They make these pads, I cant remember the name of them but I bet fordum knows, just seems like something he would have in the wordly head of his, but anyway they take in voltage and produce cold on one side and heat on the other.
I can't decide if this makes me feel like Yoda, or Cliff from Cheers...........
Anyway, its called the Peltier effect.....
Named after a French physicist Jean Charles Athanase Peltier.
Basically its a thermocouple in reverse.
If you have two dissimilar metals joined, and heat the junction, a voltage is produced.
That, by the way, is called the Seebeck effect, named after the Baltic German physicist Thomas Johann Seebeck.
The Peltier effect occurs when you put a voltage across the junction. One side gets hot, the other side gets cold.
Sort of like the effect of Maxwell's demon.
I'll let you look that one up.
The modules are readily available, but are used mostly for cooling. They are very limited in their use, and are often pushed way beyond their capabilities.
Such as the solid state ice chests that you see for sale.
If you stay within their limits, they work very well.
In this case, you could probably make it work OK, but it would not be cost effective at all.
A module big enough to heat up the tank would be costly, plus you would have to put a control on it.
Since it needs a temp differential to work effectively, it would not do well trying to dump cold into below zero air.
But, once it had engine heat under the hood to work with, it would very quickly try to get too hot and might melt the plastic bottle unless its controlled.
And the controller costs a lot too.
Personally, if I wanted warm water on the windshield, I would find a small cheap 12V pump and a thermostat.
Lay a piece of stainless steel tubing close to the exhaust manifold, with some loops before and after to increase the distance and stop the heat from going too far.
Then some high temp rubber hose from the tubing to the pump and tank.
Use an antifreeze solution in the bottle, and set the thermostat at about 80 degrees.
When the engine is cranked, the pump comes on and starts circulating the fluid through tubing from the bottle and back.
The manifold would heat up quickly, and therefore so would the bottle of fluid.
After the bottle got to 80, the pump would stop, and the small amount of fluid in the steel tubing would boil away.
Since the end would be open to the tank, there would be no pressure buildup. The rubber hose and coil would stop the heat from getting to the pump or tank, and unless you had a buildup of scale in the tube, it should last a long time.
There is actually a better way that does not involve a pump using a steam pulse setup which would use the heat to pump the fluid, but you would still have to have some way to turn it off or it would boil all the washer fluid.
I used to build them to humidify the air in rooms with freestanding gas heaters. They were neat, and gave out little puffs of steam with no moving parts. Just a pan of water and some fine copper tubing.
so i have been stuck on finding a way to heat my washer fluid and this is what i came up with.
