[davidpretorius]

Hi Guys,

well success. Whilst waiting for the remainder of my family to arrive for my eldest 6th birthday party, I gallantly told the wife and sister and law I would go down to the garage to supervise the kids riding their bikes.

Once down there, out came the tools and i made the final modification to my cooling system. I will take some photos tonight.

Basically it is a peltier cooler out of a $20 - $30 12 volt car fridge you can buy from retail shops. This has been attached to a 2mm round aluminium plate with 3 little fans then blowing the cold air onto and around the mirror cell. It is 90% sealed as i have also attached a .6mm aluminium sheet so i can screw to the mirror cell where the locking screws normally go.

Bird was very kind in donating his old cooling system, so i have stripped this old 2m plate from that.

Further improvements are needed, but at the end of the day, the cooling rate has increased from less than 2 degrees an hour to around 5 degrees an hour. The 2mm plate is too wide to fit inside behind the mirror and an insulating separator would also increase this rate.

There are 4 fans all up, one large one cooling the heat sink and three small ones. There is one 4amp peltier. I had the system running on a 7amp hour battery and it went well for 1.5 hours. I then plugged directly onto the battery, a 6amp smartec battery charger and the system got an extra boost and kept going.

Total costs, well $30 for fridge cooler, a local engineering shop here reckons 20 - 30 to drill and cut a templated 2mm plate. So well under $100.

But for a start, i am very happy. I was able to get down to 10 degrees with an ambient of 8.8 by 10pm after starting proceedings at 8pm from an initial temp in the garage of 22 degrees. It makes looking at saturn a lot easier!!!