From seawater to drinking water, with the push of a button

Amazing! Is this a game changer?

Maybe. I think Atmospheric Water Generators are much More likely to change the game since they don’t need a body of water other than the atmosphere.

Edit: I wrote out the comment below criticizing the efficiency of this device, when compared to reverse osmosis RO desalination (100x less efficient).

However, they’re not trying to be more efficient than RO devices, they’re trying to be more compact, portable, and avoid the need for filters.

They’re solving for a different problem than I was measuring them against.

In my race to criticize, I overlooked those key details.

I still think my comment is worth reading to learn about the efficiency differences but I guess that measurement is not important for the viability of this technology.

Original criticism below: ———————

I’m skeptical about how practical this actually is.

While it’s refreshing to see a drinking water solution that isn’t based on inefficient dehumidifier technology, this still seems impractical.

From the demonstration video, their portable ~50 watt solar panel took 30 minutes to get a few ounces of drinking water.

It looked like a cold winter day, so let’s be generous and assume the panel only produced 15 watts of power during those 30 minutes.

Let’s also be generous and say they got 5 ounces of water.

That means they produce 1 ounce of water for every 3 watts.

That’d be 333 ounces per kWh.

To put that into perspective, a desalination plant produces more than 100x that much.

Yes, there is lots of additional infrastructure to consider with a traditional desalination plant but It’s not like this solution wouldn’t require the same complexity to scale up.

I don’t remember the cost of dehumidifier drinking water “solutions” but I think this is slightly more efficient than those horrifically inefficient solutions.

There are big thermodynamic problems with those, the phase transition requires a lot of energy... Generally the main places where they work with any kind of acceptable efficiently and decent yield (where there's high enough humidity) are also the places where it tends to rain a lot!

From the article it sounds like they are looking for ways to scale down (i.e small portable units are the target form factor, not a mere demo), and this is where it compares favourably against things like reverse osmosis for efficiency.