Hey fellas just a general question, im looking at one of these and it says it operates from 0 to 6 amps.

Does this mean just say if its connected to a power supply with a lot of amps it will always draw 6 amps unless i regulate it?

 

Hey fellas just a general question, im looking at one of these and it says it operates from 0 to 6 amps.

Does this mean just say if its connected to a power supply with a lot of amps it will always draw 6 amps unless i regulate it?

I means that if you supply it with 0VDC input it will draw 0A.
As you increase the supply voltage to 12VDC the current will increase to 6A for a typical TEC1-12706 12V 72W TEC.

 

ahh cheers mate

 

ahh cheers mate

Another way of saying it is that a TEC behaves a lot like a low ohms resistor, ~1Ω depending on the model. This analogy fails at low voltage. I believe a TEC won't conduct at all until it sees about 0.7V, like a diode.

 

V's & A's are general specs

you can likely feed it 20v but clamp the amps to say 4. all depends on how you wish to control it.

 

V's & A's are general specs

you can likely feed it 20v but clamp the amps to say 4. all depends on how you wish to control it.

If you clamp the current to 4A, the voltage across the TEC is no longer 20V. The voltage has to fall based on the resistance of the TEC at 4A.

In other words, the power supply that "clamps" current to 4A, in effect, drops the voltage until the current is 4A.

 

V's & A's are general specs...

"General specs" is an oxymoron. The conditions which define the specs are usually available, for instance maximum continuous current will be specified at some temperature. The conditions are often difficult to achieve in real life, since they are chosen to make the part look as good as possible.