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Comment by curiousfab | Hacker News Reader

The concept has been debunked over and over, e.g. by Thunderf00t. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVsqIjAeeXw

A problem with his debunking at a fundamental level - when calculating how often the air temperature is lower than the ground temperature, he uses Canada and Wisconsin. I'm not sure those are representative of Africa?

I think the key message of all the debunkings is this: "it depends".

The device may work great in one condition but certainly not always like the vendors might tout.

Given the triple point chart for water, the solar power for that day, and your humidity and temperature, you can compute the max you'll condense from the atmosphere.

Right. So the "major" (in my mind) contribution here is exactly the work of "compute the max you'll condense from the atmosphere" over all relevant regions. In the linked nature article, the published work is modelling to help determine regions where atmospheric water generator is viable for different assumptions and thresholds.

Isn't the video you linked to a completely different concept? How does the debunking in that one apply to this one?

It is a very different concept, yes.

Considerations of efficiency and power consumption are relevant... but not much else. Generally such devices are either too expensive, too maintenance heavy, or utterly inefficient.

I'm not qualified to comment on, but I have found it interesting that it heats up the air (hotter air = can hold more moisture), passes the air through some material that's supposed to retain moisture, then cools it down with radiators. It seems that it would be more efficient in cold weather but would not perform nearly as well in a desert (where you need it to perform well as the moisture content is low during the day).

So maybe Mr. Thunderfoot will be able to debunk this too. If he can refrain from reusing Theranos and Boring Co footage.

I think you need more than just a YouTube video to "debunk" the nature paper that they have published and that is linked in their github. They seem to acknowledge that while there are some limitations it still is a viable source of water for a lot of regions.

What is surprising is that thunderfoot didn't lose his habit of repeating himself over and over again. I'm counting 10 videos "debunking" the same idea of a bottle that extracts water from air (which is not what this project really is, it's not a based around a bottle)& he's been beating the same dead horses for 6 years now.

Though to be fair, he's now more into into making misleading videos about SpaceX and obsessing over Elon Musk.

Edit: Actually it's just weird at this point,his recent videos and their titles are so bizarre. It's either cheering at failures or Facebook tier thumbnails "Owning" Elon Musk. Yeah, I'll definitely stick with the Nature paper.

> What is surprising is that thunderfoot didn't lose his habit of repeating himself over and over again

Yeap.

> Though to be fair, he's now more into into making misleading videos about SpaceX and obsessing over Elon Musk.

His videos are recursive.

You see, even videos having nothing to do with the subject at all, he will still find a way to include Hyperloop, Theranos and Boring Co. footage. Plus older videos. Like a house of mirrors.

"Though to be fair, he's now more into into making misleading videos about SpaceX and obsessing over Elon Musk."

They seem to be well reasoned. What are these misleading statements?

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