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.
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
That's what it is, just vaporware !
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?
At 600 watt-hours per liter, you're going to be losing more energy to sweat and breathing than you could possibly get close to generating by hand.
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.
Both of them.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Yeah, this is ONLY 200 times less efficient than desalinization.
Criminy.
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.
this should be sent to countries where drought is a problem.
If drought is a problem I suspect there isn't going to be a whole lot of humid air to extract water from. "The mill ceases to be effective below about 30 per cent relative humidity levels,"
And after cranking that thing to produce 300W (about three light bulbs, and I'm guessing it means old-style, power inefficient, ones), you're going to need more than a glass of water.
And that's before we even consider the price tag.
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 after cranking that thing to produce 300W (about three light bulbs, and I'm guessing
> it means old-style, power inefficient, ones), you're going to need more than a glass of
> water.
But you may sweat enough to drive the humidity up to 30% so that the thing will begin to work.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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.
more to the point, in large doses water has the unenviable effect of drowning you..
They are standard equipment on any "large" (50+ feet or so) Ocean going boat. They're pretty common even on 30-40 foot boats where the owners are planning extended off-shore voyaging.
Even more: http://www.katadyn.com/ manufactures hand powered reverse osmosis devices for lifeboat style use.
So yeah, Reverse Osmosis isn't limited to major industrial installations in any way.
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
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
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.
A regular dehumidifier that drains into a commercial water filtering pitcher with a UV light beside it might be a workable solution for people on a budget.
I don't know if there are any good kits for steam distillation at home, can anyone point me to one?
Legionnaires' disease is only if you INHALE the bacteria. The germ is ubiquitous in water, and drinking it is harmless.
Wiki Legionella
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