Originally published at: People in California are turning to Tatooine-style moisture farming | Boing Boing
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I think this solution would go for far less than 30k: In Peru, a 'Foggy' Solution to a Water Shortage - YouTube
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Another de-humidifier that filters the water.
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Oh god no, not again. And how is this one going to try to sweep thermodynamics under the rug? (At least they’re being honest that it’s a big-ass dehumidifier.)
<insert Doc Brown jigawatt noises here>
“Marty, that’s a fuck of a lot of power!”
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Can you buy a kidnapped golden droid made by your estranged father to talk to it?
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Jesus. What’s the net carbon output for this thing compared to just turning on the tap?
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One obvious problem is that the parts of California hit hardest by the drought aren’t necessarily the same places that get a lot of fog.
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A homeowner quoted in the linked article said his solar panels were enough to power it, although there’s obviously no way every user has solar power.
It would be great if these could be packaged with solar installation in simple to buy packages, but the horribly fractured state of the home improvement business makes me skeptical. It’s hard enough to work out the details of a standard $30K addition to a home that a contractor has done a million times. A simple solar + dehumidifier installation is probably less realistic than a fusion reactor.
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Let’s see, they have to remove 2235 kJ of heat to condense one liter of water from vapor to liquid. (And it’s much much much worse than that because they have to chill the air it comes with as well, and that’s a lot of air!)
8,600 liters = 19,221,000 kJ. Over a 24 hour period, so this thing would be sucking well over 800,875 kW continuously.
Not enough coffee, so I might have multiplied apples with oranges, but that’s a rough starting number for how completely ridiculous this idea is.
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Was the first tech that came to mind.
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I guess not much crazier than “Army Corps of engineers builds series of levies to protect below-sea-level city”
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The machines are not cheap, with prices ranging from $30,000 to $200,000.
That seems like a large price range. Do the models range from cardboard to gold-plated?
Coming soon, “Fog Rustlers”; criminals using large balloons to steal ■■■■■ air from foggy regions, and take it back to their hideout in Arid-Zone A, to sell.
I hope that this technology doesn’t just turn out to be more vapourware.
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Makes me thirsty just looking at it.
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There have been so many scam kickstarters on this, like the Water Seer. To bring water to dry places like in Africa. Only it doesn’t work very well - not well enough to make enough water for drinking. This uses the peltier (sp?) method and does work, but not super efficient.
Ironically, my Uncle Andy, who I talked to in the first time forever, lives in Eureka, CA, and it is constantly super humid, even if it doesn’t get super hot. Something like that would work very well up there.
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The site for the dehumidifier company that was in the video:
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Depends where you get the power to run it from.
I suspect people living in the socal catbox can get lots of solar power.
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I’m no expert on such things but it seems likely that a large-scale desalinization project would likely deliver more fresh water per unit of energy, at least for people in coastal communities (where fog is most abundant).
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That’s gonna cost you another $30K, unless you haggle with the itinerant indigenous warepeddlers.
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