Remember that Peltier coolers don't make heat disappear - they just move it from one side of the cooler to the other, and produce a lot of additional waste heat in the process. There are better ways of transferring heat from a hot IC to a heat sink nowadays - like liquid cooling for really high-performance systems, or capillary-action heat pipes for more typical needs.

Modern performance CPUs have TDPs in the 100-200W range.

Peltier cooling generates a lot of additional heat. It doesn’t scale well to the higher loads. That’s why you don’t see them any more.

(You can see a demo here where LTT try it, and they, after dumping 500W into the cooler, can get the CPU to a vaguely reasonable temperature, until they actually load it up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWrqyQWfhrs)

I'd choose a fridge with a larger compressor.

- We don't have a strong physical theory for solid state physics. Quantum stuff doesn't scale well from 1 atom to a mole of atoms, because 10^23 goes into the exponent of number of energy levels in the system, and then we also have to model interaction of those levels.

- Physical properties of materials depend on their crystal structure, unevenness of that structure, spectrum of size of crystals, temperature, pressure, fields they're exposed to and current position of stars in the sky. Even the "wrong" solid state physics equations we have are highly non-linear.

- State-of-the-art effects are usually achieved with combinations of such materials.

- Exact parameters of the process used to put those materials together radically change the behavior of the system. Put that nanolayer with a different sort of vapor deposition or at different pressure, and the thing will stop working. Ever wondered why we don't produce all the neodymium magnets at N55 grade? Because even precise description of the process is not enough.

- AI doesn't care about the exact physics, but is sometimes very good at navigating in the large parameter space.

- Google have recently made AI that predicted thousands of novel material structures. They found more materials than were found by all human research over the whole humankind history.

I wouldn't expect AI to explain what's going on in solid-state physics anytime soon, but exploring crystal structures, doping, and process parameters automatically might actually get us new materials a couple hundred years faster.

My point being that at least from an energy and carbon perspective, lowering the space cooling demand via more effective building envelopes or increasing the space cooling supply efficiency - eg via membrane or dessicant dehumidification, better heat pumps etc) is far more impactful on a macro scale than better refrigeration.

Granted refrigeration in a warehouse eg is really also space cooling, but I’m just making the distinction between the dT=0-25F context and the dT>25F context. If I could only choose one technology to arrive at scale to improve the efficiency, it would be for the former context.

Do you need those things in a home refrigerator? I suspect not. But it might be handy for lab refrigerators.

You can buy R600a on Amazon right now. One $60 can will charge the system ~5 times.

I can barely hear it now.

It's not completely silent though, there's a small PC-like fan but it's way less loud than a compressor.

A hotel I was staying at had a small bar fridge that used a Peltier. I only know because it stopped working so I checked it and realized it was only a Peltier plus a heat exchanged (a cyclopropane loop).

I presume a full size fridge is outside of reach at this point.

Might as well not use a refrigerator if your ambient temperature is that low.

Stacking a bunch of these Peltiers to give more temperature difference would give a pretty low CoP. Say, for a 13°C temperature difference you'd have to stack 10 of them and use 10x the power. It's even worse actually as the hotter ones have to also pump the waste heat from the cooler ones.

What they’ve done here is add a point of failure, use additional materials as well as a traditional heat pump, and called it “AI” and “eco friendly”.

Never have I seen more prime VC bait.

That said, 1.5C is tiny.

And you dont get to stack Peltiers to increase COP, only to increase delta T.

Still, Peltiers are super cool and I have some ideas for their use od they get slightly better. Advances are super welcome.

(This is an area which is really hard and details matter. Heat is basically impossible to measure directly, and the indirect measurements are fraught with peril. Getting it wrong was a large part of why people thought they had demonstrated cold fusion)

>A compressor based cooler gets a COP of about 4 in the real world.

Real life refrigeration usually isn't very interested in a difference of 1.3 C. The Carnot COP for this temperature drop near ambient conditions is, I believe, around 200. When you consider a cooling technology relative to the Carnot efficiency (or COP) you get a better idea of what the efficiency means in practice. For an AC unit blowing 10 C air on a 40 C day, the Carnot COP is about 10, while real units get less than half that. But I think that's still better than the Peltier effect getting less than 10% performance relative to Carnot limits.

> 'When _I_ use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less.'

> 'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you CAN make words mean so many different things.'

> 'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master-- that's all.'

> Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. 'They've a temper, some of them-- particularly verbs, they're the proudest--adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs--however, _I_ can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That's what _I_ say!'

> 'Would you tell me, please,' said Alice 'what that means?'

> 'Now you talk like a reasonable child,' said Humpty Dumpty, looking very much pleased. 'I meant by "impenetrability" that we've had enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you'd mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don't mean to stop here all the rest of your life.'

> 'That's a great deal to make one word mean,' Alice said in a thoughtful tone.