It was a nice intro about how power shutoffs impact people with
different means.
It doesn't seem the startup is intent on addressing this at all.
I dont think leasing a cube to preserve luxury food is targeted
at that market.
Having a cube that requires USB-C charging is also a gamble when
your power is cut off.
Though the 5L storage container might
not be based on USB charging at all.
Hopefully whatever gives it energy will store enough of it
for 70h - 90h without requiring more energy.
"""
r. She had been researching how power shutoffs in California, which are intended to limit wildfire risk, had disproportionate effects on people of different means.
She noticed that utilities were spending more on generators and microgrids in wealthier communities, leaving smaller, poorer communities in the lurch. “I saw the impact of what happens during a 56-hour shutoff if you’re a small business and your refrigerator loses power and all of a sudden you have to buy more inventory,” she told TechCrunch. “That was kind of this ‘ah ha’ moment.”
""
Does insulin need to be stored refrigerated? I would have thought with the number of people dependent on it, they would have found a more resilient solution by now...
Heh. I'm not diabetic, so I don't know about all possible formulations. We had to give our cat insulin for a few months (until a pancreatic inflammation - thankfully - resolved), and we accidentally ruined a vial by leaving it out of the fridge overnight. I have also read about emergency deliveries of insulin during power outages - eg, after hurricanes. So, I hope you're right, but at least some insulin (maybe just the cheap stuff?) requires refrigeration.
Yeah the whole bit about the power shutoffs affecting people with different means was weird in this article. I feel like it was just shoved in there to make her look like she's trying to help when realistically she's just trying to find a way to make some money. Thanks to that weird bit I spent most of the article going "Well I'm sure being able to cool 3 vials of stuff will help those marginalized store owners..?"
> It was a nice intro about how power shutoffs impact people with different means.
I wanted more details, honestly. Very, very few people in California have been subject to wildfire safety power shutoffs. That origin story made me think the whole thing might be a grift.
The statement that "very, very few people" have been affected is false, the number is in the millions[1]. Numbers have been sharply lower in 2022-2023 though we have had several mild wildfire seasons and it seems optimistic to expect that run to continue.
They don't turn off the power because of fires, they turn it off because of wind. The policy and doctrine about when and where to do it has been significantly changed, and that is why almost nobody got de-energized in '22, '23, or so far in '24.
Is this actually better than just putting in dry ice?
It seems that dry ice has 571 kJ/kg latent heat at -78.5 C sublimation, while lithium batteries have around 250 Wh/kg = 900 kJ/kg, but with batteries you have the extra weight of the refrigeration system plus whatever loss of efficiency it causes, as well as the risk of mechanical/electrical failure.
It seems that charging batteries is much cheaper though, with dry ice seemingly going for 2-6$/kg and electricity 0.1688 $/kWh = 0.04$/kg to charge batteries.
Well if you need a precise temperature (like really cold but must absolutely not freeze,) it's a lot better, and USB is absolutely everywhere including bikes nowadays, so I really get the appeal.
Because putting the tech together is only a tiny part of building a business.
I witnessed a startup disrupt a legacy $40k-a-device business with a raspberry pi and some adafruit sensors (eventually building their own boards after proving it worked), 90% of the success was from the founder's relationships and sales skills, not the tech.
Also hardware R&D is actually pretty hard. What happens if the box is dropped? Can it pass international regulations for air travel? What does your manufacturing supply chain look like? What's your acceptable QC failure rate, and how much would it cost to make that go down? How stable is the temperature anyway? Etc. etc. etc.
And yet without the tech the business wouldn't have happened. This is td-lambda credit assignment: the thing closest to the money gets most of the credit even though all the steps mattered. The attitude that xxx is 90% of success is simplistic at best and downplays the immense contributions of the opensource community that fed that easy to build device and the talented builders that put those pieces together in a novel way to solve a real problem. The team matters.
Let me expand GP's statement a little to show it's not aristocracy, and is indeed meritocracy.
Building a $40k device for cheap is amazing, but only part of the problem. After that, you need to salesmanship to get the device in front of customers, and persuasiveness to get them to try it, and business acumen to scale and provide support like the big kids do.
Once you do that, you can disrupt a $40k device with a rasp pi and some adafruit sensors.
Even if you take away that one, there's enough left that's skill over connections and "aristocracy".
It's easy to split hairs over what background can or cannot give to a company, but one thing is definitely true: An inept salesman from almost any background isn't going to close (by definition of ineptitude). I think at this point it's a matter of opinion, but I suggest it's definitely not "Just" an aristocracy and definitely is enough of a skill-based game that it's fair to call it a meritocracy.
Same way someone is able to build a $1B social media network with a LAMP stack.
I'm bootstrapping a startup and while the big player are dumping billions into sexy, expensive AI there are fundamental needs that get overlooked everyday.
Not at all. To be sure, the design is non trivial and rather impressive if it meets the claimed specs. Is it $14M non trivial though? I have a feeling their valuation is overestimating more than I am underestimating.
Software, being free, is the extreme case of this.
"How is someone able to combine a few open source libraries, do a little hacking, and disrupt ______". Yet we all know it happens, and so it's worth funding.
Exactly. TFA says "heat pump", but the imp on my shoulder says heat pumps don't scale down to palmtop size and it actually runs one of these, a thermoelectric cooler:
A private equity firm once asked the consulting firm I worked at to do a due diligence of a cold chain logistics company. It was ~5 years ago so perhaps things have changed, but some interesting tidbits:
+ Makes sense that this startup is starting with medical applications -- vaccines going bad because of poor refrigeration is a well-studied problem
+ I recall one cold-chain company being well known for its back-up battery because medical products are often stopped in customs, and the boxes cannot be plugged in. So you want boxes that have backup batteries that can remain unplugged for a few days while going through customs checks
+ High end seafood is another big application -- the company we were looking at started transporting lobster before moving upmarket
At the time there was a PE blitz to get into cold chain -- it had a lot of factors that they look for -- high margin, recession proof (at least the medical applications), etc.
> I recall one cold-chain company being well known for its back-up battery because medical products are often stopped in customs, and the boxes cannot be plugged in.
This is very interesting. Is there not a problem with battery-powered devices operating in a cargo plane? The whole point of batteries is that they have a lot of energy in them, which is why they get hot while operating and sometimes simply catch fire. I thought there were a lot of restrictions on transporting them.
I have good relationships with seafood and food distributors though have never thought battery powered cooling packing made sense here. What exactly am I missing? Even in vaccines this is a solved problem with fewer points of failure if you just add telemetry.
This doesn't sound like a suuuuper interesting application to be honest because there's already a way to do this directly, i.e. use chemically stored energy to keep stuff cool: phase change material (PCM) cool packs, especially when packaged into containers using vacuum insulated panels (VIPs, which achieve phenomenal U-values ). A PCM cool pack has a pretty constant temperature while absorbing heat and a VIP-clad container by itself has pretty phenomenal insulation already. There's no moving parts and no battery chemistry to degrade and no UNECE Dangerous Goods in these.
Hem... It's of course "cool" but... At scale of supermarkets fridges not lab specimens, especially in not-so-cold climate the needed energy to keep food cool off grid it's MASSIVE. Of course the future of a grid with most customers with local storage at least for 24h, local p.v. and negotiated charge from the grid (to help keeping the frequency, consume where there are more renewable than demand etc) is a probable one, but honestly a small refrigerated micro-fridge can't be compared, so the first part and the second part of the article are totally disconnected. The device itself might have some interesting applications but in terms of environmental limits, price, reliability I doubt it can became spread much.
If I remember from my engineering classes, the efficiency is based on temperature differential and the differential between the hot part of the refrigeration cycle and the ambient temperature I don't think is that high.
The house of the year 3000 might vent the waste heat into the water going into the water heater saving a little energy for your shower. It might time running the fridge compressor to when you make your coffee so it can use the waste heat to help heat up the water. Probably not cost effective until robots are building all the houses. Too many little pipes to run all over the place.
My house of the year 2024 already has a hot water tank that is using a heat pump to extract the heat from the ventilation air before it is sent out of the house. When you live in a cold climate this makes tons of sense.
Cold air enters the house, gets heated up to 22°C by a heat pump, circulates through the house, then gets drawn into the ventilation system where it is cooled back down to around 2 °C before going out of the house, and the extracted heat is upgraded to 60°C hot water. There is an electric heater taking the water further up in temp.
Our system is a retrofit, it draws around 1.2 kW peak and only provides hot water. For new builds, the bigger units drawing ~4kW peak are used, which provide both hot tap water and subfloor heating by water circulation.
I knew about the heat and cold recapture devices that allow for ventilation without a lot of thermal loss but I had no idea they made ones to heat water like that. Awesome.
Maybe - do you have a need to ship something that needs to be kept warm (not hot!) from/to someplace that also needs to ship something that needs to be kept cold? I can't think of anything like that but I'm sure it exists. However the logistics of getting that supply chain and the medical supply chain next to each other is hard.
>do you have a need to ship something that needs to be kept warm (not hot!) from/to someplace that also needs to ship something that needs to be kept cold?
So almost totally OT question here. Last week I was cleaning out some bottles that had held home made ginger ale (I had filled the bottles with water after drinking) and I noticed that one of them had a goopy, SCOBY-like structure floating in it. Was that the ginger bug?
Never made ginger ale from a mother, always used fresh ginger, but I should try it some time.
I don’t think the hot side gets hot enough for it to be a particularly useful heat, but it does help heat the space that the fridge is in. The rest of the fridge is cooling the surrounding space though, via whatever heat leaks in through the insulation and particularly whenever you open it.
I’ve sometimes wondered whether somehow having the hot side go outside (like with a heat pump) would make sense during the summer, so it acts as part of the air conditioning.
> I’ve sometimes wondered whether somehow having the hot side go outside (like with a heat pump) would make sense during the summer, so it acts as part of the air conditioning.
It would, but then the house needs to be build around the fridge. No moving the fridge to clean behind it. No trading it in for a different model. When it breaks you have to get a technician out for a few hours labor - there is no option to go to home depot and bring home a new one.
I don’t imagine it being quite that inflexible if it became popular, but a replacement would need to be hooked up to refrigerant lines like a mini-split system. That’s going to be a more expensive install or replacement.
It would be quite inflexible now when it’s custom and there’s no standard for such things.
It would have to be - the size of many of the parts need to be matched, so any change means a lot of changes (either that or the system is less efficient than what we have today). Also refrigerants keep changing as we discover less harmful ones, and often they are incompatible with the old so tear out the old pipes which otherwise should last a lifetime just because they are contaminated (or the wrong size)
There’s no way that would work without additional active components moving air or liquid to carry the heat away from the individual boxes. And that would be much less efficient than a one big heat pump and battery per shipping container.
I don’t think anyone is planning on using them that way though.
I shouldn’t say no way. Maybe if you cooled the boxes down to temp before stacking them in racks with spacing and they were very well insulated, so that the heat pumps almost never ran while stacked.
To the people who think this is easy because they could build this with sparkfun parts:
Hardware is fucking hard. Peltier coolers are not nearly as trivial as they sound, they're wildly inefficient and get exponentially more inefficient as the temperature differential between the sides increases. To actually get the theoretical max duration out of the batteries you need to have thermal simulations and modeling to create the interfaces on each side such that the pelt isn't just sitting there freezing one side and melting the other while nothing happens to the payload. You need to have drive electronics that allow the pelt to run at a steady state instead of slamming it on and off randomly. You need a PID loop that's tuned for the thermal mass of the enclosure and payload. Finally, you need a ton of engineering on the enclosure and insulation such that it is volume optimized for the exact maximum duration that they're targeting.
Tl;dr the coolers are inefficient enough that you need to very heavily optimize your design if you intend on making this actually work for more that a few hours.
And ideally, you have fins and a fan on both sides of the peltier element because relying on convection alone is ... complicated and will likely lead to the "freezing on one side" issue.
Side note, that's also why modern fridges and freezers all have fans on the inner side at least, it massively helps with preventing ice buildup.
I agree. I've worked with peltiers myself and they are annoying little buggers and like to break all the time. If you have good enough insulation, I have no problem believing that this device meets claims even on a modest battery pack.
The valuation is still crazy high. They were pretty smart to go after the medical field though, where you can tack on an extra zero or two on the end and no one cares.
Even if you have good enough insulation; you still have to dissipate the Peltier plates heat… which makes little believable sense to me without a hefty heat sink
Not necessarily. A good business is also self-sustaining. This doesn't appear to be the case. There's no clear sustainable margin here against reliable time-proven alternatives.
I agree this appears to be a clueless VC ripoff. However, do you recall how much bad-faith handwringing there was in the days of COVID vaccines about how incredibly difficult it was going to be to ship and store the vaccines, because they had to remain cool? As if styrofoam and thermometers were alien tech.
Vaccines required -40c temperatures, which most general purpose refrigerated transportation did not manage. Sure medical stuff already manages that in small amounts, but the COVID vaccine required population sized scale.
It was a very minor problem. They got help from the folks who own Dippin' Dots, who had made a business out of exactly that problem 3 decades ago, and some research that put more confident bounds around where and when in the distribution you absolutely needed specialty refrigeration.
Fun tangeant, Dippin Dot's as a business basically died, because nobody in the 90s was willing to pay $8 for a mildly interesting physical form of ice cream. The company managed to reinvent itself as a service provider of novel food modification techniques for bigger food production companies. They sold tech/solutions/services to make flash frozen tiny drops of fats and oils that could be mixed into things like vegetarian burger patties to make them have better mouthfeel.
They still sell Dippin Dots stuff, and in classic venues, like Kennedy Space Center, it's still $8, and it's still hella not worth it, despite the inflation between then and now.
It was a nice intro about how power shutoffs impact people with different means.
It doesn't seem the startup is intent on addressing this at all.
I dont think leasing a cube to preserve luxury food is targeted at that market.
Having a cube that requires USB-C charging is also a gamble when your power is cut off.
Though the 5L storage container might not be based on USB charging at all.
Hopefully whatever gives it energy will store enough of it for 70h - 90h without requiring more energy.
""" r. She had been researching how power shutoffs in California, which are intended to limit wildfire risk, had disproportionate effects on people of different means.
She noticed that utilities were spending more on generators and microgrids in wealthier communities, leaving smaller, poorer communities in the lurch. “I saw the impact of what happens during a 56-hour shutoff if you’re a small business and your refrigerator loses power and all of a sudden you have to buy more inventory,” she told TechCrunch. “That was kind of this ‘ah ha’ moment.” ""
> I dont think leasing a cube to preserve luxury food is targeted at that market.
As I understand the article this isn't about luxury food, but about medical samples.
It holds "four vials". Definitely looks like blood samples to me.
Insulin would be a good use, as well, and a larger market.
Does insulin need to be stored refrigerated? I would have thought with the number of people dependent on it, they would have found a more resilient solution by now...
Heh. I'm not diabetic, so I don't know about all possible formulations. We had to give our cat insulin for a few months (until a pancreatic inflammation - thankfully - resolved), and we accidentally ruined a vial by leaving it out of the fridge overnight. I have also read about emergency deliveries of insulin during power outages - eg, after hurricanes. So, I hope you're right, but at least some insulin (maybe just the cheap stuff?) requires refrigeration.
Yeah the whole bit about the power shutoffs affecting people with different means was weird in this article. I feel like it was just shoved in there to make her look like she's trying to help when realistically she's just trying to find a way to make some money. Thanks to that weird bit I spent most of the article going "Well I'm sure being able to cool 3 vials of stuff will help those marginalized store owners..?"
To be fair that is how she started. However the current business has nothing to do with power failures.
> It was a nice intro about how power shutoffs impact people with different means.
I wanted more details, honestly. Very, very few people in California have been subject to wildfire safety power shutoffs. That origin story made me think the whole thing might be a grift.
The statement that "very, very few people" have been affected is false, the number is in the millions[1]. Numbers have been sharply lower in 2022-2023 though we have had several mild wildfire seasons and it seems optimistic to expect that run to continue.
[1]https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/psps/
They don't turn off the power because of fires, they turn it off because of wind. The policy and doctrine about when and where to do it has been significantly changed, and that is why almost nobody got de-energized in '22, '23, or so far in '24.
I am not disagreeing with you, but how does that make your original statement any less false, or my statement less true?
Isn't the major issue that the wind causes downed energized power lines which then cause fires?
Is this actually better than just putting in dry ice?
It seems that dry ice has 571 kJ/kg latent heat at -78.5 C sublimation, while lithium batteries have around 250 Wh/kg = 900 kJ/kg, but with batteries you have the extra weight of the refrigeration system plus whatever loss of efficiency it causes, as well as the risk of mechanical/electrical failure.
It seems that charging batteries is much cheaper though, with dry ice seemingly going for 2-6$/kg and electricity 0.1688 $/kWh = 0.04$/kg to charge batteries.
Well if you need a precise temperature (like really cold but must absolutely not freeze,) it's a lot better, and USB is absolutely everywhere including bikes nowadays, so I really get the appeal.
How was someone able to raise $14 million by putting a Peltier chip, some batteries, and an ESP32 in a box?
Because putting the tech together is only a tiny part of building a business.
I witnessed a startup disrupt a legacy $40k-a-device business with a raspberry pi and some adafruit sensors (eventually building their own boards after proving it worked), 90% of the success was from the founder's relationships and sales skills, not the tech.
Also hardware R&D is actually pretty hard. What happens if the box is dropped? Can it pass international regulations for air travel? What does your manufacturing supply chain look like? What's your acceptable QC failure rate, and how much would it cost to make that go down? How stable is the temperature anyway? Etc. etc. etc.
And yet without the tech the business wouldn't have happened. This is td-lambda credit assignment: the thing closest to the money gets most of the credit even though all the steps mattered. The attitude that xxx is 90% of success is simplistic at best and downplays the immense contributions of the opensource community that fed that easy to build device and the talented builders that put those pieces together in a novel way to solve a real problem. The team matters.
aka aristocracy and not meritocracy
Let me expand GP's statement a little to show it's not aristocracy, and is indeed meritocracy.
Building a $40k device for cheap is amazing, but only part of the problem. After that, you need to salesmanship to get the device in front of customers, and persuasiveness to get them to try it, and business acumen to scale and provide support like the big kids do.
Once you do that, you can disrupt a $40k device with a rasp pi and some adafruit sensors.
Sales and partnerships can be more about who you know and have access to though.
Even if you take away that one, there's enough left that's skill over connections and "aristocracy".
It's easy to split hairs over what background can or cannot give to a company, but one thing is definitely true: An inept salesman from almost any background isn't going to close (by definition of ineptitude). I think at this point it's a matter of opinion, but I suggest it's definitely not "Just" an aristocracy and definitely is enough of a skill-based game that it's fair to call it a meritocracy.
Those benefit the company, not the customer. Not buying it.
Same way someone is able to build a $1B social media network with a LAMP stack.
I'm bootstrapping a startup and while the big player are dumping billions into sexy, expensive AI there are fundamental needs that get overlooked everyday.
And Dropbox is just rsync?
You're severely underestimating building a business, let alone the technology required.
Not at all. To be sure, the design is non trivial and rather impressive if it meets the claimed specs. Is it $14M non trivial though? I have a feeling their valuation is overestimating more than I am underestimating.
what is the correct value if not $14 mil, in your opinion, and why?
Software, being free, is the extreme case of this.
"How is someone able to combine a few open source libraries, do a little hacking, and disrupt ______". Yet we all know it happens, and so it's worth funding.
In fairness they built the product which is farther than a lot of more valuable companies have gotten lately.
$14 mil isn't a whole lot when your company hires software people in the US. Software people in the US are expensive.
What happens if you put 100 of these in a box? I have a feeling it's going to be tough keeping the ones in the center cool.
Exactly. TFA says "heat pump", but the imp on my shoulder says heat pumps don't scale down to palmtop size and it actually runs one of these, a thermoelectric cooler:
https://lairdthermal.com/products/thermoelectric-cooler-modu...
Efficiency is much lower than pumped-refrigerant systems. Access to a flow of cool ambient, external air will be critical.
If they all start at the correct temperature and you keep the outside ones correct, then it will be easy.
This doesn't apply if the the these packages have some internal heat source.
Peltier's are crazy inefficient, they produce a lot of heat.
The battery is an internal heat source.
Batteries don't produce heat unless they're discharging (or charging).
The thermostats in the middle of the pile would stay on the setpoint, so no energy needed or used.
A private equity firm once asked the consulting firm I worked at to do a due diligence of a cold chain logistics company. It was ~5 years ago so perhaps things have changed, but some interesting tidbits:
+ Makes sense that this startup is starting with medical applications -- vaccines going bad because of poor refrigeration is a well-studied problem
+ I recall one cold-chain company being well known for its back-up battery because medical products are often stopped in customs, and the boxes cannot be plugged in. So you want boxes that have backup batteries that can remain unplugged for a few days while going through customs checks
+ High end seafood is another big application -- the company we were looking at started transporting lobster before moving upmarket
At the time there was a PE blitz to get into cold chain -- it had a lot of factors that they look for -- high margin, recession proof (at least the medical applications), etc.
> I recall one cold-chain company being well known for its back-up battery because medical products are often stopped in customs, and the boxes cannot be plugged in.
This is very interesting. Is there not a problem with battery-powered devices operating in a cargo plane? The whole point of batteries is that they have a lot of energy in them, which is why they get hot while operating and sometimes simply catch fire. I thought there were a lot of restrictions on transporting them.
I have good relationships with seafood and food distributors though have never thought battery powered cooling packing made sense here. What exactly am I missing? Even in vaccines this is a solved problem with fewer points of failure if you just add telemetry.
> Even in vaccines this is a solved problem with fewer points of failure if you just add telemetry.
It's not a solved problem, and in fact it's a serious problem, pretty much anywhere outside the OECD.
This doesn't sound like a suuuuper interesting application to be honest because there's already a way to do this directly, i.e. use chemically stored energy to keep stuff cool: phase change material (PCM) cool packs, especially when packaged into containers using vacuum insulated panels (VIPs, which achieve phenomenal U-values ). A PCM cool pack has a pretty constant temperature while absorbing heat and a VIP-clad container by itself has pretty phenomenal insulation already. There's no moving parts and no battery chemistry to degrade and no UNECE Dangerous Goods in these.
Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40822633
Hem... It's of course "cool" but... At scale of supermarkets fridges not lab specimens, especially in not-so-cold climate the needed energy to keep food cool off grid it's MASSIVE. Of course the future of a grid with most customers with local storage at least for 24h, local p.v. and negotiated charge from the grid (to help keeping the frequency, consume where there are more renewable than demand etc) is a probable one, but honestly a small refrigerated micro-fridge can't be compared, so the first part and the second part of the article are totally disconnected. The device itself might have some interesting applications but in terms of environmental limits, price, reliability I doubt it can became spread much.
There are existing well established companies already doing this (active cooling).
https://www.worldcourier.com/
This is one we use all the time.
This is a bit of tangent but could the heat from fridges be harvested?(maybe it already is by some companies?) Would it be worth it?
If I remember from my engineering classes, the efficiency is based on temperature differential and the differential between the hot part of the refrigeration cycle and the ambient temperature I don't think is that high.
The house of the year 3000 might vent the waste heat into the water going into the water heater saving a little energy for your shower. It might time running the fridge compressor to when you make your coffee so it can use the waste heat to help heat up the water. Probably not cost effective until robots are building all the houses. Too many little pipes to run all over the place.
My house of the year 2024 already has a hot water tank that is using a heat pump to extract the heat from the ventilation air before it is sent out of the house. When you live in a cold climate this makes tons of sense.
Cold air enters the house, gets heated up to 22°C by a heat pump, circulates through the house, then gets drawn into the ventilation system where it is cooled back down to around 2 °C before going out of the house, and the extracted heat is upgraded to 60°C hot water. There is an electric heater taking the water further up in temp.
Our system is a retrofit, it draws around 1.2 kW peak and only provides hot water. For new builds, the bigger units drawing ~4kW peak are used, which provide both hot tap water and subfloor heating by water circulation.
I knew about the heat and cold recapture devices that allow for ventilation without a lot of thermal loss but I had no idea they made ones to heat water like that. Awesome.
In winter by fridge vents hot air into my house. Unfortunately it also does it in summer ...
Maybe - do you have a need to ship something that needs to be kept warm (not hot!) from/to someplace that also needs to ship something that needs to be kept cold? I can't think of anything like that but I'm sure it exists. However the logistics of getting that supply chain and the medical supply chain next to each other is hard.
>do you have a need to ship something that needs to be kept warm (not hot!) from/to someplace that also needs to ship something that needs to be kept cold?
Burritos and ice cream :-)
Burritos need to be kept hot, not warm. The warm is great temperature to breed harmful bacteria.
Warm is also great for useful bacteria, like lactobacillus. I keep my ginger bug mother jar in the cabinet above my fridge.
So almost totally OT question here. Last week I was cleaning out some bottles that had held home made ginger ale (I had filled the bottles with water after drinking) and I noticed that one of them had a goopy, SCOBY-like structure floating in it. Was that the ginger bug?
Never made ginger ale from a mother, always used fresh ginger, but I should try it some time.
Drinks and towels for first class?
Live animal + tissue sample? Is that anything?
We barely even harvest heat waste from Nuclear reactors...
It's not going to be economically viable to harvest heat waste from a fridge.
I don’t think the hot side gets hot enough for it to be a particularly useful heat, but it does help heat the space that the fridge is in. The rest of the fridge is cooling the surrounding space though, via whatever heat leaks in through the insulation and particularly whenever you open it.
I’ve sometimes wondered whether somehow having the hot side go outside (like with a heat pump) would make sense during the summer, so it acts as part of the air conditioning.
> I’ve sometimes wondered whether somehow having the hot side go outside (like with a heat pump) would make sense during the summer, so it acts as part of the air conditioning.
It would, but then the house needs to be build around the fridge. No moving the fridge to clean behind it. No trading it in for a different model. When it breaks you have to get a technician out for a few hours labor - there is no option to go to home depot and bring home a new one.
I don’t imagine it being quite that inflexible if it became popular, but a replacement would need to be hooked up to refrigerant lines like a mini-split system. That’s going to be a more expensive install or replacement.
It would be quite inflexible now when it’s custom and there’s no standard for such things.
It would have to be - the size of many of the parts need to be matched, so any change means a lot of changes (either that or the system is less efficient than what we have today). Also refrigerants keep changing as we discover less harmful ones, and often they are incompatible with the old so tear out the old pipes which otherwise should last a lifetime just because they are contaminated (or the wrong size)
Only to warm things up, not to cool them down.
Hmm. I wonder what happens when you fill a shipping container (enclosed space) with these. Can they still hold constant temperature?
Your average refrigerated truck exchanges heat with the outside, these exchange it with the inside of the truck.
Probably irrelevant for a day or two though.
There’s no way that would work without additional active components moving air or liquid to carry the heat away from the individual boxes. And that would be much less efficient than a one big heat pump and battery per shipping container.
I don’t think anyone is planning on using them that way though.
I shouldn’t say no way. Maybe if you cooled the boxes down to temp before stacking them in racks with spacing and they were very well insulated, so that the heat pumps almost never ran while stacked.
To the people who think this is easy because they could build this with sparkfun parts:
Hardware is fucking hard. Peltier coolers are not nearly as trivial as they sound, they're wildly inefficient and get exponentially more inefficient as the temperature differential between the sides increases. To actually get the theoretical max duration out of the batteries you need to have thermal simulations and modeling to create the interfaces on each side such that the pelt isn't just sitting there freezing one side and melting the other while nothing happens to the payload. You need to have drive electronics that allow the pelt to run at a steady state instead of slamming it on and off randomly. You need a PID loop that's tuned for the thermal mass of the enclosure and payload. Finally, you need a ton of engineering on the enclosure and insulation such that it is volume optimized for the exact maximum duration that they're targeting.
Tl;dr the coolers are inefficient enough that you need to very heavily optimize your design if you intend on making this actually work for more that a few hours.
And ideally, you have fins and a fan on both sides of the peltier element because relying on convection alone is ... complicated and will likely lead to the "freezing on one side" issue.
Side note, that's also why modern fridges and freezers all have fans on the inner side at least, it massively helps with preventing ice buildup.
I agree. I've worked with peltiers myself and they are annoying little buggers and like to break all the time. If you have good enough insulation, I have no problem believing that this device meets claims even on a modest battery pack.
The valuation is still crazy high. They were pretty smart to go after the medical field though, where you can tack on an extra zero or two on the end and no one cares.
Even if you have good enough insulation; you still have to dissipate the Peltier plates heat… which makes little believable sense to me without a hefty heat sink
Imagine getting funding for reinventing the cooled down container.
What did she think ? That no one was shipping cooled of items ? I get it. It's because its battery enabled and sounds eco friendly.
A business that people are willing to pay you for is a good business.
Not necessarily. A good business is also self-sustaining. This doesn't appear to be the case. There's no clear sustainable margin here against reliable time-proven alternatives.
Thanks to advances in technology a battery-powered portable refrigerator is more attractive today than it was 10 years ago.
I agree this appears to be a clueless VC ripoff. However, do you recall how much bad-faith handwringing there was in the days of COVID vaccines about how incredibly difficult it was going to be to ship and store the vaccines, because they had to remain cool? As if styrofoam and thermometers were alien tech.
Vaccines required -40c temperatures, which most general purpose refrigerated transportation did not manage. Sure medical stuff already manages that in small amounts, but the COVID vaccine required population sized scale.
It was a very minor problem. They got help from the folks who own Dippin' Dots, who had made a business out of exactly that problem 3 decades ago, and some research that put more confident bounds around where and when in the distribution you absolutely needed specialty refrigeration.
Fun tangeant, Dippin Dot's as a business basically died, because nobody in the 90s was willing to pay $8 for a mildly interesting physical form of ice cream. The company managed to reinvent itself as a service provider of novel food modification techniques for bigger food production companies. They sold tech/solutions/services to make flash frozen tiny drops of fats and oils that could be mixed into things like vegetarian burger patties to make them have better mouthfeel.
They still sell Dippin Dots stuff, and in classic venues, like Kennedy Space Center, it's still $8, and it's still hella not worth it, despite the inflation between then and now.