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The Water Abundance XPrize winner makes water from air

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Re: The Water Abundance XPrize winner makes water from air

#101

Post by extrapickles »

It looks like the winner is a standard dehumidifier bolted to a standard biomass generator that has a condenser from a high efficiency furnace bolted on to it.

So the only "magic" they are doing is also capturing the water vapor from the generators combustion. While somewhat novel in combining it all, its all off the shelf tech.

What I don't like is the lack of good hard numbers in its performance in a range of conditions as snake oil is extremely common in the water from air industry.

Re: The Water Abundance XPrize winner makes water from air

#103

Post by brixon »

extrapickles wrote: post #101

It looks like the winner is a standard dehumidifier bolted to a standard biomass generator that has a condenser from a high efficiency furnace bolted on to it. So the only "magic" they are doing is also capturing the water vapor from the generators combustion. While somewhat novel in combining it all, its all off the shelf tech. What I don't like is the lack of good hard numbers in its performance in a range of condi…

Off the shelf tech might be what is keeping the cost down.

Re: The Water Abundance XPrize winner makes water from air

#104

Post by joshe »

If it all works this would be useful. (Contary to all the negative comments about how pointless this is.)

Not a water expert, but here's where this reported price ranks from some googling:

  Tap water in California:     $.0005 / liter [1]
  XPrize winner:               $.02 / liter
  Water truck delivery in CA:  $.01 - $.05 / liter [2]
  Desalination:                $.05 - $.30 / liter [3]
  Wholesale bottled water:     $.30 / liter [4]
  Walmart bottled water:       $.68 / liter  [5]
If $.02/liter is right, this is close to the water truck in pricing. Also it seems like you could ship this with solar to disaster areas instead of flats and flats of bottled water and be up to 15 times cheaper. It could be an alternative to desalinization near the ocean where there is lots of humidity at 2 to 15 times expense. This seems useful.

Tap water is awesome, btw. It's 100 times cheaper than all these options.

[1] $.002 per gallon from https://www.wsj.com/articles/my-california-water-is-an-undil...

[2] $200 for 5000 gallons to $500 for 2500 gallons for water truck delivery in California https://www.cnbc.com/2015/04/08/californias-four-year-drough...

[3] https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-a-water-desalination-pla...

[4] $1.22 per gallon from https://slate.com/business/2013/07/cost-of-bottled-water-vs-...

[5] $.02 per fl oz from https://www.walmart.com/tp/bottled-water

Re: The Water Abundance XPrize winner makes water from air

#105

Post by nevlis »

mamon wrote: post #82
mchannon wrote: post #62

Pretty disappointed with their choice of winner. Using refrigeration to maintain a dewpoint means that this appliance is pretty impractical below 50% relative humidity. Or in other words, this thing only makes water when you probably don't need water. Blow some nice 90 deg F 20% humid air past those coils, and you'll be blowing out a lot of 80 deg F 25% humid air out on the other side, getting bupkis for actual produ…

>> this thing only makes water when you probably don't need water. Living in California recently I constantly see the weather forecast claiming 70-90% humidity and yet the area is basically a dessert with almost no rain. I suppose there are many more areas in the world like that.

Sounds like a delicious place to live

Re: The Water Abundance XPrize winner makes water from air

#107

Post by jamiek88 »

stephengillie wrote: post #37
explorigin wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the approach is a bit more novel than normal dehumidifiers. Instead of just collecting water dripping of the condenser coils, they use the cooler air to make a "rain chamber". The website talks about "maintaining a dew point within a condensation chamber".

This sounds like Persian Wind Catchers. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windcatcher There's a similar type of building which uses temperature difference to generate condensation within a building, creating a pool of water. The name escapes me at the moment.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakhchāl

Re: The Water Abundance XPrize winner makes water from air

#108

Post by travisoneill1 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #91
travisoneill1 wrote: post #17

2 cents a liter is not close to feasible for any sort of agricultural or industrial use and is an order of magnitude more expensive than residential tap water. Seems like cool tech, but I can't see how this is a solution to any type of water shortage.

> I can't see how this is a solution to any type of water shortage. If you don't have drinking water, five to ten cents per day is a pretty good deal! It really doesn't matter that tap water somewhere else in the world is one cent.

For one person, yes. But it would be cheaper to build a running water system for everyone to have tap water than to widely deploy this system.

Re: The Water Abundance XPrize winner makes water from air

#109

Post by xgbi »

ortusdux wrote: post #15

Here is the website for one of the winners: http://www.skysource.org/ From what I can glean online, the 150 gal/day unit costs $18k usd + $150-$300 in electricity a month if run 24/7 at $0.10Kwh. Ignoring electrical costs, it would take 1581 days to reach $0.02/liter. In that time you would use up $7.5-15k in electricity. The best estimate I could find is that the average US household uses 240 gal a day. A friend of…

Are you serious? 240gal/day is 900 liters/day!

We are four people living in a house & garden in france and I used 70m3 (70000 liters) last year. That would be about 190L/d or 50gal/day, 5 times less. Where do you dump so much water in the US?

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