Unlike the “cloudbuster”, this is an actual machine which, as others have pointed out, is nothing more than a large expensive outdoor dehumidifier collecting water the same way your everyday inescapably inefficient mildewy window air conditioner does.
As you know, thermodynamics is a harsh mistress.
As a method of producing fresh water, it’s even more inefficient than desalinization. It will never be more than a niche solution for a very small number of people with ample off-the-grid renewable power and no reliable access to a well or a municipal water supply.
While I appreciate the arid planet science fiction references from @thomdunn and @beschizza, people should be cautioned that this is not a solution to drought as the local news segment irresponsibly suggests.
I work for an engineering firm.
We have done various residential and “other setting” gray water projects. By graywater, as I talk about it below, I mean untreated graywater.
Here are a few obstacles to scaling up:
Infrastructure from point of use. For a strictly-graywater “scaled up” system to work, both the residence / business as well as the municipal entity (in charge of sewerage, usually) need to have dual plumbing: some pipes carry away graywater from point of use, some carry away the blackwater, which always means poop-water.
(Some regulating entities say that bathwater, shower water, wash-water from a clothes washer (all have some non-zero amount of fecal material in the water); and / or water from a kitchen sink or dishwasher (esp. if receiving raw meat fluids) qualify as blackwater, not graywater. That leaves water from the bathroom sink for graywater diversion, in this case.)
The majority of U.S. residential construction (single-fam homes, apartments, condos) are not plumbed this way because it adds cost to a conventional building project, and developers build to profit.
Graywater-compliant soaps, etc. are a preferred as a best practice, and scaling up human compliance means no chlorine bleaches, no to harsh heavy-duty chemicals like super alkaline or super acidic drain cleaners, no nonbiodegradable soaps, etc. Graywater-compliant laundry soaps are not so easy to find (but here’s some Brad Lancaster found!) and sometimes cost more than conventional laundry detergent. In this best management practices ideal world, the graywater is ready to be used ASAP i.e. with no holding tank, say… in a laundry-to-landscape use…
… or other landscape irrigation, in, say, mulch basins for insoak at the driplines of fruit trees…
… so graywater must be as biologically-friendly as possible from point of discharge, or most kinds of plants die. It should also not be so hot (like, from a dishwasher) that the temperature of the water ends up cooking plant roots. Also, graywater needs to applied to the land gently, not gushing at a force that causes erosion or splashbacks (see #3, below). All considerations or obstacles, depending.
Thus, specific purpose-built, graywater-use-only infrastructure is often needed for distribution of the grayish, pre-loved water, yet is not available in most of the [conventionally-built] housing stock in the U.S.: another impediment to using graywater at scale. More expense is something developers and builders absolutely avoid, unless the city or client is paying to cover that expense.
Graywater has bacteria in it that need to be kept away from human contact until the soil biota do their job and biodegrade the pathogens, rendering them harmless. Holding graywater in a tank for >24 hours is a big no-no. Pathogens and odors (hydrogen sulfides) build up. The sooner the graywater can be applied to the land, the better. Some people freak out about the hygiene issue and it does trigger some pearl-clutching among folks who don’t know and love soil biology.
They publish the power consumption on their website - the smallest is apparently 5.8kW to 7.5kW and produces “up to 773L per day” which is just over 2 Californian’s water consumption). Assuming that it needs the full 7.5kW 24h per day to produce 773L, that’s 0.23kWh/L.
It looks like CA residential electricity prices are above 20 cents per kWh so it suggests energy costs north of $13,000 per year if run flat out.
The California grid generates electricity at about 0.2kgCO2/kWh on average so that’s 0.05kgCO2/litre. I don’t have a figure for the emissions intensity of public water supply in CA but the supply of fresh drinking water in the UK generates 0.15kgCO2e/m3 so this is over 300 times as carbon intensive.
