[time-nuts] Wine cooler as temperature chamber

[Chris Albertson]

A TEC is not a very good device for cooling a large enclosure.  It works
for the case of a wine coolers because (1) you don't need wine to be very
cool, 55F is fine and you don't open the door very often either.  But TECs
do have a good use where they ar perfect.  That is cooling some small
electronic device such as an op-amp or CCD sensors or whatever so as to
greatly reduce thermal noise.  Noise is many times mostly due to
temperature.   You can epoxy a TEX to the device and then a heat sink to
the TEC and make a good spot cooler in just a few minutes.   Add a
thermocouple and a control loop and you can make a good temperature
regulated for some small (1" square) part.