I live in arizona and water is often on my mind. I think reuse of water is highly underrated with the tech that we have. Tucson has mandated that all new construction split grey and black water for secondary use, sadly I moved a bit south for my new house and didn't get to request for the plumbing to be split. I think that too many people are afraid of reusing water when in reality we can reuse a vast amount of water on site again and again just by using electrocoagulation, settling tanks, filtration, UV and ozone. Water in our town is crazy cheap though and cost is always the ultimate driver to move innovation.
Water's cheap until it isn't. 🚱 Ask the Rio Verde residents who used to get cheap water from Scottsdale, AZ! (Also see: Hohokam civilization, and probably the Anasazi before them.) 😎✌️
It's amazing how well Nevada use their water, i'm not american but i've read that they managed to grow exponentially while using the same amount of water for decades.
Growing up near Seattle gives a completely opposite perspective. I think everyone should have rain downspout generators on their houses. But we don't have rainwater collection limits - instead we have rainwater overflow governors, to prevent sewers from overflowing with rain water, during our regular torrential downpours.
@@StephenGillie I live in Southern California and installed 5 barrels to collect rain water. I keep a couple of goldfishes in each to control mosquitoes. I don't use much of this water for garden plants since I switched my lawn to succulents and don't/can't use it in the house (I only use 10 gallons per day of municipal water), so the water is pretty much just for the fishes. What was useful was when I converted my lawn was constructing a swale. This swale acts as an empty "pool" in the middle of my garden that rain water from the roof empty into and percolates into the ground to help recharge ground water.
appreciate how you touched on non potable uses for this water - it's crazy how much water is treated and processed just to be used for flushing a toilet
I was thinking the same, and it's not like it would be hard to educate people to the fact that some taps in the house are non-potable while others are for drinking water!
@@droopy_eyes you can also do a Japanese technique where you wash you hands with the incoming tank fill water. You just add a bowl above the tank and a tube that is attached to the fill valve. If you want a slightly more elegant solution.
A good idea is a grey water recycling system, a 1000 L sump that take in the water from showers and washing machines, filters it, and pumps it up to a tank that feeds the toilets.
@@killcat1971 I built a recycling shower pump that recycled the drain water back into the cold side of a thermostatic mixer. Since the temp you like to shower at is always a few degrees lower at the drain the shower used much less Hot water. The only downside was it took a long time for the soap in the water to clear out of the cycle. If I were to attempt again I'd make a switch that could use fresh cold to purge the soapy water
Water from air is a terrible idea unless it is completely free, like collecting the water that collects in an HVAC system for non-potable use. Running a dehumidifier just uses way too much energy and doesn't even produce potable water. The problem is the phase change or latent heat. It takes a LOT of energy to get water to phase change from a gas to a liquid. The environment does it for free (to us) so it doesn't cost us any money or energy.
Peltier devices are ridiculously inefficient and are not immune to breakdown themselves. I had a small refrigerator that used a peltier cooler and it only worked at peak cooling for a week or so (it originally made a small amount of ice but quickly was unable to do so) and ceased function entirely after a few months of decreasing cooling capacity. I never tried to measure the power draw of it but all Peltier coolers are known for being an order of magnitude less efficient than a cooler using the refrigeration cycle.
Well, the cost of extracting water from air is much much higher than purifying existing water supplies. If oil companies can create pipelines for oil, there's no reason why countries can't promote the same for pipelines of sea water for desalination or even local desalination followed by piping moderately pure water to a distant location that needs it.
You're starting from the wrong end. Assume there is a rational reason and proceed from there. My guess is that water isn't nearly as valuable as oil. Oil is now around $70/barrel, which is just under $2/gallon. Water's not nearly as expensive, unless you buy disposable plastic water bottles.
@@grizwoldphantasia5005 Add transportation costs, and "large" quantities of water become prohibitively expensive. Having pipelines to transport the water to locations would serve the world in more way than one. Especially, it would help reduce coastal erosion damage.
@@grizwoldphantasia5005 But air extraction (other than passive collection, which produces tiny amounts for the effort) is still more expensive than building pipelines, gallon-for-gallon. That's the point. It's ridiculously inefficient.
Here in Seattle we put water reclaim systems in buildings sometimes. Unfortunately, they tend to get mothballed after not too long because they are so maintenence intense.
This is pretty neat info, I use the water generated from my Air Conditioner to water my garden, during summer my simple Air Conditioner pulls out at least 1-2 Gallons a day. On very humid days closer to the 2 gallons not so humid days its still a little over a gallon. Pass it thru a carbon filter and I have clean and clear water. I also clean the coils regularly.
Well if we had fusion we could just skip it all and just use salt water allowing nature to do its thing instead of taking from fresh water sources. Wish we could figure out what to do with the brine though.
If my time in research has taught me anything it's: "there is no silver bullet". It's always a gradual process of solving some issues and accidentally creating new ones
@@jamesduston9292 Nuclear is the most expensive energy generation method by a wide margin. Hydro generation needs a suitable climate - mountains or a large river and lots of rain, if you're trying to generate water from the air it suggests that neither of these features are present.
😅 Your conclusion! Yes, there's got to be a good use for condensate! And all building and plumbing codes should allow (require?!!) gray-water systems without "special use" permits or other bureaucratic obstacles. That should be the norm, especially for those of us with wells and septic systems! 😎✌️
Here in Western Australia I used to keep my pool always topped up by running my refrigerated AC drain line into the pool, as I found it would produce enough water in few days to fill a small kids pool, almost never had to top up the pool.
i used to have a slippery mossy spot where my ac condensate line dripped... it was on the hot sunny side of the house. made a long skinny planter box, i grew corn, snap peas an many different crops all along the wall, the plants use up the water and keep the sun off the walls and windows... the entire house stays much cooler and free food too !
Thunderf00t has done a number of videos debunking water-from-air claims. The main problem is that if you have enough water in the air to make collecting is practical, you're usually in a pace where it rains a lot. Places with serious water insecurity either have very dry air or have more general infrastructure problem.
The most famous of it are the debunk on Fontus water collector and the MIT research to extract the water from air to "ensure water availability in dry, arid, and poor countries" (yes, it was the ACTUAL MIT research, from the best university in the world)
theoretical possible: yes comercial sens? no bacterial Problems? yes, legionella main Problem: high water % in air is found in tropical places where water is abundend anyway. low water % in air like a desert is only milliliters per DAY for hugh amount of electricity
You made me look up flash desalination and maaan was I not prepared... somehow all tech that's meant to provide drinking water in dry areas is either super complicated, either super expensive, but usually both!
A better idea is rain catching. Many arid regions suffer from flash floods. Catching that water and keeping it in the ecosystem would be a game changer, and enrich the soil as well.
I agree with you. I've been on rain for over 10 years. great water. The problem with rain is you need lots of storage. I have $10K in tanks. That gives me a rollling 10 year supply.
Rainwater harvesting is an established technology in use for decades now, it does have some hassles but it's a mature technology. The one thing that might be holding wider adoption is when regular water is too cheap. If the capital expenditures of installing a rainwater harvesting system in your property equal 30+ years of just paying your water bills, most people won't bother.
@@No0dz I agree. In my case I would have had to spend over $40K for a new water well. $10K for water tanks was an easy decision. the other problem is that you must have a large enough lot to locate the tanks. However, storage is the main problem with most water sources except wells.
Jon, There's one refrigeration technology that works great in hot climates... that can be configured to use no electricity - Absorbent Refrigeration. Not to be confused with the sorbents such as silica gel. Absorbent refrigeration requires no moving mechanical parts (pumps, valves, etc.), is much more efficient than compression refrigeration, and works by *heating* a working fluid, usually anhydrous ammonia with a little hydrogen, to it's boiling point. The condensation part of the cycle can pull heat out well below the freezing point of water. Solar collectors can easily get the heat needed. The single biggest downside is the use of ammonia. A problem such that Einstein (yea, that Einstein) and Leó Szilárd came up with a different process - and received a patent on it. Other than this - great video on a very pertinent topic for many folks around the world.
the problem with this is that the only places where this is feasible are humid and in those places there are other far more efficient ways of extracting water or moving it.
The fog net is perfect for mountain villages with thick forests.. usually rivers in that area is much lower in the ridges and valleys, and villages in the upper mountains lack water
It is crazy humid in Taiwan and other South East Asian countries. BTW, maybe you could do a video on the wind farm installations off the coast of Taiwan? On my recent trip my cousin's husband told me about them off the coast near Hsinchu. We had planned to go see but ran out of time. :/
When washing clothes in my washing machine, I sort out the cleanest clothes for washing in detergent, then save the detergent laden water for a second load of soiled wash. I'll reuse the rinse water for the second load of wash, then save that rinse water to use as wash water for the next load of washing. Plus, I use rainwater collected from my roof for all my water needs including clothes washing. Here in Seattle, there's ample rain that makes that easy to do nine months of the year, but more challenging during the summer seasonal drought. However, I haven't had occasion to use citiwater for many years. I use my wash water recycling only during that summer seasonal drought. The rest of the year floods of rainwater are easily collected. This is mainly a hobby for me, but I also am a frugal person and the idea of letting useful water run to the ground and then pay for citiwater makes no sense to me. I live in a single family house which makes such water collection easy.
I've been doing thought experiments and calculations on exactly this, but semi passively. BaSO4 nanoparticles on an IR reflective substrate can cool things around 4.5C below ambient through radiative cooling, so at 75% RH you're at the dew point without input energy. Couple that with an axial compressor as a first stage to both force air down a channel and raise the pressure (and thus temperature since PV=NRT), and supersaturated air can be decompressed against a collection mesh. Only need a few degrees from decompression, so I don't expect it to consume an prohibitive amount of energy, espec when the reflective top surface would be great for supercharging bifacial solar panels.
I never thought about the idea of using AC and Dehumidifier condensate for non-potable uses, especially as some places still use drinking water for toilets/sewage related stuff, as well as heating/cooling stuff that requires water (at least where its not required to be potable, pure, or at least devoide of metal or microbial contaminates or pollution)
In Antarctica, you would still have the opportunity to collect water with a heater, if you inverted the roles of the air exchanger and the heat pump in the active refrigeration approach. There's a runoff line on modern residential furnaces for exactly this reason.
This technology among with passive cooling is pretty interesting. I just saw a video a few weeks back about this system that was completely electricity free using both evaporative and radiative cooling. Those systems have been around but this one had potential to freeze water! I was out of it on dialysis so forgive me, but they could already get pretty close to freezing. I beleive 41.1 but the materials were not there yet. Ugh wish I could find the video or team! These systems are great for decentralization regardless if other methods are used.
In Arizona - yes, that Arizona - in the summer I use no tap water for my trees and plants. Between the monsoon rains - which water I do not collect, just the falling rain on the plants - and my three split unit air conditions, I have more than enough for all my plants. The air condition produce about 25 gallons per day. Now, if only I could afford to get solar panels to run them...
I discoved ur channel some weeks ago. Just wanna I say I legitimately love you. So much interesting knowledge at a proper depth. I've yet to go through 10% of your content but I will go through atleast 95% of it.
It's worth mentioning that while the simplicity of Peltier elements is appealing in these kinds of applications, they have absolutely abysmal efficiency compared to compression-cycle heat pumps except in very limited, specialized scenarios. At scale, it's almost always more economically viable to use a regular compression cycle and eat the maintenance costs. If your plan isn't viable that way, doing it with Peltier modules instead won't improve things.
I remember a vacation in Alexandria in 2013 where we had an AC running and the condensate would drip into a bucket in the balcony. There was a LOT of condensate. We probably had to drain the bucket 3 times during the day or it would overflow.
There's a survival water harvesting technique of digging a hole in the beach, putting a clear piece of plastic sheeting over it, and collecting the condensate that drips off the inside. This of course only works in the sunlight, but why can't it be scaled up? Have a shallow artificial lagoon alongside the shore, a big greenhouse structure over it, with gutters inside along the bottom. If set up right, this could even be connected to the ocean, and currents could naturally cycle water through. Have nets or something at either end to keep fish out, and it'd be a source of fresh water. There would still be treatment needed, but no more than a freshwater source for public water.
VERY, interesting topic. About interior AC collection : the point is, if you want to live longer, you already need to run a very specific air treatment inside your house : Filtered air intake of course (at least with activ carbon), AND your interior should be at a higher pressure than outside. (the oposite of most actual ventilation systems). SO when you make water out of your AC system with interior air, it is mostly unharmed( but not completely). As with any water recovery system, it must be followed by a serious water treatment. If your air is already clean, then your water membranes will last way longer. I'm in North of France, with 70 to 80% humidity average in summer, I'm runing such system based on standard AC (total 9kw max) water collection, we are making about 2,5L of fresh water every hour. (about 60L per day) it is enough for all our needs and our plants are VERY happy with that.
I think with projects like these it just result of lobbing of high tech industries for non-economical solutions. And maybe a wide spread nativity in Deus ex machina. The ‘fog catcher’ is a good example of this, because this the function that trees do naturally. I have seen a thousand projects like this yet not one succeeding.
I've been using HVAC condensate for watering indoor plants for several years. My tap water is very hard, and it will cause a build up of salts in house plants, which isn't good for them. While outside air in summer has a relative humidity below 20%, indoor air is about 50%, which means there is plenty of water available. I can get more than 1 gallon a day on hot days. Otherwise, anything I don't collect just makes a big wet spot on the ground.
It's interesting that in the developed world we always look for ways to get more (more energy, more water...) instead of what's the limit of how little we can live with and still be comfortable. I live 50 miles north of San Diego where the average per person use water use is 70 gallons per day. I wanted to see how little I can live with so I replaced the lawn with succulents, installed low-flow shower/faucet heads and reused my shower water (flush toilet) and dish wash water (garden plants). I live comfortably on 10 gallons per day. That's nothing. I've read that entire families of 4 in dry regions of the world surviving on 5 gallons per day.
This is the way. We need to do de growth and reduce wasteful activities. Plus rainwater harvesting with permaculture and create habitats that produce humidity leading to more rain.
Thanks for the vidja! Here in Florida a single low-end dehumidifier from Amazon (~$200-$300 U.S.) running 24/7 generates about 30liters of H2O per day. It is more than enough to water my tomatoes and herb garden. I have argued for close to fifty years that there is ***NO*** environmental-type problem in Western Civilization that cannot be solved by cheap, ubiquitous usable energy. If we had spent the last 40+ years building more and newer nuclear plants, wind, solar etc etc etc and TRULY tried to make electricity "Too Cheap To Meter" we could solve the "water crisis" and most other "environmental crises" with very little effort. Forever Chemical? Well you smack any chemical with enough energy and simply dissociate it into its constituent parts, harvest and utilize as feedstocks. E.G. superfund dirt heated to 1500-2000 degrees C dissociates anything toxic into nothing. Collect any metals/radioisotopes and concentrate. Again it is a lack of vision, not a lack of solutions. But small minds would rather scream and shout and run about and doom us all to a dim, dull future in the dark. THANKS GRETA.... ***sigh***
Here in Seattle, I collect and use rainwater in my home, and haven't used citiwater in 25 years. My barrels, five gallon buckets and 600 gallon steel tank bought from a metal junkyard for $30 has cost me only a few dollars. Why throw rainwater away and then buy citiwater? For me, this is mainly a hobby combined with my distaste for waste.
Years ago I heard a story about the Whissen windmill. This machine invented by an Australian was said to extract water from the air and did not need an external power source. It was probably bullshit but was interesting to hear and think about.
A whole bunch of factors affect the economics of producing water in this way. But there is one application area where the main considerations are not economic: emergency water supply. With such technologies, you can get hugely important water in situations where you might otherwise be in dire straits, such as a boat at sea, a desert, or simply when the usual utilities are totally unavailable, such as right after a natural disaster.
how much energy is required to produce, use, dispose then repeat the moisture absorbent materials over and over in the scales needed? is it less than the energy required to remove the sodium then purify and ship salt water?
I think I could recycke almost all water used at my home and use it for subsurface irrigation of ornamental plants. It needs a filtering system to prevent clogging, but the bacteria isnt an issue because its functionaly like a septic drain field. The sanitary issue isnt as toxic as handling kitty litter - some bad stuff there for sure. Piping waste water to a central plant is 1800s tech that we can move beyond, especially when a rural septic system is in use as is my scenario.
There is only mention of the energy costs and not of the relative value of water. I refuse to ever travel to Santorini because of how much water it imports due to the travel industry. It would seem that solutions to reducing, at the very least, the costs of importation of fresh water in specific circumstances is a more practical discussion than the abstraction of water collection methods
Having lived in Houston, Texas n Scottsdale, Arizona for 15 years of my career, I can really understand the trials of water and tribulations of Engineers to conserve it.
One of the best idea is to use air slightly above sea level with a lot of vapor in it and then condensate it with cold deep sea water. Potentially could produce a lot of water 24/7 with a reasonable price per cubic meter.
OK, so atmospheric water generation would need 500 to 850 Wh per liter. Seawater reverse osmosis, by comparison, needs 300 to 400 Wh per liter. In Aruba, their seawater reverse osmosis system takes in seawater from beach wells rather than the open ocean.
You missed the most economical way to condense water from the air. Circulate cold ocean water from about 500 meters depth which can provide the cooling power very cheaply. Far cheaper than vapor compression or reverse osmosis. No waste brine. No, it cannot be used in Arizona, but it can make a big impact in many parts of the world. Also, forget Peltier devices, far too inefficient.
Interesting idea. Not sure whether it's cheaper in terms of upfront investment. Heat exchangers are expensive, never mind a decently-sized heat exchanger that is sufficiently corrosion-resistant to be able to hold sea-water.
Some places treat their waist water till it’s good enough to drink and then to avoid the gross factor they use it to replenish the aquifer, I think LA or another city around there does it. The HVAC system would be good in that because you can just pipe the water to a existing drain.
This video could really use a discussion on cloud seeding. This technology is actively in place around the world at scale and I would be interested in a deeper dive on it.
What about new materials which as this example with fog get water from air, but not required fog? Ben Sullins made video about something like it "Off-Grid Water With Air and Sunlight" SOURCE Hydropanels from Zero Mass Water
de-salanate or drag icebergs for fresh water was one graduate year question, it seems silmlar. like pressure and wind speed in a tornado, its a balanced system. the hacksmith ones are so not light sabers, plasma at best but not pure photons.spit reflective partickles out that are held at the end of the beam in free space by the photon energy of reflecting off it. There is an invisible mirror at the end of the light sabre.
Can you do a video on the cost of server farms? Hardware-wise how much does it cost before operation, how much it costs to build a facility, the power and water consumption, the technology and methodology used in building server farms
Billions of USD, Millions of USD, Up to 5 Megawatts continuous feed, standard commercial water consumption (Not all that much is used the vast majority of the time), the technology and methodology change every few years. On the last point there is a major overhaul starting in thermal management solutions, so any information would be outdated almost immediately.
that's unfair! you can't cover all aspects (energy cost, contamination) in a 14 minutes round up. So many kickstarters needed several years (each one) to find out, scamming people along the way, giving thunderf00t great content to debunk!
denmark, finland, norway, netherlands, etc have some of the highest and cleanest water in the world! Water regulation is very strict in Netherlands and their so good they don't need and don't use chlorine for filtering their water which is great I think that also including denmark which I believe is like number one or in the top 5 highest and cleanest tap water
