Keurig Coffee Maker Autopsy

After about 10 years of faithful service, my Keurig coffee maker finally expired from old age.  

Normally this would be a period of great sorrow since that meant that I was no longer able to get the life-sustaining elixir that I disparately needed.  

Thankfully machine died just in time for Christmas and I welcomed a new addition to the family just in time since I was just on the cusp of experiencing caffeine withdrawal.

With my new machine now performing its life-saving duties, the question became what to do with my old Keurig? 

If you have been a fairly regular reader, you should be aware that I always like to salvage things that would otherwise end up as e-waste,  So I wanted to see what I could do to have my old Keurig live on in a future project. 

Harvesting Electronic Components

We seem to live in a world today where what was once the latest and greatest in tech gizmos very quickly become obsolete and subsequently are disposed of as useless junk.

Often times, the device in question for the most part still works fine, it perhaps just isn't as fast as the next new thing or it doesn't have the latest cool features.

Thankfully a lot of people will make an effort to ensure that their electronic orphans go to a proper home, be it by being donated to a charitable cause, or routing them to the local e-waste recycling center.

In my line of work, I come across a lot of desktop computers that have gotten too long in the tooth to be used in a typical business setting.

While they no longer pass muster in their old life, after a bit of a tune up and a full scrubbing of the hard disks, I often can find new homes for those old PCs by donating them to a local charity that runs a small computer lab for kids to use.

Occasionally I do come across a computer that is a total basket case in which no amount of polishing will make it shine again.

While I could simply just toss the whole thing into the e-waste bin myself, I have found that these old machines still have parts that can still live on as part of something else.

We just need to bring in the harvest, so to speak.

The Wood Stove Eco Fan Revisited

A few weeks ago I built a very simple wood stove fan using a couple of computer CPU heat sinks, a TEC wafer, a motor from a CD ROM drive and a home made fan.

At that time I was quite satisfied in how the heat sinks and the TEC were able to provide enough power to drive the motor, however I was just not very satisfied in the design of the fan blade.  The fan spun at a good clip, but it just wasn't moving much air. More of a flaw in the design of the fan blades than anything else.

A week later, inspiration hit at my trip to the Surplus store

Building a Wood Stove Eco Fan

Towards the end of last winter, the squirrel cage fan in my wood stove gave up the ghost.

Pricing out a replacement fan for my type of wood stove almost made me wonder if they were also tossing in a new stove with the price of the fan. Looking for alternative ideas, I didn't have to go no further than to my parents house.

My parents have heated their home with a couple of wood stoves for many years, with the heat from these stoves being distributed by fans that get their power from the heat generated by the woodstoves themselves. Though much cheaper than the replacement fan for my stove, I felt that even those fans were a bit too pricy for my tastes.

Looking at my parent's fan a bit more closely, I noticed that there seemed to be some sort of magic wafer that was mounted in the middle of the metal framework of the fan. That wafer was wired up to the fan motor and was providing the motor its power. It all looked pretty simple - assuming I could get one of those magic wafers.

A quick search on Instructables and YouTube, gave me the answer, since there are quite a few people on those sites that have built these gadgets. The magic wafer is in fact a  thermoelectric cooling (TEC) module.  These modules work by generating electricity if one side of the wafer is cooler than the other side. In the case of the stove fan, the electricity is generated by having a piece of metal pull heat into one side of the wafer, while a metal heat sink pulls heat away on the other side of the wafer.

A quick look on ebay showed that I could have one of those TEC wafers for less than $3.

An idea began to form....