Registered: 02/07/07
Posts: 3917
Loc: Ozark Mountains in SW Missouri
I saw this on Gizmodo a few days ago. It's a pretty interesting gadget. It says it works best in 80-90% humidity, which is pretty high for some areas, but not so uncommon in others.
I could see it being useful in a swamp, where the water is sometime completely covered by a mat of algae, or so filled with detritus as to be hard to filter. Hard to see this having any backpacking application in the near future.
This was discussed on another forum and I did some quick back of the envelop calculations and I doubt this is a viable technology. They claim in the right conditions the thing can produce 0.8 liters of water in an hour. Even at 100% relative humidity, you would still need to extract around 500 W-hr of energy from the air (not including any inefficiencies in the device). AA batteries have about 1.5 W-hr of energy, so it would take more than 300 AA batteries worth of power to live up to their claim. Additionally, a device like this most likely is using Peltier coolers which are notoriously inefficient. It's a neat idea, but not likely to come to much.
I live in Utah....yeah, this won't work here. 30% is high humidity here. And, it gets worse the higher I go (you know, where we like to go backpacking). A friend of mine on Facebook showed me the link as an option for me (he knows I love backpacking). Maybe if I backpacked in Houston. I wonder if I put one in my house in the summer time, with my swamp cooler running....use electricity to add humidity to the air and then use electricity to take it out of the air. Very efficient.
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Registered: 02/07/07
Posts: 3917
Loc: Ozark Mountains in SW Missouri
When I was a kid I spent a summer in Ft Worth Texas where I saw a swamp cooler for the first time. Having spent all my previous summers in No Illinois with no A/C I was pretty impressed with them.
There are days when they'd probably work pretty good here in the Ozarks, but it's pretty rare for us to get down in the 30% range of humidity where I'm sure they work pretty darn good. I'd imagine they work great with a dehumidifier and save some money over most A/C units.
I live in Utah....yeah, this won't work here. 30% is high humidity here. And, it gets worse the higher I go (you know, where we like to go backpacking). A friend of mine on Facebook showed me the link as an option for me (he knows I love backpacking). Maybe if I backpacked in Houston. I wonder if I put one in my house in the summer time, with my swamp cooler running....use electricity to add humidity to the air and then use electricity to take it out of the air. Very efficient.
I live in Houston. I thought the same thing. It would only work here
I live in Utah....yeah, this won't work here. 30% is high humidity here. And, it gets worse the higher I go (you know, where we like to go backpacking). A friend of mine on Facebook showed me the link as an option for me (he knows I love backpacking). Maybe if I backpacked in Houston. I wonder if I put one in my house in the summer time, with my swamp cooler running....use electricity to add humidity to the air and then use electricity to take it out of the air. Very efficient.
I live in Houston. I thought the same thing. It would only work here
Actually, my first thought was ... "if I lived in Houston". Last time I was there, coming from San Antonio (a humid place in it's own right) I thought I was breathing under water.
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I've taken a vow of poverty. To annoy me, send money.
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