Inside The Chiller

Our SOP at this point would be to dissect the unit, and so we did. Let's take a look inside the chiller.

The upper case is secured to the metal base by six screws. After removing them and lifting off the heavy metal base, this is what we saw. The unit is pretty spartan inside, populated mainly by a large heatsink and a fan.

When we removed the heatsink unit, we can see that the purple pad is actually a circular raised section of a purple metal plate. The peltier is sandwiched between this purple plate and the heatsink.

The Heatsink

The heatsink is a simple aluminium heatsink with 24 fins. It's actually pretty large for what it's meant to dissipate, especially since it has a fan to blow across it. The red and black wires lead to the peltier cooler which is sandwiched between the heatsink and the top plate.

If you look closely at the side profile, you can see white paste gooing up the works between the heatsink and the top plate. That's thermal paste. Evidently, they are using it to improve thermal transfer to the heatsink. But why do they need so much of it? It is really quite excessive.

The Fan

This unit comes with a small 30mm fan that serves to cool down the reverse side of the peltier. It sucks cold air in from the rear of the unit and flushes it out the front.

This particular fan is a DCF053010 fan with a sleeve bearing from the Shenzen Dingdao Technology company.

The exact sub-model is not known but this model can deliver anything from 1.6 to 2.6 CFM with official noise levels of 24 to 28 dB.

However, this fan is honestly much noisier than that. In fact, this could be a real turn-off for some users as it's pretty loud and clearly audible even over the noise of a nearby TV.