Spanish engineers extract drinking water from thin air | Hacker News Reader

Spanish engineers extract drinking water from thin air

reuters.com

14 pointshassanahmad11 comments

Pretty clickbaity and sketcy they don't literally just use the word "dehumidifier" instead saying something fancy like "The machines use electricity to cool air until it condenses into water, harnessing the same effect that causes condensation in air-conditioning units". I guess the tech is more sophisticated but come on, this is crappy sensationalist reporting. "water from thin air" isn't magic or new tech.

Nope, there's no magic or free lunch. It depends heavily on local conditions which might not always be suitable.

Thunderf00t has debunked a bunch of other enterprises doing water from the air:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc7WqVMCABg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPvXnmBIO7o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGTRX6pZSns

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVsqIjAeeXw

etc

Thanks for the links! Mostly scams and very bad science journalism indeed.

However, he completely misses the mark in his video about the Science paper "Water harvesting from air with metal-organic frameworks powered by natural sunlight" [1]. He declares it a hoax, but ignores pretty much everything from the paper.

Surprisingly, far down the comment section, there is a comment explaining that [2].

[1] http://globalscience.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/waterh...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGTRX6pZSns&lc=UgzJoHtYGBwXk...

Isn't this what AC does?

When extracting the water is the main goal, it's called a dehumidifier.

If the goal is to make hot air cold, it's called an AC and the water is considered an unwanted byproduct.

If the goal is to extract money from people, it's called "making drinking water from thin air" or "self filling water bottle", usually seen on crowd funding platforms. No actual product or byproduct is made.

"Atmospheric Water Generator"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_water_generator

"Air well (condenser)"

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

This seems like something that would have been done in the early days of refrigeration and continuously iterated on. Is there some sort of gotcha with simply condensing water like this at scale?

It's a dehumidifier. It would be useful to see the cost of that compared to just reclaiming brackish water, salt water ($0.45/1000 liters), black water (sewage), etc..

You'd also want to see how they're mitigating metals poisoning and mineralizing the water to prevent demineralizing the person.

Cost of energy

So a dehumidifier.

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