Water out of Thin Air, part 2

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.

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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.