I have recently bought TEC 12706 device from Sunrom.com; The specification says that the device can draw more than 6A current at 15.4V and internal resistance is ~2 ohms. But when I measured the internal resistance, the device shown ~6.5ohms and when I powered it using 12V PC SMPS, the device did not draw anything beyond 1.6A. I had tried connecting the device to my fully charged inverter battery (12v 120Ah) measuring a float voltage of ~13.5V. To my surprise, the device drew just over 2A max.
I was using a slightly larger heatsink with a cooling fan on the hot side and was keeping the cold side open.
- The SMPS can easily supply 10A.
- Heatsink was typically 3 times the area of the peltier device
What could be wrong in my configuration?
Datasheet: http://hackerstore.nl/PDFs/TEC1-12706.pdf