Considerations of efficiency and power consumption are relevant... but not much else. Generally such devices are either too expensive, too maintenance heavy, or utterly inefficient.
I'm not qualified to comment on, but I have found it interesting that it heats up the air (hotter air = can hold more moisture), passes the air through some material that's supposed to retain moisture, then cools it down with radiators. It seems that it would be more efficient in cold weather but would not perform nearly as well in a desert (where you need it to perform well as the moisture content is low during the day).
So maybe Mr. Thunderfoot will be able to debunk this too. If he can refrain from reusing Theranos and Boring Co footage.
A problem with his debunking at a fundamental level - when calculating how often the air temperature is lower than the ground temperature, he uses Canada and Wisconsin. I'm not sure those are representative of Africa?
I think the key message of all the debunkings is this: "it depends".
The device may work great in one condition but certainly not always like the vendors might tout.
Given the triple point chart for water, the solar power for that day, and your humidity and temperature, you can compute the max you'll condense from the atmosphere.
Right. So the "major" (in my mind) contribution here is exactly the work of "compute the max you'll condense from the atmosphere" over all relevant regions. In the linked nature article, the published work is modelling to help determine regions where atmospheric water generator is viable for different assumptions and thresholds.
I think you need more than just a YouTube video to "debunk" the nature paper that they have published and that is linked in their github. They seem to acknowledge that while there are some limitations it still is a viable source of water for a lot of regions.
What is surprising is that thunderfoot didn't lose his habit of repeating himself over and over again. I'm counting 10 videos "debunking" the same idea of a bottle that extracts water from air (which is not what this project really is, it's not a based around a bottle)& he's been beating the same dead horses for 6 years now.
Though to be fair, he's now more into into making misleading videos about SpaceX and obsessing over Elon Musk.
Edit: Actually it's just weird at this point,his recent videos and their titles are so bizarre. It's either cheering at failures or Facebook tier thumbnails
"Owning" Elon Musk. Yeah, I'll definitely stick with the Nature paper.
> What is surprising is that thunderfoot didn't lose his habit of repeating himself over and over again
Yeap.
> Though to be fair, he's now more into into making misleading videos about SpaceX and obsessing over Elon Musk.
His videos are recursive.
You see, even videos having nothing to do with the subject at all, he will still find a way to include Hyperloop, Theranos and Boring Co. footage. Plus older videos. Like a house of mirrors.
i've looked into air to water machines before and one downside i've noticed is that the energy use is really really high. one device I looked at was like 1 KW per 1.5 gallons or so! definately not something to water your lawn. At that energy usage, I'd say these are more useful for survival situations where you're only producing enough water for people to drink and survive.
Other than that, I'm very excited about the propsects of air to water machines, I really really hope they become a lot more energy efficient.
Given this is supposed to make 5 litres per day and is targeted at people who do not have access to safe drinking water, 1 kwh (I assume you mean kwh not kw) for 5.7 or 6.8 litres (imperial and US gallons are different) seems acceptable.
Just dig a well.
Or grab some ocean water and filter it.
Then build a big pipe.
Problem could be solved worldwide in less than 10 years.
But then what?
You can build a simple desalinator (aka, a solar still) with a couple bins, some glass/plexiglass, and access to sunlight. Preferably in an enclosed system to better contain heat and prevent water vapor from escaping.
No filters to replace, and it will run for as long as you feed it water.
Where do you put the left over salt? At those levels it’s both toxic for animals and toxic for plants.
Even putting it back into the ocean isn’t simple. If you do it in one big batch, you would kill everything in that location for a while. If you do it slowly, that isn’t simple.
Make margaritas. Put some on your steak. Throw the rest back in the ocean if you want.
We're talking, maybe a couple pounds of salt per person per day. It's not an unmanageable amount.
You're not going to hurt the ocean by adding back a little salt - salt that you took out of it...
Yes, you will most likely affect cultures within the immediate vicinity of a salt dump site but they will regrow elsewhere. It's peanuts compared to the amount of dilution being caused all the time by normal freshwater runoff and ice cap melts.
If they’re giving it away for free, that must mean there is a fatal flaw they could never design around and are confident nobody else will either. What’s the point then?
This. They did excellent internal work, decided it's not for them, but did something good and want to share it. Just because it's not profitable for them doesn't mean it was a waste - they can use their new knowledge in other areas.
Que? Isn't "don’t see how it’s a market fit" just startup speak for "it's not economically viable"? That would fall squarely into the category of design failures I was talking about. It's not like we don't know any mechanism to cause condensation from air.
It's not economically viable with their usual profit margin, on a market large enough to pay for their fixed costs, with the suppliers and labor they have around, and a lot of other constraints.
That doesn't mean it's useless for everybody. So they publishing it may improve somebody's life.
Lowering cost by manufacturing at scale is knowledge they don't have, and they do need to make it financially viable. Other people might have it and make it viable.
Allow me to snip a few quotes: "After three years of work, the team felt confident they could build a device that would produce water for $.10 per liter; however, it would have taken significant development work and iteration to prove feasibility at $.01 per liter. Additionally, the next phase of work for the project looked to be heavily focused on hardware integration and mass production expertise — not X’s sweet spot."
And:
"Given these factors, it became clear that X wasn’t best suited to take the work forward, and one of the best ways X could have an impact now on the problem of access to safe drinking water was to share what we’ve learned."
I have no idea what the prior state of the art of modelling viable areas for harvesting was (I presume this is probably where X made the largest contribution). As the blogpost identifies... X is not really the best group to tinker with large scale, low cost manufacturing prototyping and scale up.
this is just standard boilerplate at X which really means "the team and/or the executive sponsoring the project got bored and/or realized things required more professional work, and/or the idea wasn't really that great in the first place and the exterior world realized that"
I read their "Patent Non-Assertion Pledge", it's hard to interpret - they seem to retain lots of rights, as far as I can tell, it's not really 'giving it away for free'. Anyone wanting to develop this as a commercial product would probably have to call a lawyer first.
They won't sue you for using the findings or design, but they still have U.S. Patent on it and our pledging that Google will not sue those who use this intellectual property nor will anyone they transfer the patent to be able to sue.
What they call "infringement" just means that since they hold a patent others "copying" it would technically be infringing the patent - but they pledge not to sue.
Possibly they've already derived all the PR value from it they can, and further development of it wouldn't be a good ROI for them. Cynical take, to be sure, but also the most realistic one.
They likely had trouble making it cheap and durable enough for the target market. Looking at the design files, the unit is quite fragile, thanks to the cheap vacuum formed plastic.
What needs to be done is using some of the GIS tools they released to find good locations for air->water setups, is figure out what materials and manufacturing techniques are available in those locations. This way you are more likely to design something that makes a difference. Anything built with materials or techniques that are not local will break, and they will be unable to repair because they do not have access to either the materials or the tools needed to do repairs.
There may be multiple reasons for this, some of which may be those you stated, but couldn't altruism be at least an important part of the reason they shared this?
It just looks like a proof of concept. They tested it in very controlled conditions. Did not see how it withstands being knocked over, dropped, covered in dust from storms. Their market is Africa. How many of the towns have road access? Will the product be damaged in transport on very rough roads? Can they be stacked in transport, and how many high (or will they be crushed)? Will adhesives fail after n temperature cycles in the blazing sun + nighttime cold? Can it be repaired by people living there?
Almost every part looks to be made from scratch. The only thing off the shelf is the pink insulation foam. Can any of this be sourced in the target markets?
> Our assessment—using Google Earth Engine13—introduces a hypothetical 1-metre-square device with a SY profle of 0.2 to 2.5 litres per kilowatthour (0.1 to 1.25 litres per kilowatt-hour for a 2-metre-square device) at 30% to 90% RH, respectively.
The upper bound is nice, the lower bound kinda hurts. I can't tell if they are tracking the night cycle and harvesting when the dewpoint drops. Is this all calculation or is there a blueprint I am missing.
I really wish it wasn't Google, the spyware company that open sourced this. But rather a different company without all the bad and toxic disgusting ethics that Google has.
The phrase "don't throw the baby out with the bath water" comes to mind. Just because some of the practices of this large company are bad, it doesn't mean everything to come from it is. Keep the good stuff, ditch the rest.
You're thinking of vaporators. Binary loadlifters are heavy-lifting droids, though the binary programming language of those droids was quite similar to that of moisture vaporators. Maybe that's what you meant.
I want to make an orchard on a hill in the maritime pacific northwest. Its a somewhat odd climate where the time that gets hottest is when it also tends to be dryest (east coast tends to be wetter when hotter).
I wonder if something like this (possibly with less focus on "clean" water - it's rural and breezy, so I don' think raw output would harm trees...) could be suitable for generating summer water for tree irrigation.
Fair point, I thought part of the energy was being used for purification before I read the overview pdf.
The site is ~ 1/4 mile from the ocean, so I think the air won't be totally dry... but just won't get a lot of rainfall. Mostly wondering if there's a good way to 'moisture farm' to keep the soil around trees moist. Ideally with no more power than a small solar panel located right next to the device, so I don't have to run power there (there's well and power at the bottom of the hill... but moisture farming would be cooler than running irrigation :-P).
> Any water condensed from the air is going to be "pure" by most measures. It's essentially distilled water.
And you can freely give it for spherical cows to drink in vacuum.
Keeping any such device free from contamination is very difficult. Bacteria love the moist environments. Leave it unattended and you have moist dust. Lovely.
Orchard on the coast is tricky. I don't know specifically where you're located, but on the Oregon coast the only fruit trees OSU says will grow are apple and cherry (and sometimes pear). I've had better luck going with native bushes where you don't need to worry as much about supplemental water: huckleberry, salal berry, salmonberry, blackberry if you can maintain them, etc. Work with the environment rather than try to force the environment to do what you want. :)
I'm hoping heavy woodchip mulching can get me enough water retention to keep trees happy (we certainly get plenty of water the other ~9 months of the year!), but some supplemental water during the hot dry summer would probably significantly expand species and variety options.
Have a small well that should be able to help some... but looking at permaculture techniques (hugelkulture, swales etc) and possibly moisture farming as a potential way to improve moisture conditions in a 'greener' way then energy intensive pumping. Might try to build a pond high up on the hill to filter down over the dry season.
Kind of a paradoxical region, because plants want lots of water when there's lots of sun, and here we generally get one or the other :-/
Pretty common here on the BC coast for people to plumb the gutters of their house and outbuildings to tanks and then use that stored water in the summer for the garden or topping off wells.
If you have 9 months of rain/live in a temperate rainforest it's not likely conjuring water out of the air is worth the effort :)
No. The output is orders of magnitude too low. Trees stay cool by evaporating water. The solar energy they're absorbing by doing this is a lower bound on the energy you have to put in to condense that same water out of the air. But tree leaves convert about 75% of the sunlight that hits them into heat (they're a bit more than 75% "efficient" at doing something they don't want) while PV solar panels are only about 21% efficient. So you'd need more than three times as much solar-panel area as tree leaf area for that to work out.
As a correction, the paper is about a solar-thermal-driven sorbent system, not a PV-driven system. So you wouldn't need three times as much solar-collector area as tree leaf area, only about equal amounts. That's still probably orders of magnitude too expensive.
Let's say that I'm not an engineer or a researcher or a coder, but would like to set some of these units up to collect water. How do I do so? Do I approach someone to build this for me (who?)? How much can I expect it to cost?
In other words, how can I actualize this vision:
> So the H2E team asked: “What if you could put the power to generate daily drinking water into the hands of individuals, no matter where they live, by creating an affordable, easy to use device that harvests water from the air and is powered by the sun?"
My question was more, how does this help individuals without access to clean water, not a dystopian 'how can it be co-opted by corporations for business ends', but I appreciate the varying definitions of "practical" people have.
Yeah sure, but 1) prior to needing DCs, people need clean drinking water, and 2) the subset of people who need DCs is vastly smaller than those who need clean drinking water.
What exactly is a data center by your definition? What individuals (that are entirely disconnected from corporations) need them? How many individuals have personal data centers of such a scale that they would need to produce liquid water on-site for their computing needs?
I genuinely believe you’ve described an entirely theoretical person that doesn’t reside in this universe.
People need institutions to run functioning societies. These (public) institutions are one of the most traditional users of large-scale computing. Even in 60s there was a lot of computing done by public institutions. To fulfill the requirements of modern life, DCs are a must.
Most modern buildings have at least few racks of compute/storage for services like TV/phone/internet, camera recordings, etc. Even family houses have small racks nowadays.
This site is likely not hosted out of a person's closet, hence you commenting here is likely a product of a data centre.
Ignoring this specific example, a majority of the population uses social media for leisure and online tools for work (email, banking, etc.).
A majority of interconnects between ISPs and networks are hosted in data centres too... so there wouldn't be much of an internet without them.
If you closed all data centres over night, the majority of the above would disappear and certainly would not be able to scale as large as it had without data centres... hence, a majority of people need data centres to maintain their current standard of living.
The comment said "people", not "individuals" or "a person".
And considering how highly technical something like a modern water treatment plant can be, data centers are already a major force behind some of our potable water.
> My question was more, how does this help individuals without access to clean water
If the principle of it is sound, which I cannot verify, then by a manufacturer picking up the idea. Developing it into a product and selling it to individuals.
They are basically saying (paraphrasing) "Hey we suck at manufacturing things at scale, so we won't continue with this idea. But we don't want to let our learnings go to waste. Go ahead and learn from our experiments and mistakes. Maybe one of you out there can make it work as a product."
What a totally disingenuous way to recieve the comment's spirit, which takes some serious miscontruing to take it to wherever you're trying to take it.
Such a lowbrow cheap joke to assume that open source means "come take all my stuff" vs "i've made this to share with everyone" which does a disservice to open source more than it is funny.
Considering they said allowing others to build on this progress I would imagine that they have not achieved their stated goal yet:
>The team aimed to build a highly lightweight, portable, cheap (<5% of user’s income) device that an individual could use to produce 5L of drinking water per day.
> dystopian 'how can it be co-opted by corporations for business ends'
Why is it "dystopian" and "co-opting" if a company uses a technology like this to operate in a more environmentally friendly way?
People love to shit on companies (not specific ones, just "big companies" as a concept in general), completely ignoring where our standard of living comes from.
Considering the project is self-described as a way to get drinking water into peoples hands, it certainly seems a bit dystopian to immediately jump to using this to collect water for DC’s… especially considering the original comment was asking “how do you build this”, not “what could you use this for”
I'd understand this more if the two uses would somehow conflict, e.g. by competing for a limited resource. But here? If anything, this is going to either preserve other water sources for others, or put more money behind the technology.
The prototype described is tricky. Basically because they want low unit cost, they had to assume mass manufacture techniques such as vacuum forming. This means that the cost of small builds will be quite high (since there's a lot of jigging and molds that have to be 3d printed/CNC'd). Unfortunately, they don't have a BOM cost listed anywhere I've been able to find.
But also because this is a prototype, and they wanted to be able to tinker and measure, there's lots of design features and parts that are quite expensive and not really needed. Assembly also appears to be tricky and time consuming with non-trivial risk of damaging parts that then need to be repaired.
So ultimately you have a design and plan that's neither directly suitable for mass-production or low volume production (which is fine! it's a prototype! it's super not done). The prototype as described would likely form an acceptable basis for further revision.
You could probably go to a mechanical engineering design/consulting/prototyping firm with this and ask them to make it real with minimal changes (removing extraneous measurement devices, maybe swap out some of the grommets). It'd probably cost you like 50k at least to get your first one. Second one probably will cost like 100 bucks range.
There is already a similar device on the market called a dehumidifier. It takes a fair amount of electricity and costs over $150. I think the core of the problem may be the amount of energy it takes to harvest water vapor, especially in arid conditions. (Likely the areas where the need is greatest.)
Are there any sites that help build groups around current and upcoming open-source projects, and also encourage people to make stuff open-source - perhaps with pledges?
... a more business-focused GitHub.
... an OpenSea for inventors.
Imagine if money spent on NFTs would go to cool projects instead of avatars!
If a company can't think of anything useful and cost-effective to spend their money on, giving that money back in the way that passes through the largest portion of it is the most productive thing they could do.
Let the investors allocate their money efficiently, rather than buying a gold mine as a movie theatre company (as an example).
That's a pretty random example. Crypto? Maybe. But it's not like AMC is going to randomly get into the actual physical mining busin-- (hold on, it's 2022, lmgt just in case)
> Are there any sites that help build groups around current and upcoming open-source projects, and also encourage people to make stuff open-source - perhaps with pledges?
My guess is that if there were clear answers to those questions then the project might not have been shutdown. The hope is that someone or some other project might find a piece of this useful, or more optimistically that someone will find a way past any of the problems that made X take a pass on it.
Or if none of that happens, at the very least it serves as a free bit of knowledge telling others going down this path "it didn't work"
I'm thinking wildly here and not getting into technicals, but it could also be seen not necessarily for humans but also for ecosystem restoration efforts in harsh remote environments.
For example, while I have some viability questions the company Terraformation has been trial'ing photovoltaic solar powered water desalinization (using brackish wells as a source) in deforested areas for water - https://www.terraformation.com/blog/solar-powered-desalinati...
The TLDW version is these devices are fancy dehumidifiers. They need a ton of power, and lots of air humidity to be practical, which are exactly not the conditions these devices are advertised to operate in.
And even then, the water they produce is dirty, so it needs to be purified and treated to be actually drinkable.
Even if we solve all these challenges, it turns out that doing something dumb and low tech, like transporting drinking water on trucks is actually a lot more efficient.
This is another one in the long list of devices designed to help those hypothetical poor people, like OLPC and the Gravity Light.
It turns out these people have already solved these issues, and much better, usually with off-the-shelf alternatives and a bit of ingenuity.
I've heard some of the members of the project will get a payout for deciding to end the project (kind of an incentive to not keep failing projects going), and employees get a length of time to find a new home within Google / X. Though it's the same as any transfer process: you have to apply for available roles within the company, do fit chats, maybe do interviews, etc.
Are there any consumer-grade atmospheric solar water generators on the market right now? I did a very quick search and didn't find anything. Is there anything like this that people can buy right now?
Edit: There's also this water bottle I remember seeing a while back on Kickstarter or Indigogo. It doesn't seem like they actually sell it on the website: https://fontus.at/
It says clean, but isn't it only as clean as the surrounding air? For example if you used this next to a manufacturing plant spewing chemicals into the air, won't these contaminants be captured by the condensation and make it into the water?
You could buy a few solar panels, an inverter, a dehumidifier, and a water filter and be fine. The problem is sizing the power generation and dehumidifier to match and generate an amount of water meaningful to you.
Regardless you need quite a bit of solar to get a decent amount of water.
Given that a dehumidifier is prime bacteria habitat, I'd recommend probably also putting it through UV sterilisation (or ozone or chlorine) before a decent filter cartridge before drinking. But yeah, the energy required is so high that it's usually one of the least useful ways of getting water in most places.
Energy costs are the major limiter to desalination and the availability of water more broadly. One or two people can do that but if an entire civilization does it they'll clearcut their forests and make the air unbreatheable. Cooking fires are a major source of air pollution in many Indian cities.
I think these systems were always intended for small scale use for detached villages and whatnot? I don't see a way they would be able to provide for city even if you made hundreds of thousands.
If you want to support a civilization you better switch to something that can exploit the volume for increased efficiency, like an actual desalinization plant and a solar concentrator powerplant to run it.
The Sahara desert has a relative humidity of 25% (on average). Humidity tends to be much higher in deserts at night. Atacama can go to 0-2% _at noon in direct sunlight_, but as high as 50% at night.
The driest location on the planet is probably Antarctica. Yes, full of water, in the form of ice, but the air is dry.
At first pass, I would guess that something like this would primarily be useful in places with naturally high humidity, which aren't likely to have a shortage of water in the first place, no?
Maybe the argument is that the natural sources of water are dirty, and extracting from the air is automatically clean and safe to drink, but it still seems like it may be more resource efficient to invest in water treatment, not a fleet of dehumidifiers.
It might have some use in coastal areas where salt water can contaminate wells sometimes. But you are right it might just be worth pursuing something like desalination powered by solar power in those situations.
> and extracting from the air is automatically clean and safe to drink
It isn't, though. Bacteria accumulate. Dehumidifiers are generally very nasty. Although bacteria can then be killed (not sure about their toxins), while other contaminants may not be very easy to get rid of.
Almost every place on Earth has humidity above 0%. Which makes it possible to extract water, even if it's very inefficient. People have condensed water successfully in deserts.
Bacteriostatic materials aren't rocket science. One of the best dehumidifier materials, copper, is also one of the best bacteriostats. It's just expensive.
As far as I know every "water from air" is literally a dehumidifier and is going to produce dirty water at 1000x the cost of just driving water anywhere on earth.
A cursory glance of TFA suggests that it probably is another dehumidifier. Depending on the environment it might yield a small amount of water, but certainly not the kind you would want to be drinking without treatment. I look forward to thunderf00t's video on it.
What is the intersection of people who a) can afford an expenditure of $150, b) have reliable access to electricity and can pay for it, and c) can't get their hands on five liters of clean water a day?
Many people don't have good access to clean water, over 2B according to the repo's readme.
Those people probably cannot afford $150, but the goal of the project wasn't $150, it was lower.
The unit is supposed to be solar powered, so access to electricity isn't strictly necessary, in the sense of being able to connect to the grid. They just need sunlight.
There is a sweet spot of cost, where those who need it can't afford it, but nonprofits, billionaire philanthropists, and local governments can afford to purchase and distribute such devices where necessary. In cases where the need for clean water greatly outweighs the supply, such entities see a good return on investment, simply by improving the health of those people there.
Furthermore, X is a moonshot program at Google. They attempt solutions for big problems with high likeihood of failure. Are you suggesting they shouldn't do this with their money printing ad machine? It seems like any good that comes out of that company should be celebrated, and in this case they are sharing a bunch of work on solving what will be an increasing large problem for the entire world.
> Data and geospatial tools around access to safe drinking water are provided here to aid academic reproducibility and advancement in the context of the Nature Paper “Global Potential of Harvesting Drinking Water from Air using Solar Energy”.
Again from the readme.
You're correct that the slide deck mentions a $150 price point. The readme mentions cheap as less than 5% of total income. If we assume the poorest people in the world, who walk miles each day to access water, then we are talking about income levels of ~$365-$730 a year. 5% of that is less than $150.
All of my points still stand. Project X at Google set out to solve one of the very hard problems in the world, and made their findings and work available to the public for free. It's clearly not supposed to be something going to market, so asking who will buy it that needs fresh water is obtuse, IMO.
I don’t see how it can be that billions of people lack clean water. It must be plentiful enough and clean enough for the billions of people to exist. If it wasn’t they wouldn’t.
First, let me say the number comes from the readme presented, not my own research or claims.
Second, the claim that the water isn't clean enough for drinking should be qualified. You can drink it and survive, hopefully. But bacteria exist in these water sources that give people dysentery or other illnesses from which they die. In underdeveloped parts of the world there are poor mortality rates. Humanitarian goals seek to improve those mortality rates, and providing clean(er) water is one way to do that.
Don't take my word for it though. Factfulness is a great book by Hans Rosling that discusses how the poorest people in the world live and some efforts to improve those lives, even if that's not the main focus of the book (it was the main focus of Rosling's career, iirc).
I think I see what you are saying, and I haven't read the book or anything on this topic. I can absolutely imagine how people would have better lives with more and cleaner water. But billions of people is an extraordinary equilibrium population already, and it makes me wonder if access to water will improve the lives in question, or raise the equilibrium population to a higher level at the same amount of misery and suffering.
At a high level, considering the population growth rates of developed nations, almost all of them are in decline. One could posit that at some point of improvement in life for a given population, the growth rate will plateu and then begin to fall, rather than increase in perpetuity. Looking closer at the developed nations that still have increasing population growth reveals a significant portion of it coming from immigration.
I've read a lot of stuff that says we should panic because population growth is bad, the world has too many people, it's already at or exceeding its carrying capacity, there's no way the whole world can live at Western levels, people in the West are super greedy and borderline evil for living like kings while everybody else starves. You and I need to get a lot poorer to free up resources for Asians and Africans to get out of extreme poverty, and if we object to becoming a whole lot poorer for the benefit of strangers halfway around the world, we're terrible evil racists.
I've also read a lot of stuff that says we should panic because populations are shrinking and aging. Economic growth is fueled by population growth, Social Security in the US and really the whole world's economic system is a Ponzi scheme based on an exponentially increasing population, we're headed for a ton of turmoil and collapse. If America wants to avoid a complete economic collapse, or having to replace its population with a super high immigration level that really ignites political tensions (think Trump presidency but 10 times worse), everyone needs to start having tons of babies like right now.
Is it really the case that positive growth and negative growth are both catastrophes? How does it even make logical sense that there are too many and too few people at the same time? Or is somebody lying? If so, who, and how can we tell?
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[ 9.0 ms ] story [ 5221 ms ] threadConsiderations of efficiency and power consumption are relevant... but not much else. Generally such devices are either too expensive, too maintenance heavy, or utterly inefficient.
I'm not qualified to comment on, but I have found it interesting that it heats up the air (hotter air = can hold more moisture), passes the air through some material that's supposed to retain moisture, then cools it down with radiators. It seems that it would be more efficient in cold weather but would not perform nearly as well in a desert (where you need it to perform well as the moisture content is low during the day).
So maybe Mr. Thunderfoot will be able to debunk this too. If he can refrain from reusing Theranos and Boring Co footage.
The device may work great in one condition but certainly not always like the vendors might tout.
Given the triple point chart for water, the solar power for that day, and your humidity and temperature, you can compute the max you'll condense from the atmosphere.
What is surprising is that thunderfoot didn't lose his habit of repeating himself over and over again. I'm counting 10 videos "debunking" the same idea of a bottle that extracts water from air (which is not what this project really is, it's not a based around a bottle)& he's been beating the same dead horses for 6 years now.
Though to be fair, he's now more into into making misleading videos about SpaceX and obsessing over Elon Musk.
Edit: Actually it's just weird at this point,his recent videos and their titles are so bizarre. It's either cheering at failures or Facebook tier thumbnails "Owning" Elon Musk. Yeah, I'll definitely stick with the Nature paper.
Yeap.
> Though to be fair, he's now more into into making misleading videos about SpaceX and obsessing over Elon Musk.
His videos are recursive.
You see, even videos having nothing to do with the subject at all, he will still find a way to include Hyperloop, Theranos and Boring Co. footage. Plus older videos. Like a house of mirrors.
They seem to be well reasoned. What are these misleading statements?
Other than that, I'm very excited about the propsects of air to water machines, I really really hope they become a lot more energy efficient.
Requires desalination, which is more complicated than simply filtering.
You can build a simple desalinator (aka, a solar still) with a couple bins, some glass/plexiglass, and access to sunlight. Preferably in an enclosed system to better contain heat and prevent water vapor from escaping.
No filters to replace, and it will run for as long as you feed it water.
Best link I could find to explain the process: https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/61215
Even putting it back into the ocean isn’t simple. If you do it in one big batch, you would kill everything in that location for a while. If you do it slowly, that isn’t simple.
Make margaritas. Put some on your steak. Throw the rest back in the ocean if you want.
We're talking, maybe a couple pounds of salt per person per day. It's not an unmanageable amount.
You're not going to hurt the ocean by adding back a little salt - salt that you took out of it...
Yes, you will most likely affect cultures within the immediate vicinity of a salt dump site but they will regrow elsewhere. It's peanuts compared to the amount of dilution being caused all the time by normal freshwater runoff and ice cap melts.
The ocean is very large.
At least tell us why it’s a dead end.
That doesn't mean it's useless for everybody. So they publishing it may improve somebody's life.
https://x.company/blog/posts/sharing-project-h2e-with-the-wo...
Allow me to snip a few quotes: "After three years of work, the team felt confident they could build a device that would produce water for $.10 per liter; however, it would have taken significant development work and iteration to prove feasibility at $.01 per liter. Additionally, the next phase of work for the project looked to be heavily focused on hardware integration and mass production expertise — not X’s sweet spot."
And:
"Given these factors, it became clear that X wasn’t best suited to take the work forward, and one of the best ways X could have an impact now on the problem of access to safe drinking water was to share what we’ve learned."
I have no idea what the prior state of the art of modelling viable areas for harvesting was (I presume this is probably where X made the largest contribution). As the blogpost identifies... X is not really the best group to tinker with large scale, low cost manufacturing prototyping and scale up.
They won't sue you for using the findings or design, but they still have U.S. Patent on it and our pledging that Google will not sue those who use this intellectual property nor will anyone they transfer the patent to be able to sue.
What they call "infringement" just means that since they hold a patent others "copying" it would technically be infringing the patent - but they pledge not to sue.
What needs to be done is using some of the GIS tools they released to find good locations for air->water setups, is figure out what materials and manufacturing techniques are available in those locations. This way you are more likely to design something that makes a difference. Anything built with materials or techniques that are not local will break, and they will be unable to repair because they do not have access to either the materials or the tools needed to do repairs.
Almost every part looks to be made from scratch. The only thing off the shelf is the pink insulation foam. Can any of this be sourced in the target markets?
The upper bound is nice, the lower bound kinda hurts. I can't tell if they are tracking the night cycle and harvesting when the dewpoint drops. Is this all calculation or is there a blueprint I am missing.
It is like Facebook and Internet.org, we keep allowing these tech companies to continue to build these trojan horses.
All Google has concentrated on is evil.
Hell, this project could be the aftermath of a Google PM gutting a team.
I wonder if something like this (possibly with less focus on "clean" water - it's rural and breezy, so I don' think raw output would harm trees...) could be suitable for generating summer water for tree irrigation.
I wish the overview PDF had more labels...
Any water condensed from the air is going to be "pure" by most measures. It's essentially distilled water.
You can improve it easily by filtering. It's much easier than filtering the final water. But it's not necessarily pure.
The site is ~ 1/4 mile from the ocean, so I think the air won't be totally dry... but just won't get a lot of rainfall. Mostly wondering if there's a good way to 'moisture farm' to keep the soil around trees moist. Ideally with no more power than a small solar panel located right next to the device, so I don't have to run power there (there's well and power at the bottom of the hill... but moisture farming would be cooler than running irrigation :-P).
And you can freely give it for spherical cows to drink in vacuum.
Keeping any such device free from contamination is very difficult. Bacteria love the moist environments. Leave it unattended and you have moist dust. Lovely.
Quite a lot of energy, but at least you can market it as double-distilled, like a fancy spirit.
I'm hoping heavy woodchip mulching can get me enough water retention to keep trees happy (we certainly get plenty of water the other ~9 months of the year!), but some supplemental water during the hot dry summer would probably significantly expand species and variety options.
Have a small well that should be able to help some... but looking at permaculture techniques (hugelkulture, swales etc) and possibly moisture farming as a potential way to improve moisture conditions in a 'greener' way then energy intensive pumping. Might try to build a pond high up on the hill to filter down over the dry season.
Kind of a paradoxical region, because plants want lots of water when there's lots of sun, and here we generally get one or the other :-/
This, or tanks (to cut down on evaporation).
Pretty common here on the BC coast for people to plumb the gutters of their house and outbuildings to tanks and then use that stored water in the summer for the garden or topping off wells.
If you have 9 months of rain/live in a temperate rainforest it's not likely conjuring water out of the air is worth the effort :)
Pity that it couldn't move forward.
Let's say that I'm not an engineer or a researcher or a coder, but would like to set some of these units up to collect water. How do I do so? Do I approach someone to build this for me (who?)? How much can I expect it to cost?
In other words, how can I actualize this vision:
> So the H2E team asked: “What if you could put the power to generate daily drinking water into the hands of individuals, no matter where they live, by creating an affordable, easy to use device that harvests water from the air and is powered by the sun?"
What exactly is a data center by your definition? What individuals (that are entirely disconnected from corporations) need them? How many individuals have personal data centers of such a scale that they would need to produce liquid water on-site for their computing needs?
I genuinely believe you’ve described an entirely theoretical person that doesn’t reside in this universe.
Most modern buildings have at least few racks of compute/storage for services like TV/phone/internet, camera recordings, etc. Even family houses have small racks nowadays.
Ignoring this specific example, a majority of the population uses social media for leisure and online tools for work (email, banking, etc.).
A majority of interconnects between ISPs and networks are hosted in data centres too... so there wouldn't be much of an internet without them.
If you closed all data centres over night, the majority of the above would disappear and certainly would not be able to scale as large as it had without data centres... hence, a majority of people need data centres to maintain their current standard of living.
And considering how highly technical something like a modern water treatment plant can be, data centers are already a major force behind some of our potable water.
If the principle of it is sound, which I cannot verify, then by a manufacturer picking up the idea. Developing it into a product and selling it to individuals.
They are basically saying (paraphrasing) "Hey we suck at manufacturing things at scale, so we won't continue with this idea. But we don't want to let our learnings go to waste. Go ahead and learn from our experiments and mistakes. Maybe one of you out there can make it work as a product."
:-)
>The team aimed to build a highly lightweight, portable, cheap (<5% of user’s income) device that an individual could use to produce 5L of drinking water per day.
Why is it "dystopian" and "co-opting" if a company uses a technology like this to operate in a more environmentally friendly way?
People love to shit on companies (not specific ones, just "big companies" as a concept in general), completely ignoring where our standard of living comes from.
But also because this is a prototype, and they wanted to be able to tinker and measure, there's lots of design features and parts that are quite expensive and not really needed. Assembly also appears to be tricky and time consuming with non-trivial risk of damaging parts that then need to be repaired.
So ultimately you have a design and plan that's neither directly suitable for mass-production or low volume production (which is fine! it's a prototype! it's super not done). The prototype as described would likely form an acceptable basis for further revision.
You could probably go to a mechanical engineering design/consulting/prototyping firm with this and ask them to make it real with minimal changes (removing extraneous measurement devices, maybe swap out some of the grommets). It'd probably cost you like 50k at least to get your first one. Second one probably will cost like 100 bucks range.
... a more business-focused GitHub.
... an OpenSea for inventors.
Imagine if money spent on NFTs would go to cool projects instead of avatars!
Let the investors allocate their money efficiently, rather than buying a gold mine as a movie theatre company (as an example).
That's a pretty random example. Crypto? Maybe. But it's not like AMC is going to randomly get into the actual physical mining busin-- (hold on, it's 2022, lmgt just in case)
Yes, a perfectly good example.
Open Collective is designed to do exactly that:
https://opencollective.com/
Or if none of that happens, at the very least it serves as a free bit of knowledge telling others going down this path "it didn't work"
For example, while I have some viability questions the company Terraformation has been trial'ing photovoltaic solar powered water desalinization (using brackish wells as a source) in deforested areas for water - https://www.terraformation.com/blog/solar-powered-desalinati...
If I understand correctly (still learning and might be wrong), another way to frame this is in perceiving water vapor itself - you can be in desertifying areas and yet supposedly have plenty of water vapor to a lack of evapotranspiration. This is what some have framed 'the second leg of anthropogenic climate change' - ( https://museecology.com/2020/10/30/15-professor-millan-the-s... , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mf4jwkhCk_A - "Desert or rainforest" , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdcsQw3ma_Y - "Restoring the Water Cycle 1" )
Thunderf00t has made a ton of videos about devices like this, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGTRX6pZSns
The TLDW version is these devices are fancy dehumidifiers. They need a ton of power, and lots of air humidity to be practical, which are exactly not the conditions these devices are advertised to operate in.
And even then, the water they produce is dirty, so it needs to be purified and treated to be actually drinkable.
Even if we solve all these challenges, it turns out that doing something dumb and low tech, like transporting drinking water on trucks is actually a lot more efficient.
This is another one in the long list of devices designed to help those hypothetical poor people, like OLPC and the Gravity Light.
It turns out these people have already solved these issues, and much better, usually with off-the-shelf alternatives and a bit of ingenuity.
Edit: There's also this water bottle I remember seeing a while back on Kickstarter or Indigogo. It doesn't seem like they actually sell it on the website: https://fontus.at/
Regardless you need quite a bit of solar to get a decent amount of water.
If you want to support a civilization you better switch to something that can exploit the volume for increased efficiency, like an actual desalinization plant and a solar concentrator powerplant to run it.
The Sahara desert has a relative humidity of 25% (on average). Humidity tends to be much higher in deserts at night. Atacama can go to 0-2% _at noon in direct sunlight_, but as high as 50% at night.
The driest location on the planet is probably Antarctica. Yes, full of water, in the form of ice, but the air is dry.
At first pass, I would guess that something like this would primarily be useful in places with naturally high humidity, which aren't likely to have a shortage of water in the first place, no?
Maybe the argument is that the natural sources of water are dirty, and extracting from the air is automatically clean and safe to drink, but it still seems like it may be more resource efficient to invest in water treatment, not a fleet of dehumidifiers.
It isn't, though. Bacteria accumulate. Dehumidifiers are generally very nasty. Although bacteria can then be killed (not sure about their toxins), while other contaminants may not be very easy to get rid of.
Almost every place on Earth has humidity above 0%. Which makes it possible to extract water, even if it's very inefficient. People have condensed water successfully in deserts.
Haven’t there been umpteen attempts at this? I thought there’s not that much water in the air. The volume of air to move must be crazy.
Maybe I should read TFA
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EGTRX6pZSns
https://hvacguides101.com/is-dehumidifier-water-safe-to-drin...
Requires an electric motor to circulate air.
What is the intersection of people who a) can afford an expenditure of $150, b) have reliable access to electricity and can pay for it, and c) can't get their hands on five liters of clean water a day?
Those people probably cannot afford $150, but the goal of the project wasn't $150, it was lower.
The unit is supposed to be solar powered, so access to electricity isn't strictly necessary, in the sense of being able to connect to the grid. They just need sunlight.
There is a sweet spot of cost, where those who need it can't afford it, but nonprofits, billionaire philanthropists, and local governments can afford to purchase and distribute such devices where necessary. In cases where the need for clean water greatly outweighs the supply, such entities see a good return on investment, simply by improving the health of those people there.
Furthermore, X is a moonshot program at Google. They attempt solutions for big problems with high likeihood of failure. Are you suggesting they shouldn't do this with their money printing ad machine? It seems like any good that comes out of that company should be celebrated, and in this case they are sharing a bunch of work on solving what will be an increasing large problem for the entire world.
It also clearly shows an electric circulating fan in the diagrams.
Again from the readme.
You're correct that the slide deck mentions a $150 price point. The readme mentions cheap as less than 5% of total income. If we assume the poorest people in the world, who walk miles each day to access water, then we are talking about income levels of ~$365-$730 a year. 5% of that is less than $150.
All of my points still stand. Project X at Google set out to solve one of the very hard problems in the world, and made their findings and work available to the public for free. It's clearly not supposed to be something going to market, so asking who will buy it that needs fresh water is obtuse, IMO.
Second, the claim that the water isn't clean enough for drinking should be qualified. You can drink it and survive, hopefully. But bacteria exist in these water sources that give people dysentery or other illnesses from which they die. In underdeveloped parts of the world there are poor mortality rates. Humanitarian goals seek to improve those mortality rates, and providing clean(er) water is one way to do that.
Don't take my word for it though. Factfulness is a great book by Hans Rosling that discusses how the poorest people in the world live and some efforts to improve those lives, even if that's not the main focus of the book (it was the main focus of Rosling's career, iirc).
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34890015-factfulness
There is some pretty good data to peruse (particularly the aggregates at the bottom of the page) here: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.GROW?most_recent...
I've read a lot of stuff that says we should panic because population growth is bad, the world has too many people, it's already at or exceeding its carrying capacity, there's no way the whole world can live at Western levels, people in the West are super greedy and borderline evil for living like kings while everybody else starves. You and I need to get a lot poorer to free up resources for Asians and Africans to get out of extreme poverty, and if we object to becoming a whole lot poorer for the benefit of strangers halfway around the world, we're terrible evil racists.
I've also read a lot of stuff that says we should panic because populations are shrinking and aging. Economic growth is fueled by population growth, Social Security in the US and really the whole world's economic system is a Ponzi scheme based on an exponentially increasing population, we're headed for a ton of turmoil and collapse. If America wants to avoid a complete economic collapse, or having to replace its population with a super high immigration level that really ignites political tensions (think Trump presidency but 10 times worse), everyone needs to start having tons of babies like right now.
Is it really the case that positive growth and negative growth are both catastrophes? How does it even make logical sense that there are too many and too few people at the same time? Or is somebody lying? If so, who, and how can we tell?
PS. On top of that this country isn’t the unsafest drinking water place on the planet.