News - Thermoelectric wristband could reduce your air con/heating bills

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The ‘Wristify’ is a wrist attached battery-powered personal Peltier cooler and heater.

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Read more.

This sounds very interesting.
I've always thought that peltiers were really electric inefficient though.
Unless that only really applies to cooling computers and such

is anyone else just seeing wrist strap with a heatsink on it wired up to a crapple mac?

What I want is some way to channel the waste heat from my 7970 when I'm playing BF4 to keep my feet warm! :D

Though Peltier cooling had been well and truly discredited because it's monumentally inefficient? Is this still the case or has there been some breakthrough? I certainly remember a couple of attempts to use it for CPU cooling that reviewers savaged as being less efficient than a plain old fan cooler.

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Originally Posted by crossy

What I want is some way to channel the waste heat from my 7970 when I'm playing BF4 to keep my feet warm! :D

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Tape some venting duct to the back of your PC. Then you've got a positional heater whenever your computer is turned on :D

Would work even better if you had an open cooled graphics card and a computer with one large exhaust fan, with the rest of the case insulated: all the heat from all your components could be funneled down the duct, giving you your own personal couple-of-hundred watt heater :D

Of course, since most fan heaters are several kW and even hairdryers kick out well over 1KW, you might not find it as warming as you'd hope... ;)

I came up with a similar device back in 2007, I really should have patented the idea.. oh well

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Originally Posted by DemonHighwayman

I came up with a similar device back in 2007, I really should have patented the idea.. oh well

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Yeah I've had an idea like this for a long time too. Also when medical biology reaches the point where transplants and organ 'additions' are no big problem I think people will add gill like structures to wrists and other areas, if that individual does a lot of work in or around water (e.g trawler, marine biologist). Wouldn't be enough to stay under indefinitely but just enough to keep you from dying if you blackout through running out of oxygen.

Bit of a spaced out idea but I thought this heating/cooling wristband would never be done too so you never know..

Just strap a watercooling block onto your wrist

Hmm, not sure... given that this is essentially about tricking the body into thinking it's cooler/warmer than it is, I'd be worried about potential long-term health effects. The body's thermostat is there for a reason,so bypassing it doesn't feel like a particularly safe thing to do.

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Originally Posted by CK_1985

Hmm, not sure... given that this is essentially about tricking the body into thinking it's cooler/warmer than it is, I'd be worried about potential long-term health effects. The body's thermostat is there for a reason,so bypassing it doesn't feel like a particularly safe thing to do.

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It's not bypassing anything. People have worn scarfs for thousands of years without long-term health effects.

I need this. Medically. I have a condition which makes me feel way too hot or way too cold all the freaking time. My biggest issue is walking to a bus stop in the winter gets me so hot that when I get on the nice warm bus, I have to practically strip naked and bring a portable battery powered fan just to stop from sweating buckets.

I need this device.

If they are worried about aircon use then why dont they make peltier house bricks. Its perfect the hotter it is outside the colder it is inside and vice versa. Use enough and you could even get enough power generated to run some stuff in your house.
Im not a scientist so leave me alone its just a thrown out there idea. Patent pending.

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Originally Posted by markpc

If they are worried about aircon use then why dont they make peltier house bricks. Its perfect the hotter it is outside the colder it is inside and vice versa. Use enough and you could even get enough power generated to run some stuff in your house.
Im not a scientist so leave me alone its just a thrown out there idea. Patent pending.

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House designs these days are pretty stupid. I remember going to a place in Wales when I was on holiday, and they'd got all kinds of pretty "doh!" ideas for house design that could reducing heating/cooling costs at a small premium if incorporated at build.

I also remember some discussion about the Scottish Water HQ a while ago. That's got a large, south-facing glass atrium, and it turned out that - even in winter - it was so effective as a solar heat capture device that they didn't need much in the way of additional heating. Also remember seeing some discussion about using arab-style designs to circulate household heat to keep the temperature stable.

Figure that's where the real progress is - in smart use of materials for passive thermal control. Once we figure out how, then the only issue is persuading the US to use them!