I had the idea of using a small solar panel and a peltier effect cooler thing to condense water out of the air during the day and just directly feed that into a planter to make a self-sufficient plant waterer. Doing some initial investigation I found that, as usual, my idea was not novel whatsoever. In fact, people have not only discussed it, but they’ve done it.
There are apparently commercial bike-mounted water bottle systems that will refill as you ride and use various air filters to try to keep the water potable once it’s condensed (I’m still not convinced that I’d want to drink such water). Either way, in the investigation I found that the inefficiencies of such a system would either not produce enough water for any size-able plant, or it would need to be larger than I had hoped.. this make me less interested in the project as the benefit doesn’t seem to justify the cost. Of course I could do it just to enjoy doing it, especially considering that I’ve wanted to play with peltier/thermoelectric devices for a while now, but I think I’ll save this as a project I can do if I find myself with extra (otherwise unused) solar/peltier devices, not as something I’ll purchase everything solely for.
One other thing I happened upon in my poking around the internet for the above is that there was some research project that used peltier effect devices fitted to a wrist-band to make people feel cooler overall. The idea was that these devices, while not terribly efficient, were more efficient than cooling a whole room/building when the environment was in the sweet spot of slightly too warm for comfort, but not quite arizona-in-july hot. The research was in the skin contact amounts, on/off cycles to prevent it getting too cold and doing damage to the user, and how these could be used and tuned to stop the need for A/C use in environments where it made sense.
This was a really cool idea to me and lead to two separate ideas that will be explored outside of this post:
- Potential modification to the pacific rim cosplay
- Cooling keyboard wrist rest