251–260 of 644 posts
Can I shower in salt water? Then all I need to do is desalinate drinking water. “Distributed” home desalination for drinking water seems like the best approach in my mind, then people can pay as much or as little they need, but I have no real data to back this up.
I've been wondering if one solution is having dual plumbing in some houses, that includes a parallel system for non-drinkable (but otherwise clean) water.
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If people needed as much salt as was contained in the water to begin with, we wouldn’t need to remove it in the first place.
No reason to keep the 1:1 ratio. Use the salt to replace our current salt mines/outtakes and then use the water as an addition to our current freshwater usage.
Some years ago I toured a maple syrup operation that has the opposite goal: Concentrate the dissolved stuff in the water. Their first stage was reverse osmosis, but only to a point. Second stage is boil, but with aggressive heat recovery from the steam to preheat the incoming liquid. All this to keep the energy cost under control.
Is it just me, or did this article dance around the question? I am not a physicist but let me give it a stab: except for a few specialized steps like UV or oxidizing heavy metals, most filtration is mechanical. A series of filters with smaller and smaller pores capture more and more of the mess in the water like bacteria and particulates while UV breaks down viruses, the oxidizer precipitates out metals, and so on. N…
Can I shower in salt water? Then all I need to do is desalinate drinking water. “Distributed” home desalination for drinking water seems like the best approach in my mind, then people can pay as much or as little they need, but I have no real data to back this up.
I'm not even remotely knowledgeable about this, but I'd assume saltwater would wreck plumbing. The connection in and out would probably be degraded much quicker. Then the water treatment plants would have to deal with dirty salt water, which is probably more difficult. On top of that all the brine that people produce in their homes would have to be disposed of, and I'm sure many people would just end up flushing it d…
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I'd guess that if anything they'd increase the pressure to raise the boiling point. That way things dissolve in it faster and the water doesn't evaporate away.
They're concentrating maple syrup. It comes out of the tree with the sugar and flavors already dissolved in it.
Is it just me, or did this article dance around the question? I am not a physicist but let me give it a stab: except for a few specialized steps like UV or oxidizing heavy metals, most filtration is mechanical. A series of filters with smaller and smaller pores capture more and more of the mess in the water like bacteria and particulates while UV breaks down viruses, the oxidizer precipitates out metals, and so on. N…
It’s important to note that the energy needed for RO to work is due to the high pressures needed to ram that little H2O molecule through that virgin nanohole. 700-900wh for a trickle of 14gal/h. At least that what I’m getting on my sailboat.
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> That's about the same amount of water as a typical American household uses per day. I assume you meant per year?
No, 1000L/day is about right for a typical American household. [1] claims "The average American family uses more than 300 gallons of water per day at home." 300 gal is 1136 L. https://www.epa.gov/watersense/how-we-use-water
"Turning sea water into clean, drinkable water costs $2 to $5 for 1000 gallons. Less than half a penny per gallon is obviously absurdly cheap." - Elon Musk, 2023-05-07 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1655262008898383872?ref_...
It's very easy to forget that we use orders of magnitude more water than comes out of our tap. A pound of beef is about 2,000 gallons, so that would be a nontrivial price increase.
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You've pretty much nailed it except for one minor nit: > It takes less energy but produces a concentrated liquid waste stream that must be disposed of. This implies that creating a concentrated waste stream is a problem unique to reverse osmosis. It isn't. No matter what you do you're going to end up with a bunch of salt that you have to get rid of somehow.
Its always been my understanding that any treatment to remove stuff from water is going to produce waste which needs disposing, just look at the Brita water jug filters, they need disposing. I've often wondered why dont we have more pure water pumped through the water mains in various countries, and I think after reading about Super K the Japanese Neutrino detector [1] and how the water in the tank was so pure it had…
Once it dissolved a tiny bit of the metal it would no longer be so pure. So this sentence makes no sense. It takes just a minuscule amount of mineral to replicate regular well-water.