Tuesday, March 08, 2005

Duh

When I lived in New York, my dehumidifier pulled about a gallon of water out of the air every few hours, which meant I was constantly dumping pails of water into the bathtub.

I still use the dehumidifier pretty often to keep mold growth down. Since I have a garden now, I dump the water there.

This, however, is something that never occurred to me:

Somebody had the clever idea of combining a dehumidifier with a water purifier, so that instead of throwing out the pan of water sucked from the air, you can drink it....It'll produce 20 liters of water a day in 70% humidity, which is about the amount that comes in one of those fat-ass 5 gallon bottles, but without the waste or transportation emissions.
I wish I'd thought of that. Make a solar-powered version of this thing, and you just might have one of the greatest products ever.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Have you ever tried to drink distilled water? It's awful: no taste at all, because it has no minerals. And of course, the condensate from your room air will trap in it a lot of extraneous and undesirable flavors and smells, from air pollutants, sweat, cooking...

You could, of course, pass it through a charcoal filter such as a Brita™ to remove those. But then you'd be back to distilled water at best.

Phila said...

Theophylact,

Well, it is going through a purifier. That's the whole point of the article!

If you don't like the taste, it's still useful for other things. Tea, coffee, frozen juice, boiling pasta, and so forth.

But frankly, I'm most interested in the possibilities of a solar-powered version in poor but humid countries, where the need for clean water trumps the sort of aesthetic objections you've brought up. (And which I agree with...I hate drinking distilled water!)