DC 12V DIY Thermoelectric Peltier Refrigeration Cooling System Kit Semiconductor Cooler Conduction Module + Radiator + Fan + TEC1-12706

I purchased this to conduct thermal control and water harvesting experiments. All wired together the total current draw is about 5.1A @ 13.9VDC continuous running. I used 14AWG wiring to a 30A capable power supply. I ran the setup for about 20 minutes with no problems. Cold side got to about 55F and hot to about 95F. Ambient temperature was 79F @ 68% humidity. Condensation began forming on the cold side as hoped for.

Ordered one thing and received the wrong Peltier. The fan is underpowered and useless. Reduced temp by 4 degrees C. Not impressed. Will be looking for a Japanese product and gladly pay more for something that works. Waste of money

First of all, packaging was not great—just wrapped in bubble wrap in a bag but nothing appeared damaged. Like others have said no instructions were included. Having said this chances are if you are buying this you have some amount of technical savvy.Others have said the little fan barely spun. This was my experience too after I checked my power supply, but feeling the blades were a bit hard to rotate I removed it to check it out. Once removed it worked perfectly—it seems to be the way it is screened to the ill-fitting smaller heatsink. I eventually was able to reattach it and get it spinning in place, but as one of the other reviews suggested it works better in reverse with the sticker toward the sink.As someone else said, supply wires get a little warm to the plate itself so it may be worth rewiring.The main reason I give it 4/5 despite all of this is that for an inexpensive unit, it does the job I hoped very well. I installed it in a home made 4CF Styrofoam cool box I’m intending to use to help keep a 5 gallon fermenter at around 50 degF ambient temperature during the summer. A temperature probe I have kept nearby was reading almost 80 degrees. After I hooked up the cooler and stuck the probe into the box the temp dropped to 62 degrees within about 15 mins. I have not tested long term as I was nervous to leave it running at night in case anything overheated so I want to monitor it over a day and see how it performs.It may not have the oomph long term but my intent is probably to use ice to iniItaly cool the fermenter and then use this device to maintain the temp and I aim to connect to a temperature controller to achieve this.I’ll post an update later if anything develops but so far so good.

"DIY" in the product name should have been one's first clue that it would be something that one would have to look carefully at to see if it fit one's specific application, which I did and found it *should* do exactly what I needed. I got it, hooked it up, which was pretty simple considering I only had Red and Black wires to work with, and when I turned it on, it did exactly what I would hope it would do, cool, but not too cold because I am using it to heat/cool an environmentally controlled chamber to house rare cloud-forest orchids that require much colder and more humid conditions than could ever be expected in one's home. But, orchids aren't known to live in the Arctic so blasts of cold air wouldn't be good either so the gentle cooling and heating of this DIY heater/cooler is perfect for my application.That said, although the fans on the hot and cold side are well balanced in their respective air flow capacities to evenly extract the heated and cooled air enough to avoid thermal runaway on the hot-side leaking over to the cool side or causing excessive condensation buildup on the cold-side, I've ordered a 40x40x20 mm fan for the cool side to double the air flow on the cool side to increase the distribution of the chilled air because although the cold-side fan does do enough to prevent condensation, it doesn't flow enough air to keep the cold-side heatsink as "warm" as the hot-side heatsink is "cold" so I think much more cooler air can be extracted than is currently.Some have said that the Peltier chip is installed backward with the printed part number being on the hot side, I isolated the chip applying a low +5v just to test to the red wire and common on the black and the side with the smaller heat sink, the cold side, did indeed get cold so I don't know why people are saying the element is reversed when the manufacturer itself, Hebei, says this, "Lettered side of modules are the 'hot side'.”About the only critique I could make of the DIY kit is that the cold-side fan is too low in flow and also would be more effective, from a heat-transfer perspective, if it flows air into the heatsink instead of trying to draw it out. In an air-to-air heat exchanger that may be preferred but when forced air is used to extract "heat" from a surface, forcing air directly onto the surface is the most efficient.I'd buy it again and likely will when I need to build the next chamber.

The product contains a 12705 TEC, not 12706 as advertisedThere are no instructionsThe two fans and TEC cannot run off the same 12v power source at the same timeThe TEC plate is installed backwards. The cool side is on the larger heat sink/fan side. The cool side should be on the small heat sink/fan side, in my opinion.The Thermal Paste job is horrible and ineffectiveThis would have had more value as a box of parts. The reversed TEC causes the unit to overheat as many other reviewers indicated, and it only cools about 4 degrees Fahrenheit in the incorrect configuration. In the correct configuration (TEC flipped and properly pasted), it cools about 15F pretty quickly.