Machine Condenses Drinking Water Out of Thin Air 438
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.'"
Dune (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Dune or its wind traps yet.
Or that no one has mentioned another story on slashdot [slashdot.org] about extracting water from wind, even if the other one used a windmill to do so.
Send this to the third world (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Who spends $1200 for a pimped dehumidifier... (Score:5, Interesting)
"public water authority"?
Ah... you must live in a large built-up area where water comes out of a big pipe provided by a municipality of some sort.
I'm on a dug well with extremely hard water and a tendency to go dry during droughts. Between the filters, UV treatment, water softener, RO filter system, pumps, cisterns, etc... there's probably $5000 for all the bits and parts of my water system. I've spent $1200 on far dumber things than drinking water. For someone with, say, a sulphur problem... $1200 would be darn cheap.
c.
Re:Just Vaporware (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Send this to the third world (Score:4, Interesting)
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/ [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.
Re:Amazing! They've invented... (Score:3, Interesting)
The output might depend on the climate it's in, would your dehumidifier grab as much water in the desert?
The "dry air" simply has a lower water saturation, hot air can hold more water than cold air.
Re:Just Vaporware (Score:2, Interesting)
Glass? That's a solid liquid.
Re:Amazing! They've invented... (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't forget the sanitizing UV light...
You know, I've never been terribly confident in those since an 8th grade science experiment. I think the point was to try and come up with something that might cause a mutation in some bacteria - so we grew some in a petri dish, picked one colony (to get all the same type of bacteria), then grew it in a petri dish, then picked some out of that uniform batch and put them in another petri dish. We covered half with aluminum foil, then put it in the UV hood designed for disinfecting lab goggles. The bacteria had no problems growing after being supposedly "killed" by the UV (not to mention, no mutations like we wanted).
Of course, that was still an interesting result that our science teacher liked - so we spread more bacteria on a petri dish, put it uncovered into the UV hood (in case the plastic on the petri dish was opaque to UV or something like that), and ran it for much longer than normal. The bacteria still had no problems growing.
Now maybe it's just difficult to kill bacteria when you've put them on top of a nice big pile of food (aka agar)... But I really don't expect UV to kill anything. That doesn't mean I wouldn't drink the water - it just means that the UV shouldn't be the only line of defense if I think there's really a risk of getting sick (which there probably isn't a big one anyway...).
Not quite the water cycle (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [westernfarmpress.com]. 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.
Re:Who spends $1200 for a pimped dehumidifier... (Score:3, Interesting)
I think what's going on here is a play on the fear of local tap water, where no amount of filtering can substitute for completely removing yourself from the source.
Re:My refrigerator does this already (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Amazing! They've invented... (Score:3, Interesting)
"Three light bulbs" is journalistic code for 300 watts.
In practice it could mean anything between
My electricity costs about 8 cents per kWh. $0.3 per liter implies it uses 3.75 kWh per liter. At 300 watts, it takes 12.5 hours to generate a liter of water. Or rephrased, it could fill a 2 liter soda bottle in about a day.
Thus you'd need several of these machines to produce drinking water at anything like a useful rate.
However, my $200 Chinese dehumidifier purchased at home depot, using the same electricity, easily fills its multigallon bucket in a day, at least during summer months. To help any NASA scientists here, multiple gallons is quite a bit more than two liters.
It probably isn't going to cost you a thousand dollers to add a UV lamp and a pump to it either.
So, why does this greenwashing gadget cost five times as much as my dehumidifier but only produces about half the output? Surely it can't be continuously dumping 150 watts of UV sterilization light.
At the rate it would be producing water you'd probably need more like 1.5 watts of UV.
There is a certain perfection in a device that only works where you don't need it and can't work where you would otherwise need it the most.
Also the only people who can afford this device are likely to live in parts of the world which already have drinking water delivered through pipes...
Re:Amazing! They've invented... (Score:4, Interesting)
Or perhaps your machine wasn't puting out the UV light like it should have, Hell, someone probably looked at the 20 dollar bulbs and said this $1.57 one looks like the same thing.
We did similar experiements in 8th grade, we subjected a lot of things to uv light and it always killed them. I even know of sewage treatment systems that use UV light in the last stage and have never found anything growing in the samples. I'm pretty sure it had something to do with your UV source.
Re:Who spends $1200 for a pimped dehumidifier... (Score:5, Interesting)
And in many places, digging a well in prohibited. At least Colorado and other parts of the US West. Water rights are a major problem here; Colorado state law doesn't even allow you to collect water which runs off your roof: http://www.hcn.org/issues/40.18/a-good-idea-2013-if-you-can-get-away-with-it [hcn.org]