I was off camping with some friends this past weekend and one of them had one of these with him.
I’ve some very limited experience with thermoelectric technology such as Peltier devices but hadn’t see one of these.
I agree that 70 lumens for $120 doesn’t like much but considering you get those lumens off a single tealight candle it’s not bad. And I will say it was very well built.
Cool!
That’s pretty cool! I’d get one if it cost less but it looks fragile and I tend to break things. :zipper_mouth_face:
Thanks for sharing .
That's very cool .
One of the first useful devices I've seen that uses the Seebeck effect!
Very cool
Don’t forget all the water heaters and gas furnaces that have pilot lights… pilot light heats a thermocouple which opens the gas valve. If the pilot light goes out, no gas will flow.
Zombie apocalypse must have.
Super cool, I just had found some Pelletier elements yesterday. I am definitely goin to try this.
I guess 300mA for a XML would give about the same light output so we need about 1W…
I would like to know how this looked inside. I see some heatsink underneath the candle and a metal part behind?!?
Have you seen essential things?
When the door on the front is opened the tray for the candle slides out. I’m not sure why but the candle is surrounded by a heat sink. I don’t think there is much if any heat radiating from the side of the tealight and even if it was, the sink was not connected in any way to the upper device.
When the door is closed, the candle moves into position under a rectangular, stainless steel box. I assume there is a Peltier or similar component in there. Behind that box, the full width of the lantern is a heat sink, though you can’t quite see it in the pictures.
The top portion housing the LEDs sits on telescoping struts, it can be moved fore and aft and rotated to face up or down.
I’d like to play around with one a bit, I’d be curious to see if adding a fan near the heat sink would increase output. I’m also wondering if those “struts” are the electrical conduit to the LEDs. If so I’d like to see what voltage it’s providing, maybe even open the circuit and see what kind of amperage.
I’ll see if my buddy will offer it up for a little experimentation.
That would be great if it had an output port to charge phones/tablets, etc.
Probably need to be larger for that kind of output, though.
I am tidying up and found some Peltier elements and a heatsink and a shiny metal piece…than i had a short blackout…and …I found myself glueing and soldering it together…measured voltage 1-2V current some hundreds mA…looked around the table and found a sk68 pill and a filmbox…
Not bad for first attempt, but the shiny metal is iron and conducts really bad, so the most heat is on the upper side but the Peltier is on underside. If I hold it direct over the candle it doubles output. Picture makes it brighter than it was, it’s like a higher moonlight mode right now.
I have 3 or 4 peltiers and I will find some other material for this…