141–150 of 246 posts
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I will never check out a Thunderfoot video. He is a hateful pitiful man.
He's generally not wrong. But I agree, his approach is pretty obnoxious.
Instead I think real engineering relies on tradeoffs, certain areas of a multidimensional space where an idea makes sense - and others where it doesn’t.
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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 af…
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.
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).
Check out Thunderf00t's videos cricising solar water collectors, e.g.: - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc7WqVMCABg - Zero Mass Water: BUSTED! "Honestly, it drives me crazy how many people have reinvented the dehumidifier, put a solar panel on it, and the media has danced around like theyve just saved the world!" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPvXnmBIO7o - Self-filling water bottle: BUSTED! " The fact that its t…
I wonder how well it would work as a stand in for a desalination solution. Where there's all the water you want but it has salt (or other contaminant) that makes it impossible to drink. Seems to me that a beach would be the perfect place for it. At $150 price point it's a very good alternative to high price machinery.
From the README, "This is no longer an active project at X" ==> (implies) ==> We don't care about it any more, so we're dumping it here. Do what you want :-)
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Dehumidifiers aren't what's thermodynamically impossible, of course; Fontus was just making quantitative performance claims that were thermodynamically impossible about how small their system would be and how little energy it would use. You don't need to sink to citing YouTubers to figure out how much water air contains. You can just consult a standard psychrometric chart: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Psyc…
You also need power to take the heat away that is created when the water in the air turns into a liquid. Best case you need to cool for about 0.7kwh per litre of water you make. That means for your 10 litre example you need best case 7kwh. That is a decent sized solar array and if you have any inefficiencies in your heat pump setup it gets much worse. Also you assume per day - solar only works during the day so you n…
The terminology you need to google for "the heat that is created when the water in the air turns into a liquid" is "enthalpy of vaporization of water"; around room temperature this is about 2.4 MJ/kg, so 10 liters/day is 24 MJ/day, which is 6.8 kWh/day, or, in SI units, 280 watts. However, remember that a heat engine operating at the Carnot limit is reversible. The coefficient of performance of a typical heat pump at these temperatures, the kind you might buy off the shelf at a big-box hardware store, is about 2, so you only need about 12 MJ/day (3.4 kWh/day, 140 watts). At a typical desert capacity factor of 25% this means you need a 560-watt solar array, about US$120 and three square meters. (California's utility-scale PV average capacity factor was 29% last I looked.) Very cloudy and polar places can have PV capacity factors as low as 10%, but they also have easier sources of drinking water. Like a rain barrel.
It's easier to store water or to "store coldness" than to store electricity, so you don't need electrical storage, you just need a heat pump sized for your peak throughput instead of your average throughput. Heat pumps are pretty expensive, so you might think this is a big problem, but the cheapest air conditioners I can find for sale around here are about 2000 watts, not 500 watts.
I've been noodling on desiccant-powered heat pumps for this and other uses, which may be able to reduce the cost of such systems, gather a larger fraction of solar energy than the 21% of high-efficiency PV panels, and provide built-in energy storage.
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People need DCs too, not just corporations.
Wait, what? 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.
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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.
:-)
So what is the practical use of this? 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…
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!