For a while now I have had some Kryotherm Frost-74 peltier-units (you can buy them at TE Distributing) lying around, just begging to be used. I never had the time, until I got a couple of weeks off, because the simulators were all booked (see About me in the Menu if you're interested). I bought a  power-supply kit from Conrad (Nr.: 195847 / NT255) which would deliver the power required by the peltier. It allows me to regulate the output power from 0 - 30 V and 0 - 6.5 A. The idea was to have it all build into my big-tower case, with some fancy LCD-displays on the front telling me how many Amps and Volts I had selected and what the temperature of the hot and cold side of the peltier was.

I started by choosing a casing for the power and control unit. I had an old 2x cd-rom player lying around, which I promptly disemboweled. After soldering together the power-unit I placed it inside the casing.

Then I took a 5½" bay-cover, in which I installed 2 LCD-displays , one for the voltage and one for the amperes. Under these LCD-displays I installed 3 potentiometers, one for voltage selection, one for voltage-fine selection and another one for amperes selection. To the left there are also 2 switches, one for on/off selection of the power-unit and the displays (the right one) and one for selecting the display back-light (it's on in the picture).

Then I took another 5½" bay-cover, in which I also installed 2 LCD-displays, but this time they were for monitoring the temperature of the hot and cold side of the peltier.

I decided to cool the peltier with the best cooler available which a mere mortal could still afford, the GlobalWin FDP-32 (Left). This huge mother doesn't fit in any system, because of the condensators which are often found right around the cpu-socket. This was however no problem, since the GlobaWin would be elevated by another 9 mm from the peltier (4 mm) and the aluminum cold-plate (5 mm). I used CircuitWorks Silver Conductive Grease (CW7100) which I bought from Plycon. The Panaflo Orb (right), which I also considered, looks cool but the GlobalWin is just a bit better.

Here is a picture of all the hardware that I had to build into my bigtower. The biggest problem was the enormous 300 VA transformer. I placed it on top of the PC power supply and attached it to the bottom 2 screws of the case-fan I have up there. In the picture you can also see the two heatsinks which are used to cool 2 power-transistors (6.5 A each) which were placed in front of the case-fan.

And here is my computer with everything build in. Because I wanted the fan on the GlobalWin to run as soon as I turned on the peltier-system I had to disconnect it from the motherboard and hook it to the 15 V output of the 300 VA transformer. However as it turned out later, the output (after conversion to DC) was still fluctuating between 11.5 V and 13.5 V every 2 seconds. This unfortunately was too much strain for the fan and it burned out. I installed a new one and will probably try to equalize the DC output with a condensator, but I still haven't looked into it properly yet.