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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.
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
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 !
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.
How long will we have to wait before Linux has support for the binary language of moisture vaporators?
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.
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,
...and we have unlimited source of power!
Mechas anyone?
not sure what the diff between this and that is, but this one says it's not useful below 30% rel humidity. Not useful in the desert. Not during the daytime anyway. Maybe at night. There's a lot of critters in the desert that get all of their moisture by licking up the morning dew.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Might want to check your post, it's a bit disjointed.
The minerals in tap water are indeed useful, if not critical. Most distilled water intended for drinking has 'minerals and salts added for taste'. ;)
As your post notes, water intoxication is indeed a valid issue - on average it takes out a couple of military people in basic training a year.
I don't read AC A human right
In very large doses, everything eventually collapses and forms a black hole, and black holes, as we all know, are dangerous. Therefore, everything is dangerous in large doses.
Ezekiel 23:20
Here in Iowa we get our water from limestone-based aquafers and sand wells. Water's almost crunchy. I just got done using an entire gallon of vinegar to remove the lime from my bathtub, and I have to soak the tap filters several times a year or the screens solidify.
Though once you get used to drinking "real water", bottled water is almost nasty tasting. It's hard to describe... it's just like drinking water from a tap at someone's house that has a water conditioner. It almost has a soapy or dulling/flat taste to it. There's just something a whole lot more refreshing drinking ice cold water that has some mineral content to it.
I don't like drinking the water when I travel. Water that's either bottled, conditioned, or reclaimed out of the local river and gone through intense filtering. I need to start packing my own water when I go on vacation...
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
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.
At 300 watts you'd need a fair amount of solar panels. And even then you'd only be able to run it during the day -- if you wanted to run it 24/7 you'd need something more like 1+ kW and a battery system. And you'd still be hoping for enough rain to drink rainwater any day it wasn't sunny.
Did you get the idea when you noticed the refrigerator was cold?
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.
The American west is getting more and more arid. At some point, we will probably have to ship people out of here.
Fixed that for you.
. . . 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!
I think that a large life raft would be better equipped with something more like this.
Note - Liberal use of <sarcasm> tags may or may not need to be applied.
more to the point, in large doses water has the unenviable effect of drowning you..
The Great Lakes are already out as an option. The Great lakes water pact passed.
Xavier Rabourdin for president 2012
Here's a hint. MOVE to Where The WATER IS LOCATED.
Life rafts are already supplied with a Solar Still for converting saline water to fresh - and they are solar powered.
Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.
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.
I don't know - coming to slashdot and getting you're/your wrong... *sigh*
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.
Actually, it can get quite humid in the desret. I work with folks who have spent a lot of time in Saudi Arabia and in such places and they report that it is very humid in the summer time. The reason it doesn't rain is that there is no cold dry air masses that come down to mix with the hot humid ones.
There are some places this might be a very nice appliance.
Kevin
the problem is that it uses three 1000W light bulbs worth of power
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.
From a systems analysis standpoint, the dehumidifier machine doesn't work. It would be far more efficient to install an electric fan on the stern of the boat pointed at the sails, so as to go faster, thus requiring less stored drinking water. Err, maybe that wouldn't work, how about installing a big windmill in front of the sail and hooking that up to an electric trolling motor.
Seriously though, a Katdyn 35 hand operated R.O. desalinator pump produces about as much water in 30 minutes of hand pumping as this "dehumidifier" produces in a day of using 300 watts.
http://products.katadyn.com/brands-and-products/produkte/Survivor_34/Katadyn_Survivor_35_48.html
Or if you prefer to save your hand and arm strength for other purposes (?) and use electricity to desalinate, a katadyn model 40E/12V draws only 4 amps at 12 volts and squirts out 1.5 gallons per hour. It only weighs 25 lbs and is about 7 by 17 by 15 inches. It's amazing that the off the shelf katdyn produces about 30 times as much water per day yet uses about a tenth the electricity of this "greenwash" dehumidifier product.
http://products.katadyn.com/brands-and-products/produkte/Survivor_34/Katadyn_Survivor_35_48.html
I have no connection to katadyn other than happily owning a couple of their backpacking R.O. filters.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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.
I used to live next to someone who made dehumidifiers from old fridges with freezer compartments. Drill a hole in the bottom of the freezer, put a bucket underneath, make a few holes in the front and back of the freezer and add some fans to (slowly) blow air through. As the air gets in to the freezer, it cools and the water drips in to the bottom of the unit. Cheap to make, not so cheap to run...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Legionnaires' disease is only if you INHALE the bacteria. The germ is ubiquitous in water, and drinking it is harmless.
Wiki Legionella
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.
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
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).
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.
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