chiller on amazon that uses a compressor, but then you have to wonder if it's quiet enough to sleep next to.
Same, though I've seen thermoelectric chillers of that size moving ~200 Watt and a human produces less than 100 Watt at rest. The ones I saw on Amazon for $150 claimed to move around 70 Watt which is ballpark useful. You wouldn't want to cool down to a very low temperature anyway, just remove the heat you produce yourself.
Good point. That does sound plausible then. Here's my napkin math after some quick googling:
- A human produces about 40 watts of heat while sleeping.
- Thermoelectric coolers have a coefficient of performance (CoP) between 0.3-0.6. So for every watt consumed, they can move 0.3-0.6 watts of heat.
- The wattage consumed and moved all needs to be dissipated.
This random chiller [0] on amazon consumes 100 watts, so perhaps this could move 60 watts max. CoP drops as the temperature difference increases. And it's unclear if the unit can dissipate 160 watts steady state.
But it could plausibly keep you from heating up on a warm night. It doesn't seem like there's much margin for actually cooling you down tho. If someone wanted to experiment with this, I'd definitely read that post.
