"Elricko? Vodkadaddy? John? Are you guys still around this forum? I haven't been involved much (read: any) sine early 2007, but have a new topic as enumerated below...

Up until now, I have been an ice-in-a-cooler-with-water user. However, living in a city in a desert nowadays, the ""cost"" of the ice every run has begun to bother me. The last several weeks (possibly longer, tough to recall exactly) I have surfed the internet for other ways of cooling. Portable water chillers (electric) presented a viable option - problem is the initial cost. Upwards of several hundred dollars!!! Needless to say, a little out of my range to simply eliminate the need for buying ice. Evaporative coolers (home-made) then caught my eye, but that can only get the water to near the wet-bulb temperature and requires quite a bulky setup to achieve any appreciable water cooling. I know - I tried it. My most recent run I gave the copper coil in the ice bath method by Elricko a shot. It worked alright, using the least amount of ice of any system I've tried. At one point, I used a cooling system involving a radiator with fan immediately on exiting water, then through a coil in a tub of water with a mini-fridge cooling element immersed in the tub, and finally back into a cooler with ice to be pumped back into the input. Definitely the most elaborate setup, but it didn't prove any better as the mini-fridge element just couldn't keep up with the heat!

My latest brain-child: a thermoelectric cooling setup. Question is this: is there anyone out there who has tried this and succeeded? If so, would you mind posting the successful design/setup? If it was unsuccessful, could you provide the design/setup and possible causes it did not work? If you haven't tried it, but know what a thermoelectric module (peltier module) is and how it work, do you have any ideas about the best way to implement them for chilling the cooling water? Here in a couple of days, I will have a design finished for a system utilizing TEC modules and will post it with a narrative and hopefully some drawings/sketches. Until then, I would appreciate any knowledge you could throw my way."