Slashdot Mirror
Machine Condenses Drinking Water Out of Thin Air
longacre writes "A new $1,200 machine that uses the same amount of power as three light bulbs promises to condense drinkable water out of the air. On display at Wired Magazine's annual tech showcase, the WaterMill 'looks like a giant golf ball that has been chopped in half: it is about 3ft in diameter, made of white plastic, and is attached to the wall. It works by drawing air through filters to remove dust and particles, then cooling it to just below the temperature at which dew forms. The condensed water is passed through a self-sterilising chamber that uses microbe-busting UV light to eradicate any possibility of Legionnaires' disease or other infections. Finally, it is filtered and passed through a pipe to the owner's fridge or kitchen tap.'"
...the dehumidifier!
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Check your refrigerator or freezer for water drops or ice. If you find none, open the door over night.
This principle is so not new!
They would get much better results using one of these things in thick, humid air rather than insisting on using thin air.
... but won't spend the money on first class stamp to write to their public water authority and complain about whatever it is they think is wrong with the water supply?
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Dune or its wind traps yet.
Or that no one has mentioned another story on slashdot about extracting water from wind, even if the other one used a windmill to do so.
"He may look like an idiot, and talk like an idiot, but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot." - Duck Soup
Didn't he make a living with these machines back in the 70's? Something about moisture vaporators...
If sharing a song makes you a pirate, what do I have to share to be a ninja?
I'm somewhat sure that a communal water treatment plant achieves a better efficiency than 600 watt-hours per litre.
Don't whistle while you're pissing.
That's what it is, just vaporware !
Been around a while hasn't it? I'm sure it was on Dragons Den (UK Investment type TV show).
Uhh... am I missing something, or is it just a dehumidifer with a UV light (and maybe some antimicrobial plastic)? Here's a hint: if you are so desperate for water as to need this, there's probably very little moisture in the air anyway.
The target market for this is the ecologically-posturing super-yuppie who doesn't like bottled water but wouldn't be caught dead using (horrors!) water from the plebeian tap.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Isn't this the business Luke's uncle and aunt were in on Tatooine? Making Star Wars a reality is the most important consideration of course.
I have to keep a small bowl in the fridge which fills up with water every day from the leaking (frostless) freezer.
So my broken fridge is worth $1200 eh?
If we can solve the problem of giving it power (possibly with a hand crank and battery or some such thing), this should be sent to countries where drought is a problem.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
If these go wide-scale, wouldn't our air be drier? Which in turn would allow more water to be sucked up in the air from the nearby water bodies, which basically means you're getting your water through the air, or wireless (sic) if you will.
Real men read Slashdot articles at -1, bottom up.
Next step: protocol droids to understand the binary language of moisture vaporators!
How long will we have to wait before Linux has support for the binary language of moisture vaporators?
Regular tap water has a small amount of minerals, whereas distilled water (which this is, I presume) has none. Those minerals are actually rather critical:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_intoxication
(Of course, regular tap water is dangerous too in laaarge doses.)
I have no idea if this is an issue... Anyone have a clue? :)
Also, three lightbulbs? Watts please... Found no proper specs on the site.
.: Max Romantschuk
Those Sietch Tabr focus groups loved it.
Nowadays, you either bring all your water along in tanks or use vaps to get fresh water from seawater.
If this works reliably and with that small amount of power, I can see ships and submarines adopting this to save weight and power requirements.
I imagine such a device would be invaluable on small vessels at sea such as sailboats, etc. It sounds as though you could power this from a solar panel easily enough, so it could be used even without fuel if you prepared properly. I know that getting drinking water is often an issue for smaller boats which may not have room or power for desalination or reverse osmosis units.
According to the manufacturer's website, these things will produce "up to 12 liters of water per day". Generally, an adult needs a couple liters a day and we can assume from the "up to" the manufacturer is overstating the actual output by a bit. Still, a small boat with 3 or 4 adults could probably rely on one of these things reasonably well, I think.
You know the thing about UDP jokes? I don't care if you get it or not.
The Element Four site doesn't say, but the inane "3 lightbulbs" remark from the Guardian article suggests it uses 200-300 W to produce 12 liters of water per day, if the humidity is >30%. Assuming 200 W, that's 1750 kWh/year.
The site markets this to First World households. But is that where its value lies? I get potable water from the tap, and so does most of Europe (and I pay E 1/m^3 instead of $0,30/litre). IDK about the States. The site mentions a ludicrous amount of bottled water, is that because US tap water isn't potable or is it just a fad?
The locations that most need this (hot and dry climates) I guess would fail the "humidity >30%" criterium.
The site only compares its efficiency with that of "bottled water" production, but what we need would be a comparison with e.g. a desalinisation plant.
Sorry for rambling a bit, but it adds up to this: is this condensor something the world needs, or just another "a fool and his money are soon parted" scheme?
Both of them.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
of resources, money and energy. Old concept.
What I really need is a droid that understands the binary language of moisture vaporators!
...and we have unlimited source of power!
Mechas anyone?
They just took up to the space station a machine that makes drinking water out of PISS. Now THAT'S impressive. This thing is a glorified de-humidifier. I had one when I was a kid in my room. Minus the fancy ultraviolet thingy. Something like this will appeal to Mac owners, maybe. All style with little else to justify the price tag. It's not even efficient or eco-friendly when you get right down to it.
uses the same amount of power as three light bulbs
That's great to hear. Now how much water does it produce? I don't want to run it all week just to get 3 oz.
On a side note, let's also find a way to harness the static electricity buildup that would be generated from an ultra-low humid environment if this were deployed on a very wide-scale?
Plop a couple of huge caps on this thing harnessing static discharge, and you may find a way to perpetually power it.
(Do Slashdot posts qualify as "dibs" on patent designs? If so, I call it!)
According to the product's web page, it produces 12L per day. That page says nothing about power consumption, but the article has the (frustratingly imprecise) claim of "about three light bulbs" of power consumption, so assume that means 200W. 200W for a day is about 17MJ, which is about 1.5MJ/L or 400kWh/m^3. By comparison, the best desalination processes cost about 1.5kWh/m^3 and typical processes cost only twice that (source).
In other words, you would only use this if getting pipes run to your house was completely impossible, and digging a well was completely impossible. That means there are only a few places where it could be useful, and most of them happen to be deserts which are probably too dry to use it anyways.
The American west is getting more and more arid. At some point, we will probably have to ship water here. One idea is to pipe it from either the great lakes (the midwest is fighting that idea; enough jobs have already gone) OR from Texas, or from CA.
But this might present unique opportunities. In particular, rather than piping it back, but up giant windmills or fountains to help saturate the air in CA, and then pull it out of the air in various places like SLC and Denver. This might even be done in eastern CA, on top of some of their peaks there. The reason is to help move it across the range. If the air can be made to carry more water and this idea works, it is simply trading the carrier from pipes to air.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
We made these in boy scouts. They collect a little bit of water which I guess is better than nothing.
They can also purify water/urine but putting the grey water outside the cup where you collect the good water. Can't say we tried that.
Uncle Ben was a moisture farmer.
My $140 dehumidifier can create up to three gallons a day here in humid Florida. At 500 W, though, I'd pay the electric utility about $1.70 for those three gallons of water, when I could get the same thing from the water utility for half a cent.
My wife used to drink bottled water, then we got a pour-in water filter. Same damn thing at 1/1000 the cost. :-)
Ignoring friction losses, and inefficiencies, You have to move 2250 joules to condense one gram of water, and that is work.... a lot of work.
Just 10 liters of water a day would take 22 million Joules, or 250 Watts (6000 Watt-hours, or 6 kWh)
The average person uses 500 liters a day, so that's 300 kWh, or about $30 a day.
They appear to be marketing this box to replace "bottled" water usage.... They filter solids, but they also don't say what they do about vapor-phase pollutants, such as benzene and other aromatic hydrocarbons that will also be in the condensate.
I would never drink condensate like this unless it were a life and death situation.
Not to mention, that in most places, dehumidifying the indoor air will cause people to need to turn up the heat, and use even more energy. Plus, air conditioning depends on phase-change (dehumidification) for efficiency. In dry air, it is much less efficient -- again, more energy.
there was an episode of odyssey 5 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0318236/ about this. The device caused the air to dry & heat up in the region...Too bad element four didn't happen to make the watermill look like a gramophone.
"About 3 lightbulbs" can be up to 400 watts, assuming 120W is the top end of what can be considered a "reasonable" consumer lightbulb. That's actually a fair bit of power.
Meanwhile, output (per the manufacturer's site) can be "up to" 12 liters a day, about 3 gallons. Not bad output, but is this, say, on a cool day with a rainstorm outside? Or is this at 30% humidity, which the manufacturer admits is the lower limit for effectiveness of the device? What's the dropoff? TFA implies in drier areas the machine can shut off during drier parts of the day, so you save power, but obviously get less. How much of each?
Where I live (New York), at 400W, the device would cost just a fraction over $2 a day to operate. That would be a decent price for 3 gallons of fresh water a day. It would be cost-competetive with store-bought for 2 gallons a day. And it's not compelling for less than that. So I don't know how much of a "miracle machine" this really is.
That's all if I drank bottled, which I don't--we have some of the best tap water in the world, and I think people who drink bottled in NYC are somewhat crazy. Because tap water sells from the city at $2.31 per 100cf, which is 0.3 CENTS per gallon.
At best, this is slightly more eco-friendly than bottled, since you don't have the transport costs and bottling costs (though you do have the electricity costs). And your water might be a bit cheaper (though I'm skeptical how close the actual output will be to the marketing "up to 12 L!" hype). But if you want to save the world, or save a bundle, this just isn't the device you're looking for. Move along.
I mean, how long is it going to be before Evaporator Farms in deserts happen? Really!
No! It's a *SIG*. Keep the Special Interest Groups away! (Con joke!)
My eyes itch already
This is nice, but it relies on electricity. If they can mitigate the need for the thing to be plugged in, this would go a lot further in the areas where electricity is as unreliable as the water supply.
What we should be focusing on, and I am surprised there isn't an X-prize on it yet, is how to get drinkable water from the ocean by using solar power or other non-grid source of energy. Think of all the folks who live along shorelines and do not have access to drinking water.
If we can find an energy-efficient way to extract fresh water out of the ocean, we will be able to reverse the dilution happening due to melting of the polar ice cap, provide water for areas affected by drought and with self-powered irrigation systems turn deserts into arable land.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world > > Those who understand binary and those who don't
...now have an excuse to meter our dehumidifiers?
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
My first thought (after, "it's a dehumidifier") was that combined with a nice array of solar panels this could be a self-sustaining water supply in remote areas.
Then I read the article to find:
which rules out use in places where water is most hard to obtain. There's plenty of water in most places where humans live; the trouble is usually that it's undrinkable because of its salt content (ocean/sea water) or because it will make you sick. Desalination is a more efficient solution for the former and water filtration is more efficient for the latter.
That said, there's probably some small market for these things. The claim that the company "hopes will become the first mainstream household appliance to have been invented since the microwave" seems over the top.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
Water from wind? It's already been done.
Call me when we can extract wind from water.
My uncle who lives up outside of mos eisley maintains a field of them.
Okay folks we aren't going to all get our water this way. Where it gets interesting is if you live off the grid. There's a lot of land that doesn't have a reliable water source. It's not a cheap solution but it's an afordable one. If you're isolated and can't drill a well it's an attractive solution. Say you have a cabin in the woods a unit like this and a wind generator with storage tank could provide even enough for showers. If you use the cabin three months out of the year the unit could work year round to keep a large storage tank filled so it'd be available when needed. Another one is if you happen to live on a small island, I have considered it. One major problem is water. Here in Maine there are hundreds of small islands but a good share have water issues. Desert areas may not be the most practical for this approach but if you produced more than you needed it could be stored for drier times. I'm guessing a scaled up system would be more efficient a system 2X to 4X the cost could supply all water needs. If you're in the desert solar and possibly wind could provide power.
Is it the cheapest way to go? Possibly not but it could be a Godsend for fringe living. These days you can get phone, power, cable TV and even internet almost anywhere in the country but water isn't always available. Even coastal Florida has a massive problem brewing with sea water contaminating ground water. As they drain aquifers they tend to fill with sea water ruining them for household use. The water may be okay for toilets and even showers but you wouldn't want to drink it. A system like this could provide household water and help take the pressure off the city water system. If you have a 500K to 2 million dollar house a $1,200 machine doesn't seem that expensive. The southwest has a dire water problem. There will be rationing soon. It may be a far cheaper solution than trucking water in to use these machines in most houses and require them in new construction. If every house had one in wetter times of the year it could add tens of millions of gallons of water to the available water supply in a state like Arizona and even more in California where it is fairly humid especially along the coast. If every new house built in the last ten years had one the water situation in the southwest would be far less desperate.
Yes the extra power used will end the world. Ironically there may be less moisture in the southwest but there is plenty of sunlight. A couple of solar panels would offset any added power. Yes it might add 5K to the price of a new house but when you are talking average prices in the 350K range 5K isn't all that earth shattering. If all new houses were required to have solar electric, solar hot water and a system like this for water in the southwest a lot of the problems they are facing could be avoided entirely.
It really pisses me off that even supposedly "quality" newspapers like the Guardian just reprint some PR's press releases with marginal editing rather than doing even the most basic of reasarch or even, god forbid, any thinking.
TFA answers none of the pertinent questions about this device. But reading between the lines and doing a little thinking it's pretty easy to determine this device is going to be useless as anything but a gimmik.
Firstly, how much power does it use? "Three lightbulbs" says TFA, now as far as I'm aware the lightbulb is not a standard measurement for power consumption. But let's be generous and assume they're taling about standard 60-80W bulbs, that about 200W, give or take.
How much water does it produce? The article doesn't say, their website claims "up to" 12L per day, which I'd imagine is operating under optimium conditions (i.e hot air at close to 100% humidity). That's actually not a lot of water, and i'd imagine operating in any real conditions you could halve or quater that amount.
So adding up the numbers, that's 4.8kWh of electicty to produce about 6L of water. Or 800kwh/m^3. This is a ridiculously, hideously energy intensive way to make water, even desalination, which is seen as ecologically unfreindly, uses about 3kwh/m^3, or is about 250 times more efficient.
TFA also states this device is useless below 30% humidity, which removes the last reason one might consider using it, providing water where no other method is possible.
My point in all this is that doing about 2 minutes thinking, and exactly one google search, I have been able to determine that this thing is anything but ecologically friendly, and anything but economic. The journo writing this article for the Guardian, which for those of you who don't know it prides itself on being a "green" newspaper, couldn't even be bothered to do that and reprinted some PR's words wholesale, giving people the impression that what is in fact a toy for rich consumers who want to feel good about being "green" is some kind of ecological miracle device.
It should be a source of lasting shame to any newspaper to allow their editorial content to be used by some idiot for marketing purposes, sadly it's all too common and nobody even seems to notice the extent to which PR is taking over journalism.
If all the bugs worked out and it was made rugged this would be great for desert folk all over the world.... As well as for the citizens of Black Rock City!
folks at Burning Man leave no trace, but they have to haul in a crap load of water and usually haul out a lot of empty plastic containers....
imagine if this actually worked GOOD
. . . the machine produces water, and water can be used to produce hydroelectric power . . . which can be used to produce even more water . . . and then again more electricity!
Can this be scaled to power an electric car? The static electricity would be the turbocharger.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
If it lasts 3 years, that's an extra $1/day depreciation, plus the cost of the 7.2Kw-hours per day of electricity. (Around here, that's 50 cents or more.) So it costs $1.50 for 12 liters, which is 12 cents per liter.
Water from my tap (which is also drinkable) costs about $0.001 per liter. So this is 120 times more expensive than that.
Then there's the installation, and piping to dedicated outlets...
Then there's the ecological cost of the device itself - it looks like a lot of plastic...
Hrm.. Awfully low tech for a high-tech price. You'd do better with a peltier junction, a pressurized discharge still (basically serpentine counter-flow open-cycle still with core pressure > 1 atmosphere, working fluid at atmospheric pressure with the core output feeding into a cooled 1 atmos chamber), a shaded fan heat-sink radiator, a thermistor, a Hygrometrixs polymer-based humidity sensor, and a 8bit microcontroller.
BORING! When they come out with a design that can generate 1 gph/.1Kwh at 10% humidity I'll be impressed. Their design is too small to have the thermal mass needed to be efficient.
If there's water in thin air, it makes you wonder if there's fat air? If there is, what's in it? And where do you find the height/weight proportional air?
Air diet. This gets really deep in a hurry.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
OK, it uses the same amount of power as three light bulbs when it's operating, but how long does it take to generate a liter of water? Without this, the "three light bulbs" is meaningless.
free water?? or will we be forced to pay for air now, instead?
this is a virtual insanity that always seems to be governed by our love for this useless twisting of our new technology.
I'd have done it, but the javascript is borked as far as IE is concerned, and gives me a "undefined" is null or not an object error. That happens despite clearing the cache, resetting IE to default, etc.
Yeah yeah, "use another browser" is all very well and good, but what if I *want* to use it? It's my risk, my choice, my right, and IMO, IE is closer to adhering to web standards than most browsers. It's kind of draconian to try forcing users to switch to other browsers by borking your own website, just as the old days of "This website is best viewed on Netscape" disclaimers of the 90s.
Anyway, this is off topic, and mainly a gripe about being locked out of the tag process, I don't know if that problem applies to anyone else. I'll understand if I get modded down.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
FTFA:
The mill ceases to be effective below about 30 per cent relative humidity levels
I somehow don't see this as the device that will deliver much-needed water to bone-dry deserts.
With climate change, large portions of land away from the oceans may slowly turn into desert. This machine can help create water short term, but once the humidity in the air falls below a certain level, it's useless. A better solution will be to combine hydrogen and oxygen from the atmosphere into water. These machines already exist, but are very expensive.
Can it extract frosty piss?
Just imagine one of these installed at a gym.
I have a machine that produced illegal immigrants that drain or Economic and bankrupt Social security out of thin air.
It is Copyright left wing Liberal kooks .
My Air conditioner does this already.
one time it flooded my Apartment.
You're correct, that's exactly how the water cycle works. But this gadget skips a couple of steps.
The water that's in the bottle on my desk started out as atmospheric moisture over Northern California. Then it precipitated out as snow or rain, ending up as ground water or in a reservoir. From there it was pumped into the local water system, and where I siphoned it into my bottle. Eventually I'll drink it, piss it into a toilet, whence it will find its way through the sewage system and out to sea. Then it will evaporate into the air and the whole cycle will start over again.
Right now, only a small part of the the rain and snow that falls on Northern California ends up in the various water systems we humans depend on. The rest is used by what's left of the natural ecology. One reason this ecology keeps shrinking is that humans keep sequestering more and more water for their own use. With gadgets like this one, we could potentially sequester every single drop before it has a chance to fall out of the sky.
That notion might seem far-fetched. And indeed, we'll probably never go that far in a relatively moist region like the one I live in. But consider an arid region like Arizona. There's relatively little atmospheric moisture there, but what there is sustains a thriving desert ecology. It also is home to human communities that are always struggling to find water. It's not hard to imagine Arizonans building enough of this gadgets to grab virtually all the precipitation before it has a chance to fall. When that happens, the desert ecologies are, so to speak, toast.
Which is not to say that this technology is totally evil. I can think of many situations where it would be the most ecologically sound way to obtain water. You just have to remember that this is not an ecological free lunch.
IOW, your comment is an understatement.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
Saw it 2 months ago at a tennis tournament. The water cooler like object was just plugged into the water, and drew moisture from the air. It was there probably more for show than anything else. With the time it took to fill up, it couldn't quench the thirst of everyone. The keg next to it could, though.
Drop these into places that just got hit by a hurricane, tornado, tsunami, wild fire, earthquake, or Godzilla attack, and people can be saved.
It'll need some batteries and some solar cells to go along with it. I wonder if it can run directly from batteries with Direct Current, or if it requires 110VAC with an inverter?
You could have it soak up water at night and early morning taking power off the batteries, and let the batteries recharge in the afternoon with the water maker turned off.
The size of the battery bank would be determined by the amount of sunshine you get on an average day and the power draw of the unit.
After initial install, when the batteries are dead, you could charge them up with a little generator. Once they are charged up, the cycle could continue on it's own with no additional outside energy.
What am I forgetting?
I think it'd work better in thick air actually.
...As opposed to hauling in a crap load of gasoline and petrol generators and trailers for the generators to generate the 600W per device to suck water out of the air (at the BM festival)? Seems like just hauling in the water might be more energy efficient overall surely?
I bought a dehumidifier last week for $135. It didn't have the UV light though. I guess that explains the $1065 price difference.
I am a lawyer, but not yours. Anything I tell you might be a total lie intended to benefit my clients at your expense.
Really, most bottled water is just tap water, a plastic bottle, and marketing. I put my tap water through a tabletop filter pitcher before drinking it. Yeah, I'm a little bit paranoid about what might be in tap water.
And I can't stand that these news articles use a comparison such as "three light bulbs" (which in the middle of the growing popularity of CF bulbs is more vague than ever - 7W? 11? 13? 25? 50? 60? 75? 100??? What's an order of magnitude between friends, anyway?) instead of just stating the number of watts of electric power the thing consumes.
Tag lost or not installed.
The only thing about this device which is new is that the water isn't contaminated with heavy metals from the heat exchanger. (One hopes, anyway. . .)
A stainless steel heat sink is worth $1200?
Hmm.
If they could sell it for a lot less, then I could see it being quite useful in some situations. Not a bad way to get pure water. (Certainly better than the treated crud gurgling out of your town pipes!)
I wonder if it's cheaper to run than a steam distillation unit. I'm guessing it's still less expensive to just buy those big carboys of bottled water; about $1 per US gallon and the trouble it takes to haul them home.
-FL
in their statistica, they measure the amount of water in the air. and if...if..we suck up all the air's water, will we make this planet like mars. if....if..enough of these were being used, and everyone on the planet, was to take and store water (again, future, in a haste like thought) would we see the end of free water? if..and again, i stress "if"...we dried out the moisture in the air, would our landscape suffer... before anyone flames out, i want to let you know, i already know all h20 has been used over and over, but i just wonder, about prolonged use, or living in a climate (even our houses) that has its water removed...
happy trials
Legionnaires' disease is only if you INHALE the bacteria. The germ is ubiquitous in water, and drinking it is harmless.
Wiki Legionella
Remember, all the water in the world has been used countless times and pee ain;'t even the worsed of it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
It's a simple measure - enough to clearly illuminate a volkswagen but not enough to light up a football feild and only a fraction of what you would need for the library of congress.
In the northern part of my country, which is very arid, people use some devices that consist of a mesh that captures morning sea mist. It condenses on the mesh and it's then collected in a drum.
Kirk .... Are ... you ... back ? ... or ... ar ... you... his .... evil ... twin?
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Coke's UK launch of Dasani failed primarily due to an almost immediate full recall after the initial batches were found to be contaminated with bromate. That basically killed the brand from the start, making what people thought of tap vs. spring water a moot point.
(And the bromate contamination was, oddly enough, not actually present in the tap water they source Dasani from, but was introduced in the "purification" process.)
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
If you had read the description on their website, you'd know they are planning version that run on solar power or wind power.
I don't think this is much of an issue to worry about because:
1) This tech is only really useful in areas where there isn't already abundant fresh water. For example, I live in Ohio, USA. We have lots of rivers (including the Ohio River, which is a large tributary river of the Mississippi R.), streams, lakes (including a northern coast on Lake Erie, one of the "Great Lakes", which contains a pretty massive amount of fresh water), and lots of ground water as well. Because of the energy requirements to operate this thing, I suspect that treated water from a municipal water network is probably much cheaper in much of the world.
2) I don't think that 6, or even 10 billion humans could out-use the water evaporated from the oceans, rivers, and lakes by the Sun, although I suppose that, *maybe* we could inadvertently change weather patterns a little bit. This point, however, I will admit, is pure speculation on my part and I don't have any hard data to back it up. Just a knowledge that a massive amount of solar energy hits the earth's surface every day, and that some 80% of the earth is covered by water, so, basically, about 80% of the energy from the Sun goes to evaporating water (ok, some percentage of the energy is reflected off the surface of the water, so that statement's not, probably, quite true, but gives us a good starting point for thinking about the problem).
What version of IE are you using? I've used IE6 and IE7 with Slashdot (though I haven't used 6 recently, so that might be broken now, not sure) and I don't think I've had problems with the tags (though I have had some nasty rendering issues with stuff on the page overlapping other stuff, but that's life, I guess).
I suspect that the problem is just that you are using an old version of IE. You're free to use whatever browser you want, but it's usually a good idea to use a recent version of the browser instead of an old one.
Also, there's a difference between coding to a specific browser and trying to force people to switch to that browser, and coding to the published Standards, and having people using broken browsers having a problem. I really don't see any moral wrong in coding to a Standard even though some browsers don't support it. Let Microsoft fix IE.
Slashdot needs a science editor. Desperately.
Will this open the door for orphans raised by their uncles on moisture farms grow up to be Jedi Knights? /FTW!
From RTFAing the fine air filtration and UV sterilisation seem to be the only inovations on this 10x overpriced compared to something that sits in the corner of most homes doing the same job with the same level of efficiency! The only benefit here is dedicate purpose design for plumbing into a residence. I'll hack my own for half the price, thanks.
I'm sitting looking at a $200/200watt/24 litre per day dehumidifier with a pretty good dust filter on it. I wonder if I could put that 50-pack of UV leds I bought to use here...
**feels dehumidifer hack coming on**
In the event of civil disaster I would be perfectly happy drinking water from my dehumidifer as is, which should supply enough water for 4-6 people per day when hooked up to an inverter hooked up to a 12~24VDC source (ie car/truck), which would be better quality than mains supply water in some cases.
People utterly forget dehydration kills you (~72hours) long before water born illnesses merely make you sick in (48hours-7days to kill in a fraction of cases). You also can't beat boiling your water, something people in far away places seem to not know, or just not be able to do with resources (which comes back to infrastructure, which is the problem causing scarce water resources).
The pertinant point here is why come up with a $1200 magic uber water thingee that's a reinvention of the wheel and priced out of range of people who need it / no good in the third world? That price gets you a small solar panel or wind turbine and a standard dehumidifer and 4-6 appreciative third world folk who have enough clean driking water a day to live> **Spawns firefox tab or two** Hmm ok, for less than $1200 I have a parts list for 500 watt wind turbine, 24DC->240AC inverter, 2x 26L per day Dehumidifiers, HEPA filters, UV lamps... shipping to third world countries is extra though.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
This rather interesting article fails to mention the two best markets for this device. I've listed a few of the pros. There cannot be any possible cons for these, as I've thought about it for about 10 seconds.
Submarine:
1) Energy efficiency - its nuclear powered.
2) Water Quality - better than sea water.
Astronauts:
1) Water Quality - They drink their own pee. Collecting the water from the air - much better!
2) Convenience - If they pee in cabin, a more powerful version of this machine could collect the liquid for recycling immediately.
Is that you?
Steam Distiller for Countertop $180. 565 watts. 1 gallon every 4 hours. You say you want 20 gallons a day? That will cost you $5000 and draw down 3000 watts 24/7/365. Polar Bear Home Water Distiller For the geek, the micro-brewery might be the better - or at least, more rewarding - investment.
Hah!
You just thought you were safe!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
The site markets this to First World households. But is that where its value lies?
I can see something like this being useful where I work. The town puts toxic waste into the water, so I buy RO water by the gallon instead of using that town's tap water. Useful pitcher filters are expensive, slow, and clog easily. It's probably less energy expensive, overall to use the electricity rather than drive over to pick up another gallon at the store.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
http://www.elementfour.com/products/the-watermill
"The WaterMill is designed to minimize energy use. It's so efficient that producing one liter of water costs only three to four cents. Alternative bottled water systems typically cost ten cents per liter or more."
http://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Both right, the contamination issue brought it into the news, Then the origins were discussed and the PR nightmare really began.
Would take issue with the adverse comments on UK tap water. it varies hugely around the country. London is awful, as you'd expect. Scotland, Wales and many parts of England are excellent
esp. Colorado. The problem is that due to water compacts and legal stealing, our water ends up in CA, NV, AZ, NM, Tx, and even into Mexico. Right now, CA is taking a LOT more water from the Colorado than they are suppose to. NV and AZ are also taking more, but not hugely so. If they would not, then plenty to go around. On the eastern divide, Nebraska gets FAR more than they should in certain areas, and less than they should in others. This is a water battle.
SO, I am located where the water is.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
My approach uses salt water combined with either fountains or wind mills to PUT the water in the air, which accomplishes the same as the plants. The difference is that you require a VERY expensive Desalination process. Mine would skip that part.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I am sure you could get loads of water in a humid climate. Where I live in Yorkshire you often have misted windows in the morning and a cold can left out of a fridge will soon leave a puddle. My wife tells me that Louisiana is even worse.
Would this work in somewhere like Arizona though. It was so dry when I visited there that I wasn't even aware of sweating, but the fact that I had to drink a litres of water and the "salt marks" under my armpits meant I must have been sweating profusely, but the evaporation kept up. Would there be any water in the air to extract here (or in other deserts).
Methods for Recovery of Atmospheric Humidity by Robert A. Nelson Copyright 2003
http://www.rexresearch.com/airwells/airwells.htm
This is a really interesting website.
It may not be exactly the same device, but this appeared on the UK edition of Dragons' Den. The Dragons were very sceptical, but the clincher came when they asked to taste the water that came out of it. Apparently it tasted disgusting - cue lots of umming and ahhing about it not having time to be set up and stabilize, etc.
I just cannot see how burning coal to condense water can be economical. These type of devices have been around for ages - ever since the basic refrigerator was invented in the 19th century.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Sooo , that's what they call vaporware ?
I remember reading about things like this 2 or 3 years ago that were a little more expensive.
Of coarse the real question is how does this 'purification' stack up from an environmental and economic perspective compared to say. Tap water?
I think in the industrialized nations this thing is of limited value. It is of coarse of very good value in countries where water is scarce ( read expensive ) and infrastructure limited.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
Relative Humidity is a measurement, where all things remaining constant except temperature, as the temperature goes up, the relative humidity goes down. The "blazing sun" thus "dries the air". Though I do recommend reading the "misconceptions" section of the aforementioned article.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Call me when they invent a suite that recycles my own urine for drinking powered by my walking.....
Cool. This is what Luke did on Tatooine. Perhaps, it's lucrative.
Yeah, but this requires just 3 lightbulbs worth of power (or whatever) - Moisture Vaporators need Power Converters, and then there's the trip to the Toshi station. No comparison, really.
And more importantly, Moisture Vaporators only speak Bocce - so unless you know the difference between "raffa" and "volo" you're out of luck.
Bow-ties are cool.
First, the site is not mine, though I do agree with most of it. Haven't actually been there for a while. Preaching to the choir type thing. Still, it's about the best I can do with the limited sig length I have access to. I'll fully admit that they're leading questions. Got a better site?
1. It'd also be nice if cars ran on butterfly farts, for example. Sad fact is, they're finding hidden gun factories in Britain now, and violent crime is at an all time high, exceeding that of the USA in some categories. British people certainly feel less safe than even paranoid americans.
2. There's plenty of ways. I cheer however a potential victim gets away from, or takes care of, his or her assaulter, whether it be a mugger after a wallet, or a rapist. Still, studies have shown that defense with a firearm is the method with the lowest injury rate to the victim. The highest is actually the 'passive opposition' some police departments recommended. It generally goes from lowest to highest Defense with firearm, other weapon, running away, no weapons, active cooperation, passive opposition.
3. Actually false. Most US burglars do not carry guns. They also spend, on average, three times the time casing a house to make sure it's unoccupied. The standard response to being confronted by a home owner with a firearm is to either run away or surrender.
4. Violent crime in England was far lower than the USA even when they didn't ban guns. Since the banning of them, their lead has shrunk to almost nothing. It's so bad they're trying to ban knives now. Target the behavior, the culture, the situations that lead to murder - not just one tool.
5. The decision to carry a firearm is a very personal choice. I don't recommend it to everyone. If it's your thing, go ahead, carry a rape whistle(a gun's louder), pepper spray(some can bull right through it), taser(civilian models have to be in touch range, and leave no lasting disability - the crook can be getting up while you're still turning around). There are reasons cops who carry less lethal devices still carry firearms. A knife requires you to get close up, as does an asp or other such instrument. They also require a more or less fit individual to wield effectively. My grandfather can shoot. He'd have a hard time wielding a knife or club.
6. Psychological - Criminals tend to go 'OMFG that can KILL me!'. Criminals tend to not challenge the gun - can result in fewer injuries all round.
Personally, I have a very simple solution that I believe would, within a few years, plunge the US murder rate to below that of Europe. First would be to legalize drugs - I'd also regulate them for purity and safety, and tax them to give the opposition a carrot(and fund treatment centers). Oops - there went 85% of most gang's income streams! Do the same with prostitution, and there goes another 5-10%. Makes slave trading less profitable - I certainly wouldn't stop enforcement against stuff like that. Retask a lot of the vice cops to illegal immigration and such. Fix the immigration system period so that only the [i]really[/i] bad ones need to sneak across - and treat them accordingly.
I don't read AC A human right
The song remains the same. Don't do stupid shit and then whine about it. MOVE TO WHERE the water is.
I'm especially laughing at df6's comments about siphoning all the water out of the air, creating horrible consequences in Arizona. Once the water is siphoned, it may create a vacuum effect, which would siphon water from another system, perhaps making Arizona more wet. I bought one of those mini-airconditioning units during the summer. When I opened the little compartment, although I had not placed any water in it, there was water that had been condensed from the air. I've since learned how to operate this machine better, but its output still sucks. At the time, I mentioned this to a friend, that it might be a good idea, if someone were stuck in the desert with no water, but we soon realized the inefficiency of the power to actual production ratio, we'd have to have a large solar panel just to supply the energy needed. Another consideration was the low amount of moisture in the desert air, etc. It would be better to dig for water, than to get stuck with the extra weight and pricey realization.
Oh man, I am SO buying one of these for my yacht, along with some powerful solar panels. That way, if I get stranded on a deserted island somewhere, I'll at least know I'll have clean drinking water. Now I've just got to buy a yacht... anyone have one for sale, cheap?
But SCO had plenty of muppets.
Now, normal humidity in a room would be around 40-50%. Run this machine and quickly you get air that is too dry to be healthy, so this is apparently for use outdoors. Still the question is about the environment you can run this in efficiently: From TFA: The mill ceases to be effective below about 30 per cent relative humidity levels, which are common later in the day in states such as Arizona. To combat that problem, the machine has an intelligent computer built into it that increases its output at dawn when humidity is highest, and reduces it from mid-afternoon when a blazing sun dries the air.