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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

#121

Post by andbberger »

petermcneeley wrote: post #47

I actually had a discussion on this subject with Phil Mason aka Thunderfoot who has a Phd in chemistry and is the creator of the video that is critical of this announcement ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3s-xI895zc ) The discussion was about how much work is actually required to condense the water vapor. The fact is that it is thermodynamically possible to MOVE more heat energy (Q) than work (W) applied. The effi…

Sort of topic, but man is his presentation format tiresome.

I would never have guessed that he has a PhD in chemistry... he comes across as rather off his rocker

I think it's his rhetoric - there's some substantive argument under the surface but it gets washed out with all the aggression and rhetorical fallacies.... it's very schizophrenic...

Re: The Water Abundance XPrize winner makes water from air

#122

Post by andbberger »

andbberger wrote: post #121
petermcneeley wrote: post #47

I actually had a discussion on this subject with Phil Mason aka Thunderfoot who has a Phd in chemistry and is the creator of the video that is critical of this announcement ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3s-xI895zc ) The discussion was about how much work is actually required to condense the water vapor. The fact is that it is thermodynamically possible to MOVE more heat energy (Q) than work (W) applied. The effi…

Sort of topic, but man is his presentation format tiresome. I would never have guessed that he has a PhD in chemistry... he comes across as rather off his rocker I think it's his rhetoric - there's some substantive argument under the surface but it gets washed out with all the aggression and rhetorical fallacies.... it's very schizophrenic...

Following up on my comment because this is driving me nuts...

His aggressive diatribe manner of speaking seems all too ubiquitous these days, as we find ourselves conducting the vast majority of our communications with the 'hivemind' on platforms where ability to attract attention wins out over quality discourse.

And it's just fucking impossible to have any real conversation in that context. There's no room to entertain subtleties, the higher-order structure of the subject, if you will.

For instance.... he makes it out like everyone involved in this prize is absolutely clueless about thermodynamics and that there are no conceivable advancements to be made for this particular scenario because thermodynamics.

Bullshit. There's plenty of innovation to be had. You can take advantage of daily temperature swings, use a ground-source heat pump... and almost certainly current humidifiers aren't operating at the thermodynamic limit; there's probably work to do in developing better materials, optimizing the design for efficiency, etc

Re: The Water Abundance XPrize winner makes water from air

#123

Post by brokensegue »

comesee wrote: post #99
_0w8t wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ancient Roman Empire was politically stable. When this is not the case one really needs very local water sources.

Why isn't there an xprize for politically stabilizing these countries then? That would lead to vastly more efficient and convenient water sources.

Can't tell if you're joking

Re: The Water Abundance XPrize winner makes water from air

#124

Post by mchannon »

jessriedel wrote: post #113
Sephr wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Details I received from emailing mchannon: > Thanks for reaching out. Mine uses a deliquescent salt, which requires no energy to absorb water from the air. It's pretty messy, but does the job. Getting the water back out is where the energy is required, and this is non-trivial, but still far better than those dehumidifier approaches, which are unfortunately the perpetual motion machines of our era.

Isnt the assumption here that he didn't want to share this publicly? It seems like a betrayl of trust, regardless of the merits.

It’s a slightly different motivation. There is something worse than a forum troll, and that’s a forum censor.

I could post all the stuff publicly, but then I’d get more downvotes, because a lot of forum users enforce the norms they like.

I see the number of points in my posts like this one jockey up and down repeatedly, meaning equal double-digit numbers of readers approve and don’t. Being able to follow that history would prove fascinating, but it’s not a feature on HN.

I’ve even attracted a following of a couple of readers who downvote anything I post.

So it’s with the norm—enforcing downvoter in mind when I want to reach out.

Share away. I can’t even give my technology ideas away.

Re: The Water Abundance XPrize winner makes water from air

#125

Post by irascible »

xgbi wrote: post #109
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?

Are you neglecting to factor in your wine consumption?

Re: The Water Abundance XPrize winner makes water from air

#126

Post by comesee »

brokensegue wrote: post #123
comesee wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why isn't there an xprize for politically stabilizing these countries then? That would lead to vastly more efficient and convenient water sources.

Can't tell if you're joking

That means I'm probably on to something :)

Re: The Water Abundance XPrize winner makes water from air

#127

Post by tastroder »

andbberger wrote: post #122
andbberger wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sort of topic, but man is his presentation format tiresome. I would never have guessed that he has a PhD in chemistry... he comes across as rather off his rocker I think it's his rhetoric - there's some substantive argument under the surface but it gets washed out with all the aggression and rhetorical fallacies.... it's very schizophrenic...

Following up on my comment because this is driving me nuts... His aggressive diatribe manner of speaking seems all too ubiquitous these days, as we find ourselves conducting the vast majority of our communications with the 'hivemind' on platforms where ability to attract attention wins out over quality discourse. And it's just fucking impossible to have any real conversation in that context. There's no room to entert…

I kind of see what you're saying in regards to leaving no room for subtleties but that argument goes both ways.

I tried to find accurate information on the technology and how they differentiate from the regular old dehumidifier spiel when I first heard about the prize, even spending a few minutes on Google scholar searches for their contributors. It was all drowned out by marketing materials and fancy graphics.

On one side we have a person with a Youtube brand that lives off of these kinds of debunkings, including their over the top tone. On the other side we have multiple companies with a product and accompanying marketing budgets. Both clearly lacking in room for discussion and subtlety. Could the youtuber get their point accross more objectively and clear? Sure. Would somebody listen or even discover their argument? I kind of doubt that. Just like the product would not gain traction from scientific papers alone.

Trying to make my point clearer, I do not feel like that the Youtube person is solely at fault for a weirdly framed discussion here. If the XPrize winners have more innovation to show than combining two technologies that they seem to have used before they should clearly communicate that, including scientific analysis that are easy to discover. They got a prize for a product that claims to be better than competition with similar tech in a space that previously saw players that absolutely were pure snake-oil. Just put facts next to your pitch decks and fancy marketing materials people.

Re: The Water Abundance XPrize winner makes water from air

#128

Post by beaconstudios »

stephengillie wrote: post #68
beaconstudios wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the wind traps, from Dune?

Similar - wind traps in Persia and Arabia. Those in Dune were probably inspired by their real world counterparts.

probably - the book did lean very heavily on middle eastern cultural references.

Re: The Water Abundance XPrize winner makes water from air

#129

Post by DoctorOetker »

reason-mr wrote: post #36
VBprogrammer wrote: post #26

I might be way off base here but is that Jim Mason - Founder of All Power Labs? In that case it hints that gasification could be part of the solution.

As I understand it, it is basically the skysource water extraction device hooked to an all-power labs gassifier, which produces electricity from gassifying organic material. Allpower's product uses the gassifier output in a conventional engine, in turn using that to power a generator. The great part here is - uses locally generated biomass, and produces a waste stream of biochar, which can be used for argiculture, es…

the CO2 exhaust isn't really carbon neutral is it?

Re: The Water Abundance XPrize winner makes water from air

#130

Post by VBprogrammer »

DoctorOetker wrote: post #129
reason-mr wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I understand it, it is basically the skysource water extraction device hooked to an all-power labs gassifier, which produces electricity from gassifying organic material. Allpower's product uses the gassifier output in a conventional engine, in turn using that to power a generator. The great part here is - uses locally generated biomass, and produces a waste stream of biochar, which can be used for argiculture, es…

the CO2 exhaust isn't really carbon neutral is it?

It's using 'current carbon' which is basically the same thing. Plants grow using CO2 in the air, we burn the plants and that CO2 is released again. If we just left the biomass to rot on the ground it'd produce CO2 and / or Methane depending on the type of decomposition it underwent.

Verses plants and animals lived millennia ago, died, got compressed by huge geological forces and finally we come along and extract it and burn it.

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