4 Pelteir Plate Water Bottle wired to Arduino Uno

Question

Note - I plan to use the Arduino Starter kit to make this project.

Hey everyone,

I've had an idea for a project recently and I would like to get some insight on its plausibility. Is it possible to heat and cool a bottle of water using 4 pelteir plates? I'd like to heat up or cool a bottle of water using 2 pelteirs for heating and 2 for cooling. Could the amount of power for the peltiers to function be supplied from a laptop, computer, or battery pack? The role of the Arduino is to program in some safety features or some things to help the circuit function better if necessary. For example, a feature I want to add in is if the cold pelteirs are on, the hot peltiers are off if nessecary. I might add an LCD to display which setting is on/off if I can (example: Cold: ON, Hot: OFF)

Thanks guys.

Answer 1

When it comes for amount of power from laptop, then this is not realy reasonable to expect even USB3, maybe some older laptops PCMCIA, or hardware docks. When it comes to Desk, They would have to be adjusted to get the ATX from PSU (it would have to be upgraded for purpose) We are still talking about a small Can or Yacult botle...
Even then insulate, insulate (and same again)
Then its a question of speed and how hot or cold) Battery pack that charges even when not used, used as buffer might work (for a short time).
Controlling it from Arduino is easy part using function that switches one on other off whenever you want and then calling the function itself to make sure both steps happen, rather then manualy editing or using one output for controlling power on/off and another on two way relay switching between sets (relay would increase consumption here).

Answer 2

In a word, no. Laptop or desktop computer usually have USB ports, which put out like 10 watts of power for a "high current" USB port. That is not enough to do much heating or cooling. You want a high power supply. The pelteir plates I've seen run on 12V DC. Get a 5A 12V supply, or even higher.

You might be able to draw larger amounts of current from a USB-C port or a USB-C power supply, but why? Get a dedicated high current power supply that puts out the maximum voltage your peltier plates can handle.

Note that there is no reason to have 2 plates for heating and 2 plates for cooling. Run the current one way and they heat. Reverse the current and they cool.

Also I'm not sure of the value of using 2 plates to cool. A single plate able to handle more power would likely be more efficient, and easier to insulate. (With 2 plates you'd need 2 heatsinks, which will allow twice as much heat to leak through when the power is off. Doubling the current you feed into a single plate should give double he heating/cooling, without increasing the heat leakage when it's off. Just make sure you don't exceed the maximum rated current of your plate, and that you have a large enough heatsink to handle the heat transfer.)

You could use an H-bridge meant for controlling motors to provide either +12V or -12V under software control. Those generally handle high current.

You could also use a digital thermometer and make a thermostatically controlled system. You'd measure the temp in the bottle, and when it got to your desired temp range, turn off the power. When the temp moved outside the desired range, you'd turn the power back on.