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Several weeks ago I started a series about our attempt at a homemade atmospheric water generator, literally a system that extracts water from the air. That’s right, just like our friend, the Hydrologic Cycle!

The first thing that probably comes to mind is a dehumidifier, but other historical examples include the Dew Fence, Aerial Well, various other dew condensers and experimental systems like a “radiative air well designed to cool a substrate by radiating heat to the night sky” (then my head exploded).

We are building the dehumidifier type, hooked to a solar panel.

Before we get to the step of trying to extract water from thin air we have to get the parts, prepare a little patio area and build the system. The site has been identified at the corner of our house and we’ve placed item 1, the water storage container. This is a nifty 250 gallon container that was gifted to us by our neighbor last summer. Yes, 250 gallon which is friggin’ huge.

Earlier this morning came another donation from another neighbor. Several 5 gallon buckets of pea gravel that we removed from one of his yard beds, a big stack of random pavers he unearthed from archeological digs in his 60 year old backyard, and treated lumber with stakes to frame out this mini-patio. He was concerned he’d have to dump it because he didn’t know anyone that needed it. This underscores my desire to build a neighborhood based Freecycle type system.

250 gallon plastic water tanks go for around $300 new online, pavers are anywhere from $2 to $6 (x30? $90), pea gravel is $3 a bag (x5 $15), and rot resistant wood is about $8 for a 8′ section (x2 $16).

Saved around $420 to $450 retail and diverted a pile of junk from the landfill, priceless.

I know there’s some skepticism about this project but I can reuse all this stuff for other stuff if it doesn’t work. This is not the only yard project we have…

Unless you live in a vacuum the glass is not half-full, the glass is always full.

Read, Water out of Thin Air, part 1

Water out of Thin Air, part 2 by Brad Rowland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.