Originally recorded March 12, 2019.
I was given this wine fridge/cooler a few years ago as a gift. Not anything I was looking for to start with, but still nifty. Most of these use Peltier junctions to cool the inside, rather than an actual compressor that can get the job done properly. Of course the Peltier ones are much less expensive than the way-overpriced compressor-cooled ones. The buyer of this unit wouldn't have known the difference anyway.
Well, as it turns out, these have fans in the back to cool the heatsinks. That can collect dust. The manual for it SPECIFICALLY STATES to remove the back and use a vacuum to clean up the dust every once and again.
I did just that last summer. Upon plugging it back in, the bottom compartment no longer got cold. No reason, no explanation, just China'd out. After a harrowing hold time, I got someone on the phone who told me the circuit board I needed could be ordered on their website, and couldn't provide me with much more information than that. Thoroughly dissatisfied with this company and now even more dissatisfied, I begrudgingly paid my $50 for the circuit board that shouldn't have gone bad in the first place.
Some time later, it arrived, and was promptly misplaced. It just happened to come at the wrong time and the project was put on the back burner.
Recently, the board was found again, so with a fresh mind I set out to fix it. Well, that should have all gone well but for some reason I can't explain, they decided to directly solder the wires for the Peltier junction to the circuit board instead of socketing them! Undeterred, I cooked up the iron, and soldered the wires to the new board. The solder joints I made looked tons better than factory.
With everything reconnected and ready to go, I plugged it in, to find that now the bottom compartment works, but the top decided to China out at that very moment! I was ready to smash the thing!
I certainly wasn't going to throw another $50 into this junker. So I decided to give it a last chance. I bypassed all the Chinaness and wired it the right way, ON. China limited the cooling of the bottom compartment to 54°. The was probably so they could get away with using the same Peltier junction as the top, while claiming that red wine should be kept at a warmer temperature.
I wasn't having any of that crap any more! I did a very crude wiring job with "twist and tape technology" because I was so angry at this point. I connected both Peltiers and both sets of fans to the same board. This bypassed the temp display on the front that was useless anyway, and forced everything to run at full power constantly.
Obviously, I'm pulling way more power from the single board than it was designed for so I know it will crap out sooner. When that happens, I'll rig an external power supply in the form of a computer power supply up to it, and it will continue to run at full power until one of the Peltiers dies, at which point I'll get rid of the whole thing. Problem solved through redneck engineering!
22 мар 2019
