Clive, when I was researching dehumidifier designs for my thesis project about 6 years ago, your video on a white version of one of these was incredibly useful and I cited you in my research. That video was such a great help to understand how these things functioned, thank you!

At moments of madness in the world your little corner of the internet is harmonious and peaceful Clive. Keep up the great work! 🙂

I just LOVE thermocouples, so simple yet so intriguing...from peltier dehumidifiers to radio-isotope thermoelectric generators.

He should have sent a second package with a 5 gallon bucket of milk.

Well done Clive, you can read my native language quite well! Thumbs up! Greets from your Dutch fan!

You make the simple stuff fun and educational.

Dehumidifier so huge that he's got his own proper name, Christopher 😂

Love your videos Clive,you explaine them in great details.Thank you.

The translations are spot on! Cheers from Flanders!

You done hit 600k! Congrats clive!

Your method of explaining, and exploring new systems/designs are very similar to my own 😅 I had watched your video months ago for the white dehumidifier, and a friend sent this to me tonight because I was talking about TEC units. Keep up the good work in educating and exploring!

For those those playing at home, if you give a TEC electrical power to change temperature, it's the Peltier effect. If you use the opposite, it's the Seebeck effect.

Congrats on 600k! Time to blow up something to celebrate.

Dude your voice is so relaxing. I just listened to this video in the background while doing something else, without even watching.

I’ve got exactly this. Except it’s white. And was bought from Maplins quite some time ago. Exactly the same melty behaviour occurred too. One day just before going to work and leaving it on all day as usual I, for some reason, just decided to reach down and feel the pluggery area, which felt alarmingly hot. I pulled the plug out, but what happened instead was molten plastic formed strands leaving one of the pin sockets still attached to the connector, the other came with the cable side! Some time later after putting it aside, (and as Maplin had gone) I fitted a fairly hefty barrel jack arrangement drilled above the molten socket area. I took the molten socket out and left it vacant. It worked quite well for a long time like that, but we never (at my wife’s insistence) ran it unattended. I recommend nobody runs this model unattended, it’s clearly a fire risk. The thing no longer works for other reasons. It’s out in the shed, where I expect it will heal or see the error of its ways one day when I bring it in again.

So based on those specs this dehumidifier works best in the amazon rain forest...

Hi Clive, KZfaq showed me a old vid of yours where you stripped a similar model on October 2014. Keep up the good work fella

I had one on my sailboat and it was great in a locker that got bad condensation, dried it right up. But they won't work on a very large space. I did run a full sized compressor one too during the New York winter, helped keep down condensation on the whole boat. Ah the fun days of shoveling three feet of snow off of your boat deck!

I did my first repair using your techniques, I knew watching your fabulous videos would pay off :D I bought a peltier de-humidifier off Amazon for my front room. The room has an exposed narrow vertical beam of stone in the middle of the window ( its a normal 2 bed terraced town house). The stone has been plastered over but in winter the cold penetrates the stone and draws condensation to the window and bottom of the double glazed units. I was sick to death of buying those granulated dehumidifiers, they filled up over a week. Long story short, the one from Amazon is of a good build quality but wouldn't do its job. I took it apart, nice 'full' switch, Led's work, button works, multimeter out, voltages on input 12V, 12V at stages on board, 5V at microprocessor, erratic voltages at transistor output to pelitier. Looked at it under a magnifier lens and solder looked bad. Re-flowed solder on tranny, it works! I put the unit about 4 inches from stonework and leave it on when I am at home. It collects enough water to get nearly to its tripping point (there is a float inside the collector) every 3 days or so, about 400ml (it has a 1 litre tank). It depends how cold outside and whether or not I put the heating on in that room. The rooms floor is boarded over a cavity. These houses are built on raw compressed sand and vented at floor level to the outside, under the floor. So I guess that room is always going to have musty damp air. However I must say this unit has eliminated almost completely the smell and no condensation has appeared on the windows, or more importantly the stone since using the unit. I was buying those granulated dehumidifiers at a rate of 1 to 2 a week at a cost of 69p each (pound shop). That unit will never cost that in electric per week and it runs from a wall wart, which gets quite warm but not worryingly hot. I guess for me, this electric unit is a cheaper option and there is nothing to throw into land fill every week. I wonder if anything can be done with the liquid from the granulated units as I imagine it would be very salty stuff, maybe use as a weed killer lol :) Sorry for such a long comment and, as ever, many thanks for your vids and much love, J x

I have a similar small unit, opened it up and replaced the fan with a noctua one. Went from being able to tell it was on in the next room to needing to check it visually every few days because even when I'm right next to it I don't know it's working. Great upgrade!

15:42 BC 2018 - not that old, only four thousand and thirty-six years! :-D

Your Dutch isn't bad at all Clive ;-)

Unless the technology evolves I can't see the point of wasting 60 watts to barely condense any water, and what you do condense from the air in the average room will be replaced by drafts/doors opening in the space you are trying to dry. I have got good results from 600 watt portable condenser units, great for drying laundry indoors in a small room in winter when you have the heating on anyway, work out cheaper than a tumble dryer. In reverse mode, Peltier devices are great for generating electricity from camping stoves, etc, to generate power to charge a mobile phone when camping - charge while you cook.

I had similar melting of a connector like that on a 12V fridge. I found an XT60 a much more suitable replacement as a connector.

Thanks - i have enjoyed your show

I have almost the exact same model but even larger. Works well for being so much smaller than a standard dehumidifier.

Thank you Clive.

I like these solid state ones though. They are quiet and you can dry out your bedroom all day and night. I have inherited the cabin from my grandfather and had to throw out most of the furniture because of the moisture and black mold. I put one of these in almost every room and two in the kitchen and run the whole thing off three large solar panels. Granted, I have added a few more electronic components, but this stuff has kept my cabin dry throughout the year for three years now. I wouldn't want to miss it.

Love your Dutch man, and you too obviously😘 (I knew it was dutch when I saw the speculaaspop (massive cookie))

Nothing like a nice piece of Trim on a Sunday morning.

It is nice to see that there are other fans from the Netherlands as well. So Clive, if you ever going to visit Holland, please let us know so we could bring you typical dutch stuff like drop, speculaas, pepernoten en stroopwafels.

christopher is indeed a great man

The "reverse" effect of thermocouple junctions is employed by RTGs, Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators. A mass of Plutonium 238 undergoes alpha decay, generating a significant amount of heat on one side. The other is heatsinked to radiate into space typically. Notable uses have been the Mars Curiosity Rover (MSL), the two Voyager probes, and the Apollo ALSEPs left on the Moon. There have been Soviet lighthouses using them as well!

I have a very similar unit, and had to return the previous one as the plug (as you've shown) started to melt! I have to say it's a fairly effective, I leave it running next to my laundry airer and it'll fill its tank in about a week.

I have one of these in a small room used as a wardrobe about 10x6. It's been going for many years and no mouldy cloths.

I'll definitely keep an eye out for dehumidifiers in the future! It's one of the few household electronics, so far, that I haven't ventured to tear down. Maybe the wife won't mind if I open up the one we have later...lol

Love you Big Clive ! Man ! Your a Great teacher !!!

I believe that power supply is a number 4 on my toaster, lightly crispy and just a dash of black on there. Perfectly toasted!

Wow now I know how those electric coolers work!

Those Peltiers are bloody clever devices.

2:30 - 30 degrees is definitely warm, but note that in some parts of the world, that might be a normal indoor temperature. Over here in Australia, that would still be on the warmer side, and we'd probably put on the air-conditioner by that point, but high 20s indoors are pretty normal temperatures during summer. However, point taken about the performance being based on "ideal" situations that are not going to be common in much of the world.

Thanks Christopher for you contribution & thanks Clive for taking it apart. So it was the single shot thermal cut out that killed it. I’ve been fascinated by Peltier plates, there is one in my stove fan to drive the motor. I’m pretty sure Clive has done a video on these devices in the past. 👍💯

I live in Australia I tryed a very similar device to try and remove some of the dampness in my poorly ventilated bathroom. I found that in a relative humid and warm environment it to be completely ineffective about 3ml collected per week and in consumed 25W. The solution was a box fan to blow into hallway after showers where it is better ventilated by open windows and air conditioning.

Your dutch pronounciation is fantastisch👌😂

Clive, it's cute that you think that's a big dehumidifier. The ones sold in Canada hold at least 10 litres and have a compressor like an AC. :D

I love how you show us every function of a device that we are never going to buy simply because its broken and you tell us at the end of the video it's just a piece of junk lol. Classic

It still amazes me that an electric current can cause a cold side on just a connection to another conductor. I always believed it would cause heat due to resistance. I only learned of peltier cooling a few days ago.

Man I love ALDI!

30c sweltering hot lmao, here in Australia, 30c is our winters!

That reminds me of an old CPU heatsink in so many ways, even the dried out thermal paste.

Love the way he said cookie. Haha. The accent made it funny.

Peltiers have fascinated me for years. There's some fairly recent research into creating much more efficient TECs, which I hope become more mainstream. Another cool patent I've seen recently is that AMD may be using ultra thin TECs between CPU and memory chips to help transfer heat better once they start 3D stacking their chips. Super neat!

If you've got one of these then save the condensate, it makes for a pretty clean distilled water substitute ideal for irons etc

I have a cool box based on the same principle (but with a fan on the cool side too, as you were expecting) and it is really quite effective but probably not very efficient electrically. 240v or 12v, which is useful for pre-cooling before going away. Over 10 years old and still going strong.

Clive, you rock! You aught be a household name by now.

I had no idea Peltiers were based on thermocouple technology. I suppose I read "solid state" and my brain substituted "semiconductor". Thanks, Clive. They might be inefficient, but (in generation mode) were allegedly used during WW2 to power spy radios. This mechanism powers many small space vehicles including Voyagers 1 and 2. They're also useful in the classic cooling mode for chilling sensitive front-end amplifiers well below ambient temperature, where all the K's matter.

Clive: based on an ambient temperature of 30°C, which is *absolutely* sweltering. Australians without air conditioning: Uhh, I mean, you're not wrong, but also that's just the lower limit of what we'd consider "hot". It's when it hits 38°C that you really start suffering.

I run one of these 24/7 in my workshop. The fans wear out eventually so I retro fit a ball bearing type fan and a another year or two out them.

The fan is not just to keep the hot side tool "to avoid damage". These TEC devices will achieve a given temp reduction (say 18degC) so if you want the cool side to be cold enough to condense water out of damp air passing over the fins, you have to keep the hot side cool too. I have a TEC-based 12v portable fridge and that works the same way - the inside can only ever get a fixed temp reduction on the air passing over the outside hot fins.

Hello Clive. Those fans are more commonly used in computers; that one looks like a standard 120mm fan to me. PC fans nearly always have symbols on their sides. There will be two arrows: one shows which way the blades go and the other shows which way the air goes.

Clive calls 30 degrees sweltering hot. Meanwhile I Australia.... I was looking at my local weather forecast earlier, and thinking how good it is that we're cooling off with a maximum of just 32 in the next week. 😂

Where I have seen this work was a cooler for camping. It maintained the cold the entire trip plugged into the lighter.

I've had a few of this style of dehumidifiers and I've found that they always break down after a few months. I eventually got myself one of those desiccant dehumidifiers instead and it works so much better.

tec's are nice to play with.

Nice Dutch Clive :).

I use a home brewed arduino controlled version to keep the condensation on my lathe under control but didn’t think of adding a thermal cutout on the hot side , i did fit one to the cold side to stop it freezing up so i may have to modify the unit and my sketch and fit a hot side cut out . Thanks for the excellent video Clive !

I'd really like to see a new mre and a metal detector wand.....new series...dinner and a schematic

Lekkere speculaas pop. The big cookie is called an speculaas doll. And it is very good.

We had a Land Rover 'fridge for our secret office milk stash. It was a super-insulated toploader armrest design. It always had a beautiful white crystal of frozen dense ice covering the TEC.

30 degrees is a beautiful day where I live. That's only 86F!

600K! You need to do something special! :D

I had that exact same model, with the same exact problem.

XT60 connectors are my favourites for this kind of retrofit

I have had one of these for several years in my storage room which used to get very damp and even mouldy especially in winter on one wall which has the cold water pipe running along the skirting area. Pretty much cured it all year round by two to three years ago. Just wipe down with cold water as insurance against fungal build up every few months or so as the walls also dry quickly now, no sweat. One thing I noticed a few years back which may have coincided with the improvement was that the noise has greatly reduced. I wonder if I didn't connect up quite snugly enough on original installment and it could have been ready to overload. I think it is a design flaw resulting in the tick and cross symbols. There is no noticeable 'click' to inform you that it is absolutely 'in'. I have an Epson printer with similar connectivity. Sorry to hear yours and others have been faulty but in full working order these are little beauties.

I have exactly the same one down in the cellar. I have to turn it off every so often because it actually freezes up into a big block of ice on the front

I have one of this type in the garage, one upstairs in my house & one in the conservatory (& a dessicant type one downstairs in my house, that's the main dehumidifier). They do collect a fair bit of water (approx 50 to 100 ml a day) but do tend to ice up at lower temps (sub 10 deg. C).

This Peltier element setup is exactly how these cheap 12V car fridges work also. Pretty cool concept applied there.

I've always wanted to know how it worked. never heard of that little device, Thermal electric cooler very interesting.

I had one exactly like that in white from Aldi, it worked excellently up until the point the plug melted and it didn't anymore.

Peltier cooling is always less than refrigeration/compressor/evaporator. BUT, Peltier effect is so much more economical to operate. If you have a lot of moisture to remove, Peltier is not for you. You will have to pay! Yeh, it’s a trade off!! 👍👍👍

re-subscribed to your channel. Apparently your channel was one of the ones that youtube dropped my subscription for a while ago, and I have so many you got missed when I was putting them back. Anyway, I should be getting your channel updates again :D

I bought a box of raw Peltier plates. Why? For fun, of course! Running them with the cold side exposed and the hot side properly cooled will result in substantial ice very quickly. One is a very large one that I haven't figured out an effective way to keep it cool when running at full power. It's a powerful one. IIRC it's like 200w. Even computer grade heat sinks allow it to get uncomfortably hot, and I don't want to blow it up. I've also got a peltier mini-fridge and a peltier drink cup cooler. The latter can also build substantial ice on it if I don't have a drink sitting on it while set for full power. These things are just so neat! :D Also, use computer-grade thermal compound to replace the goop they put in there. It's what I use, but I also work on computers a lot, so have a lot of it. It'll improve transfer efficiency. You can also get compounds designed for low temperature operation, or for ultra long service life.

In 1986, when domestic dehumidifiers were quite a new thing on the market, I bought a Toshiba DryMINI compressor dehumidifier. Quite heavy, and more foursquare in design than today's units, it has a mostly metal body (measuring 230mm by 340mm by 47mm high). It was expensive at the time, £200, as they were not in general distribution and I got it from a specialist heating/electrical place. It's rated at 199W, 1.5 Amps. I wanted it for my room at the time, which was on an exposed corner of the building, no cavity wall insulation, no central heating and single-glazed metal-frame windows. While there was no water ingress from outside, moisture-laden air from elsewhere in the house condensed in there, and things were getting mildewed. I installed the Toshiba DryMINI, and kept the draught-excluded door shut so that only the air in that room was processed. I decided to measure the water extracted. In the first 48 hours of operation (not running it at night, in case it sucked all the fluids out my body and I awoke in the morning a desiccated corpse), the DryMINI extracted TEN PINTS (5.68 litres) of water from the air in the room. I was impressed. And I am still impressed today because 34 years later it is still going strong! The fan has become ever so slightly rattle-y because the bearings must be a little worn (but the machine has always been incredibly quiet in operation). So, hats off to Toshiba for a durable product! I am a huge believer in dehumidifiers for here in the West of Scotland.

I think it's worth noting that if the net heat generated is useful (i.e. in addition too or instead of simple electric space heating) then all types of electric dehumidifiers are 100%+ efficient.

"30⁰" "swelteringly hot" Ah, that's adorable.

30°C is upper limits for u , that's a normal day here in South Africa :P Hope u have an amazing day :)

congrats on 600k subs

Yay Fontus! LOL

as allways , wealth is the best cushion against reality.. I define wealth as 'a guaranteed income without the need to work'.

I've had a very similar dehumidifier with the same sort of plug exhibit the exact same problem. The connectors are crap, so I hard wired it.

In my humble opinion, companies add too much thermal compound to their heatsinks. The compound is there to smooth out any irregularities and tiny pits in the metal so increasing the surface area of the metal parts when pushed together. The conductivity of a good thermal paste is around 8.5 W/mK but it's 205 W/mK for aluminium so the compound actually acts as a thermal insulator when too much is used.

A new name for this contraption, the Horridifier

In Canada, plugs like that tend to max out at 120v 7A. If that one was running twice the voltage at 5A, I can see why that might be an issue ...

You say "from Lidl" but the title says "Aldi" ... .oO

The problem with the solar panel thing is, on sunny days, humidity is already going to be lower, unless it just rained. Humidity will be the highest on cloudy days.

thanx !!!

Hello 👍 have a great night everyone. Another good video to watch ☕☕

The thermal paste will often dry out, but it usually takes some time. So long as it's not disturbed, it's usually still relatively effective. Once you remove the heat sink though, you'd definitely want to clean it off and re-apply some thermal paste to the unit before re-assembling it.

The thermoelectric thingies use semiconductors rather than metals- you can make semiconductors very electrically dissimilar to each other (p Vs n type) so you get a bigger effect+ metals are a bit too thermally conductive to perform well (the heat flows backwards)

Heatsink compound goes hard after a few years. It does it’s job still but not always as well. It’s goal is to fill the air gaps with a material that will conduct heat.