Klarstein thermoelectric mini fridge suddenly stopped cooling.

Les Jones said:

I had thought that the device consisted of a number of junctions in series (Both electrically and thermally.)

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My best guess of how the device/connections must look with the top ceramic layer removed:

When sdagger comes back with the requested information we may be able to work out how to get him to disconnect the Peltier device. I am reluctant to suggest unsoldering one of the wires from the PCB to the Peltier device as we don't know his ability at soldering.

Les.

Les Jones said:

I am reluctant to suggest unsoldering one of the wires from the PCB to the Peltier device as we don't know his ability at soldering.

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Understood.

According to this post at the other site, he has already removed the covers from the joins in the cables to the peltier:


Im not sure if removing and later replacing those crimp connectors is easier or harder than soldering?

At least it wouldn't damage the board.

Hi all. I think i'm too scared to even think about taking things apart further. I'm guessing this should just be scrapped as I don't want to electrocute myself trying stuff above my head?

Didn't see the last two posts before I submitted mine. I'm good at soldering btw.

sdagger said:

Didn't see the last two posts before I submitted mine. I'm good at soldering btw.

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If you feel confident with your soldering, you could try -- having made sure the fridge is switched off and unplugged -- removing the crimps (circled in green) from these wires:

(If you're confident you'll be able to solder them back together properly later; or obtain some new crimps and recrimp them.)

Set your multimeter to the lowest resistance setting -- it will be labelled something like "200 Ω"
or perhaps just "Ω"

And then test the resistance across the two wires coming from the Peltier unit.

If the reading is in the low ohms -- say 3.0 Ω ... 8.0 Ω -- then the Perltier unit is probably okay, and it would one or more components on the board that is at fault.

At that point your best course of action would be to take some good -- well lit, in focus -- photos of both sides of the board and post them here; and perhaps the experts here will be able to talk you through diagnosing the fault.

I will do just that.