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Comment by corodra | Hacker News Reader

It’s an overpriced dehumidifier. Pulling humidity out of the air. It’s not magic. It’s not new. There is water vapor in the air, every middle schooler knows this.

They are in Hawaii. An outdoor dehumidifier will work great in a water abundant area. How well do you think a dehumidifier will work in a low humidity area? The places that need water the most. It’s not making water, it’s pulling out the humidity.

This is such a scam.

I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. All these “smart” folks gave up 1.5mil and there are tech folks here nodding their heads because it’s xprize. Y’all turned off your thinking just because it’s xprize.

Say you want to help 3rd world poor and it gives you magic armor from logic apparently.

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I think you are wrong. This gives more details about how it works. They are using gasification both as power and as an additional source of water. I think that's pretty clever and I'm confident that the x-price people wouldn't have awarded the prize if it didn't meet the requirements.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mbddw8/artificial...

Its much more than that. Here are the requirements they met (listen in the second paragraph)

"easily deployable high-volume water generator that can be used in any climate, meeting the competition parameters of extracting a minimum of 2,000 liters of water per day from the atmosphere using 100 percent renewable energy, at a cost of no more than two cents per liter."

I think the key difference is that "Skywater machines use a patented Adiabatic Distillation Process, where water vapor is reduced to liquid without a gain or loss of heat." so it's a little different than just a regular dehumidifier.

It also seems to be able to pull a lot more water than a normal dehumifiier? "Skywater machines are ranging from Skywater 30 (up to 30 gallons of water each day) to Skywater 300 (up to 300 gallons of water a day)."

You are right we should be more skeptical though. Like how much energy does this thing use?

The prize requirements limits costs to two cents a gallon, it looked like, so can't be all that bad in the energy front.

"Because the process uses a large amount of electricity, designers paired it with a biomass gassifier, a low-cost source of energy. When the gassifier is filled with wood chips, coconut shells, or whatever biomass is locally available, a process calls pyrolysis vaporizes that material. That makes the system hot and humid, the ideal environment to run the air-to-water machine. Because the process uses a large amount of electricity, designers paired it with a biomass gassifier, a low-cost source of energy. When the gassifier is filled with wood chips, coconut shells, or whatever biomass is locally available, a process calls pyrolysis vaporizes that material. That makes the system hot and humid, the ideal environment to run the air-to-water machine. "

https://www.fastcompany.com/90253718/a-device-that-can-pull-...

That link looks more informative than the original press release, so we changed the URL from https://water.xprize.org/prizes/water-abundance/articles/wax.... Thanks!

I think the approach is a bit more novel than normal dehumidifiers. Instead of just collecting water dripping of the condenser coils, they use the cooler air to make a "rain chamber". The website talks about "maintaining a dew point within a condensation chamber".

This sounds like Persian Wind Catchers.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windcatcher

There's a similar type of building which uses temperature difference to generate condensation within a building, creating a pool of water. The name escapes me at the moment.

> The name escapes me at the moment.

Vancouver Condo

...and scene. Might as well just close the thread at this point.

the wind traps, from Dune?

Similar - wind traps in Persia and Arabia. Those in Dune were probably inspired by their real world counterparts.

probably - the book did lean very heavily on middle eastern cultural references.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakhchāl

Was this the mechanism at work in the movie "Prometheus"?

This reminds me of desert water collectors. There are so many that it's hard to find any specific one. Here are a few examples.

http://www.cais-soas.com/CAIS/Architecture/wind.htm

https://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient-technology/sophistic...

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/this-tower-pulls-d...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_well_(condenser)

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Moisture_vaporator

http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=92

You do know Star Wars isn't real?

Better check those last two again; one is about fictional tech from Star Wars, the other likewise about something from Dune.

The problem has been solved for so long that it's used by multiple authors in our culture's fiction.

Science fiction is equally replete, if not more, with technological tropes that decidedly do not exist.

The runner-up is in Hawaii. The $1.5M winners are in California.

By posting this comment, you're saying "I'm a genius, and you're all idiots, because I've figured out this obvious thing that has gone over all of your heads."

Now, you might actually mean that, but it might be more useful to explicitly spell it out in that case.

I was going to say, I have a dehumidifier in my basement that I empty a gallon of water out of/day during the summer in Pennsylvania. I can't believe this kind of shit wins the xprize.

> They are in Hawaii. An outdoor dehumidifier will work great in a water abundant area.

In fact, isn't there a big, natural dehumidifier in the center of Maui?

If it was "just a dehumidifier", then someone could've just submitted a pre-existing dehumidifier.

The ignorance in your comment is truly astounding.

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