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I once had the same idea when i saw condensated water on a cold window in middle school. I asked my physics teacher about it and he promptly calculated for me how much energy it would cost to condensate water from the air at average humidity levels, i think he arrived at around 0.5-1kWh per liter of water. He then pointed out that a desalination plant can put out a thousand liter for that amount of energy, and a simple pump can pull up even more groundwater with that. He then jokingly congratulated me on inventing "affordable water for millionaires". My favorite teacher to this day.
@@BarronVonSchnoot You just had shitty teachers man, science is the one of the few classes where you can show the application of the theory all around you. It's about as far off as saying that it's unbelievable that a teacher would bring a toaster to show the effects of carbonization.
Lupe was right on one point, there is an obvious lack of education on how we get water. Problem is he and this group are also affected by this lack of education.
At first I thought it was a solar still, i.e. you put dirty water in and it distills clean water out of it. Because you can actually make that quite cheaply, and it's very useful to a lot of people around the world without a clean water supply. Instead it was woo magic. Seriously, helping give people more access to clean water is much more useful than trying to magic water out of the air.
I had the same thought. A solar-powered water purification system like their boxy trash? That might work. Capture the heat and maybe some sunlight to power a heater and boil off all the impurities, that wouldn't be completely idiotic, although it would be HORRIBLY inefficient and a nightmare to maintain. But no, it's another goddamn dehumidifier scam. Fuck's sake. Humanity needs an enema.
You'd get distilled/deminiralized water out of it, just like with these glorified dehumidifiers. For some reason nobody mentions the basic fact that it's a really bad idea to drink that.
Thunderfoot is looping Because the science communicators are looping Because the scammer startup companies are looping This is a never ending nightmare.
one thing to consider is that distilled water is unhealthy to drink in the long run. It tends to leech vitamins and minerals from your system. Distilled water has actually contributed to water intoxication deaths.
We had a solar self filling water source years ago when we had a garden. It was a rain barrel connected to a downspout off the garage roof. Rain filled it up, and you poured the water on the plants. My 1920 farmhouse had an underground cistern hooked to the house gutter and downspout. The water was used for washing and dishes, well water was used for drinking and cooking.
Dave if you and Philip could stop pointing out there is, in fact, an objective reality... maybe some of these companies could succeed. Please stop tanking the economy.
At first glance, i thought that it was a fancy solar water heating panels or an solar oven.. But...Its WORSE and useless... Why those people don't really make useful things
Oh man it's like a huge self filling water bottle. Edit: here's a tip people, if you live in a place humid enough to pull water out of the air and sunny enough to power the machine just wait a few hours it's gonna rain because you already live in the tropics.
There is this amazing invention called a 'well'. You dig a hole and it fills with water. It requires only men with shovels. It sounds too good to be true but it isn't :) It works perfectly fine in dry climates. You just need a deeper hole. The earth has tons of water. There is no water shortage. There can be water distribution problems. But that is poor government. Period. If your government can't provide clean water then you need a better government. The earth is a closed system. Global warming is not going to make water scarce. There is nowhere for it to go. It will make the earth wetter because the icecaps will melt. An ice age makes it drier. Climate alarmists: all our cities will be underwater. Also Climate alarmists: we won't have enough water I know what you're thinking. Yes there is a difference between water and drinkable water. So tell me what happens to 'undrinkable' water when it evaporates? Only water evaporates. Rain water is more or less pure drinkable water. No matter where it comes from. Is global warming going to cause more evaporation or less? So you have the icecaps melting and increased evaporation. Not exactly a formula for a water shortage. We'll be practically swimming in it.
I once went to Africa with a team of people to build a well in a remote village. A year later, some of us returned to the village to see how the people profited from the new well. Immediately we noticed the well looked unused, so we asked one of the people and the reply (through the translator) was that all the villages gather water from one location, though it is a long walk, it is where the people meet and get news of the world.
So essentialy a 2-wheeled cart would benefit them way more, so these women wouldn't have to walk "several times per day". With this groundbreaking device, 2 women would be able to bring the water for several households.
"After walking for hours to fill their containers with water...." Hold up...so they DO have water! Just not anywhere nearby...Why not just invest in infrastructure to pump, clean and deliver that water to somewhere closer?
Maybe they think of Africa as some magically hellish place that needs magical technological solutions instead of a normal place that's simply impoverished and needs infrastructure.
Honestly in those areas walking to get your water is probably safer then living near the water since that is also the water source for every predator in the area
I feel like I've watched enough of these to be able to come up with a scam... er, I mean invention... of my own. Only two things standing in my way. I'm pretty good at math and I have a conscience. I need to work on raising my sociopathy index...
This makes me wish I had gotten an MBA, rather than majoring in engineering. Imagine being able to get $150 million in funding for setting up a business that has no chance of working.
As an engineer you know you can't do this. These are scams to steal money from taxpayers. These are government funded, and the people that are redirecting the money get kickbacks. Don't trust who supposedly is funding these things. All this garbage is to steal money or launder it.
Why settle for begging billionaires for $150M, of which you'll only legally be able to personally enjoy a small fraction, when with the engineering knowledge you can just build something that does work and become a billionaire yourself?
Hey, don't think like that! If anything, an engineering degree would give you more legitimacy & ability to design something even more convincing should you ever decide to run some kind of tech scam.
I remember back when I was a kid there was a plan to push icebergs to areas in need and honestly I wouldn't mind seeing a cost comparison with these dehumidifiers.
@@lookingbehind6335 That was actually a hypothesis that never gained acceptance in the general scientific community based on the Earth's elliptical orbit which takes us slightly further from the sun.
"Usually when a science guy says it cant be done to me that's validation that i can be done" *cheers* THIS is the issue. The sheer fucking hubris of these people to think they know better than a person that most likely spent the majority of their adult life working and trying to understand thier respective fields.
everyone watched steve jobs whip engineers into pushing the proverbial envelope for decades; now every ego in a suit thinks they can moxy away any physics obstacle. sheer fecking hubris
"Usually when an expert in the field says it cant be done to me that's validation that i can be done" Of course, if you substitute "expert in the field" for "science guy" it suddenly doesn't sound so incredibly stupid... cause we ALL know that those slick scientific bastards, with their diplomas and their white (*gosh!!) lab coats, are good for nothing (read this with Homer voice and mockingly moving your fingers in the air, please)
I assume the corollary would be "when a science guys says it can be done, that's validation that it can't be done". If not, then what he is in effect saying is it is a waste of time to ask a "science guy" whether or not something can be done because no matter what he answers, yes or no, will be validation that it can be done. Can't wait for my perpetual motion machine!
I have a friend who is a civil engineer (the original kind, makes buildings). He wanted me too look into using magnets to make generators. I immediatly asked him "This isn't going to be perpetual motion nonsense right?" and he sends me a link to the SAV. I guess that was his way of say "Yes, yes it is" Dude has a masters.... I told him I wasn't interested, my education is called mechatronics and is only a bach, so I'm not an electronics engineer and I'd let an actual expert "deal" with this, and asked him what he thought he could bring to the table. "It's because people just haven't made it right yet! I get the friction stuff but there has to be a way to make it have little enough friction!"
laws of thermodynamics are only valid for fool engineers xD dehumidifying air in a dry environment is possible but consumes an insane amount of electricity to get a reasonable amount of water. the ressources for such projects are better in spent something climate change related which keeps the hope alive that it is raining from time to time. funfact: you can exactly calculate the energy demand and output for given ambient temperatures and humidities with the technical characteristics of air conditioners
I’d buy into this incredible “technology” but right now I’m saving my money to buy this amazing composting device that you keep on your kitchen counter top! 🤪
Well he kinda was, at least his uncle was. Rich enough to have his own moisture farm, several droids and had enough cash, to buy Luke a speeder and a freaking T-16 skyhopper. Thats like having a car and a P-51 mustang with the machineguns still attached. And Luke was talking about going into the Imperial academy, which implies they have money for that too.
@@ChocorocK His uncle was still paying off his moisture vaporator, all those other things were on least-to-own plans. Poor uncle Owen, sucked in by cleaver marketing.
The 'investors' ned something vaguely in the 'green energy' sector to pump money into for tax reasons. When the company falls apart they get it back in tax relief
I guess it is brough to you by the same people who applauded Zelenky's Volkssturm calling a murderous despot in his bunker a hero fighting for freedom and democracy.
You know, when someone says "I know this looks like a scam, but don't listen to your gut feeling. Be open-minded and just believe it'll all be okay", that *immediately* makes them more trustworthy.
Thunder foot misses a key point. Gates and the other investors are going to have western governments buy these with tax dollars and give them to poor countries. They tried really hard to do this with the vaccine. They are repeating the same strategy
Don't listen to science guys! Go on faith, not on provable data because nobody ever lost money investing on faith! Even if what they were selling was completely legit, that pitch would make anyone dubious.
Like two days ago, there was news post on the greatest Czech media outlet Novinky(cz) that S.A.W.E.R (another solar water generator) made by CTU in Prague has won the first price for the greatest innovation on some Dubai EXPO. I was comment shelled after I said it's just a magnified heatpump from a tumble dryer lol.
Iam sorry, but i have bit of insight myself. Calling Novinky “greatest“ media outlet is kinda strange. The main focus of that site is conflict, gossip and headlines that will attract low info audience. Only thing worthwile there is their weather forecast model and maybe e-mail client to use as spam adress for online shops. If you commented there and expected anything else than shelling from local dinosaurs, than iam affraid you are bit naive.
I swear this must be like the 10th time you've debunked water from air devices. You'd think people would learn that they don't work by the sheer amount of projects that try and fail miserably.
The majority of people are sheep and will believe everything they are fed by the mass media. Also, Thunderf00t mentioned something in this video that mirrored something I watched in another one about carbon footprints in how these huge corporations (like oil) push the whole carbon footprint problem onto the people and say that "we need to be more mindful of what we put into the air" when they are the ones that produce the products that we consume and put the stuff in the air. They shift the blame to the people who have no choice but to buy their products. It works like this too, they're saying that we are the cause of climate change and that's why we need to buy their solar products. People need to wake up, but they won't.
But the other times the devices looked silly and had silly names like Waterseer and Pontus. This time the project looks totally different and has a cooler name, so surely it works this time!
Wow, I had no idea the 5,000 litres of water in the tanks I have catching rain water from my roof was so valuable, and all this time I have been using it to flush toilets. I feel really stupid now.
@@tylerfricks7369 He's using it to flush his toilet... Some houses out there use gray water to, well... Flush the toilet... So he's doing pretty much the right thing with his rain water.
@@Donnerwamp I am aware. Just in reference to the topic at hand. Source supposedly makes potable water. Dehumidifiers usually don’t make good water at all though.
@@tylerfricks7369 Oh, that seemingly got lost in translation... Yes, dehumidifiers usually make no good water, good enough to flush the toilet or watering the plants outside, but that's about it.
@@tylerfricks7369 In a crisis will treat the rainwater and use it for drinking water but I currently use all the rainwater I catch for flushing and that saves me the cost of using potable water for that. If I add a tank or two in future the plan is to keep one small tank reserved for potable use with some extra filtering and treatment but using what I have now for drinking would mean I would have to revert to using potable for flushing sooner, so it makes no sense at the moment.
@Paul Murgatroyd And they are solving a problem that doesn't really exist in the worst way, even if it had a hope of working at all. There aren't many places in the world that don't have have some water within a few km. Even the Sahara has water under it fairly near the surface in many places. Problem is it isn't anywhere near drinkable due to salt or other mineral contamination. Less than 1% of water is fresh water, and a lot of that isn't immediately drinkable, or near where the people or crops could use it. All you have to know about the expensive scams is large scale commercial desalination plants using seawater source, at the expensive end of desalination, can desalinate it at between 6-3 kWh per cubic metre. 1,000 litres for a dollar or less. Smaller scale are not quite as efficient but a couple of $k for a couple of 1kW panels and desal hardware can give you a kilolitre a day with decades old industrially proven technology. Cropping water needs to be a few cents per ton to be cost effective in open field farming. Desalinated water isn't much use for cropping except in intense hydroponic farms inside greenhouses designed to prevent moisture loss to atmosphere. Expensive but working commercially. e.g. sundrop farms port augusta Just a working example, not the future of most farming unless the world gets to 50+ billion people or the world goes into a sci-fi armageddon drought , or something :-)
Almost completely I agree with the approach, calculations, and conclusions of Thunderfoot, but I must point out an error. To quote: "To just not die from dehydration, your typical human needs to drink 5 'ish' litres of water a day..." Er, no! First, that's almost twice the quoted figure and, second, that is fluid intake, which is entirely different. If you are going to be methodical and precise, DO NOT make statements so patently wrong!
Yeah, he definitely got carried away there. 5-6L of water per day would be more accurate for a family of three, not (for the majority of cases) one person. That 5L per day per person would mostly be for someone who does a lot of hard physical labour, like landscaping or railway track maintenance. So if I were him, I'd fix that by saying 2-5L per day.
The NAS suggests 3.7 liters per day. This includes water contained in food and other liquids people normally consume. But if you live in a poor area where food is scarce, drinking water may be the main form of fluid intake. Also, the same institution makes it clear that this estimate can fluctuate a lot depending on the individual, so I don't think you can be "so patently wrong" about a very variable number, like you could about a mathematical principle or a universal constant. Also the use of the suffix "ish" means a rough estimate, which even if it's too high, still doesn't affect the fact that this device is completely impractical.
It's an over-estimate for the average person, sure. But if you're working outdoors in a hot climate, or especially in a hot and high humidity climate, you would be sweating a lot. In that kind of situation, you could easily need 5 litres per day, possibly even more.
I live in the Northeast, and I would have to estimate that I drink about 1.5 to 2 liters of fluids (not just water, but also other stuff too) per day, but then I am not typically doing hard labor outdoors. Where I live, it is commonly humid and we get summers of ranging from 85 to 95F, and humidities of 50%+ are common. So when he said 5L per day I was like "uh, no?". Also, if you live in a hot but arid climate, your sweating mechanism works so much better than if you were living in a hot and humid climate, therefore you don't need quite as much sweat (and thus, less water) than you would if you lived in the tropics.
If a US citizen's average daily water consumption is ~600 litres/day (and total water is ~ 2000 litres/day), the difference between 5 litres of drinking water a day and 2 litres amounts to a rounding error. 3/600 is 0.5% and 3/2000 is around 0.1%, which is about one order of magnitude away. That means it should not effect the end result in any meaningful way.
What is depressing is how quickly people forget about the previous snake oil sales pitch and lap up the same story and believe that it is a new story, because the storyteller says it is new. There is such a desperate need for critical thinking skills to be taught from the very first year of schooling and continue as a default part of every class thereafter.
I like how everything is done in Africa, here's corporate to save the day, but in Africa, and nobody thinks, "Maybe people will get the wrong idea about Africa."
Problem is most teachers can't tell the difference between critical thinking and their own ass... Critical thinking is part of the school curriculums in many countries already. On paper, that is.
@@skaruts critical thinking education is impossible in America. Every curriculum and lesson plan will end up in the court system as conservatives and liberals howl about bias in every single sentence.
@@skaruts gotta hope the kids critically think while going through the critical thinking classes. I assume teachers could really screw up someone learning critical thinking if taught wrong. I can see the possibility of people out and about thinking that critical thinking means being thinking about something and be critical about it. As if it's just one thinking about a subject and engaging in critiquing what one feels should be different or if anything should be. I can even see people thinking along the lines of critical meaning something like "very important". So they end up thinking about what they feel is most important, what "matters" to them, about the subject. The last 5 years I feel like i've noticed the ratio of people actually seeming to have a well rounded base education going down. Maybe I'm just noticing things more now, or maybe there's just more examples able to be seen because of the growth and changing of the internet. Idk, but it seems like it.
I think they just never got the memo. They never looked up what happened to all those fake projects. They just forgot about the product and got excited for the next thing.
@@Enkarashaddam We'd probably have Thorium power if those idiots at places like the Gates Institute of Stupidity would stop wasting money by the truckload. But as usual unless BG can get his grubby hands on the patents he's not interested.
It's always fun when people think you can efficiently syphon water from the air in places where the air is about as moisture free as the proverbial rock most of the time.
Seems like the life cycle of these scams is about three years, but with truth and fact systematically being destroyed there might be a new one every six months by 2025. I don't expect they'll get much more regular than that, though, since there' s a finite amount of money to be extracted out of thin brains.
Bill gates is using the same idea to make money as he did with the vaccine: he is going to get western governments to buy these products for poor countries so the cost and viability don’t matter.
That's the problem with all of those dehumidifier water collectors is that somehow people seem to forget all the other things like dust & pollen that are in the air with the moisture & how all of that would get collected as well.
I also have to question efficiency. I mean if you have 100 of these things in that tight grouping wont you basically start stripping out the water so quickly that the local area's humidity would sharply fall below the ability to condense in the ambient air temperature thus cause sporadic operation and hurt the efficiency badly?
The sad cop out most these scams always use is "It will pay for itself in time". Ignoring maintenance or problems given a lot of them "pay for themself" over a period of decades. Plus this one would have all the problems of a solar panel plus a water system. I can only imagine the pipes get nasty as mold and other things grow inside them. Requiring frequent cleaning or replacements.
Wells are infinitely scale able. Need water anywhere on the planet, sink a well. What if groundwater is not replenished at an infinite level? Just drill deeper? "Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe!" Albert Einstein.
Frankly the second I hear the words "Infinitely scalable" I mostly tune out because I know whatever follows will be some full on bullshit that straddles the line between science fiction and science fantasy.
To be fair, whilst not infinite, there is a lot of space over the oceans around the world that they could build these things. Ok, so some people might argue that there are better approaches to getting water from ocean regions, but they just don't understand how revolutionary this not-really-a-dehumidifier approach is. (Yes, the use of the word "infinite" is also a reality red flag for me as well.)
@@philrichards7240 This whole line of solutions is akin to creating a Rube Goldberg machine to flip the light switch. It is a wildly over-engineered solution at best, and a complete waste of time, material and energy at worst.
If only George Lucas never made Luke and his family moisture farmers in the original Star Wars. Because it seems like a lot of people are drunk on the idea of moisture farming.
Finally - looking down the list somebody else got it. I'm an engineer (aerospace) and it just infuriates me that here's another con-job exploiting the ignorance of main stream media. Theranos should have been obvious that it was ripped off from the film Gattaca. This is equally a rip off of Star Wars and a few other films. It really is infuriating how ignorant mainstream media is these days. And after they convince the general public about this crap we have to spend days, weeks, months, years explaining this stuff again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.............
Granted, water on Tattooine is so expensive, that "Moisture Farmer" is literally a profession there. I believe, in the Star Wars Galaxy, it's only slightly less expensive, to get the water out of the air, than it is to literally fly it in from another planet, that has liquid water.
Well, SW moisture farming is obviously based on SW fantasy tech. Here's their description: _"The devices were stationed at ground level and coaxed moisture from the air by means of refrigerated condensers, or chilling bars, _*_which generated low-energy ionization fields. Captured water was then_*_ pumped or _*_gravity-directed into a storage cistern,_*_ which adjusted its pH levels. _*_Vaporators were capable of collecting 1.5 liters of water per day,_*_ even when the relative humidity of the air was only 1.5 percent."_ Basically tech gobbledygook with "chilling forcefields" and "gravity manipulation".
@@Vladimir_Kv 1.5 liters? From 1.5% humidity..... These things appear to be pumping at least 100 kilograms of damp air through them. And they don't solve the dehydration. Because by removing the water from the environment it just leaves the environment as a whole even more dehydrated!
It's mandatory to have rain water tanks on a new house here in Australia, but i'm sure it would be cheaper and more effective to install some of this garbage on the roof instead right...
I looked up the Source specs from the official website. There's no way this unit costs more than $700 to produce and ship. I understand a cost markup relative to service life and sale volume, but $6000 is absurd for something expected to make less than 4 liters per day per year (Source's own numbers). Could literally run a $200 dehumidifier from a $300 single panel solar system and get the same, heck probably better, performance.
The water from a regular dehumidifier will be full of random bacteria and shit. So you have to add the cost of a filter, UVC led, and a pump. The filter just needs to be small (micron size) enough to filter out the dust & grime. The UVC led will do the heavy lifting on sterilizing the water. However, I highly suspect that the con-men involved in these projects bother to build all that and figure they'll be long gone with a bag of cash before you can say legionella.
@@Shadi2 Yep, that's the rationale of those of full-of-crap solar panel companies, too. They take their fat govt. subsidies for starting up, take your money for punching holes in your roof to install idiotic solar panels, and then go out of business before you can collect damages for them screwing up your roof and getting major water damage (happened to a co-worker of mine, I told him not to do it, so he had to make the claim to his homeowners insurance and is now getting ass-raped on his premium). End result: a bunch of pissed off customers while this guy and his girlfriend are on their way to the Caribbean in a Lear-jet stuffed with duffle-bags of cash while the employees come to work Monday morning to find the building locked-up and dark, they have an e-mail in their inbox informing them that they're fired, and they get stiffed on their last paycheck.
About two decades ago, San Antonio increased their available water supply by roughly 25% (iirc) by aggressively finding and patching leaks. More recently, they reduced usage by about 50% by instituting conservation measures. Common sense FTW.
@@DCBChump Which is ALSO a conservation measure. California needs to raise their water rates to discourage people from building swimming pools and growing turf lawns in a desert.
I'm always shocked when people think they can magically pull water out of the air in places where there is a general lack of humidity. Anyone trying to sell a product with fear mongering is typically a red flag for me. I love the Dr. Strangelove clips, TF!
It's really disappointing to see the "top minds" and great universities getting so reckless and lazy to be involved in such things.. I'd love to see your take on how come these projects, which are nothing new or innovative, go through programs like MIT/Berkeley and are deemed great innovations or even win prizes!? What the heck are they using as criteria and who is the competition to allow this stuff to win? Good lord.. I was gonna say I'd like to see more science / what is possible with X humidity but I am guessing you covered in previous similar scams.. Love the channel. Cheers from Brazil.
I'm guessing that these prizes no longer have scientists judging them. They just pick what is the most advertiser-friendly to appeal to people who think any miracle is possible as long as it's associated with clean energy.
There is a huge difference between the rigorous and competitive programs and the marketing-led corporate programs. Essentially, consider whether involvement in a project sounds like it would be costing them money or making them money - if they would cost them significant money, it's much more likely to be a strict and rigorous program.
@@fattiger6957 And for that they give away their good names, like MIT? Isn't their word supposed to carry some weight, don't they have to maintain some dignity? And how come big investors are drawn into this, too? Are they just looking for small startups to realize a short term investment gain? In that case they couldn't reasonably be counted as backing the project.
@@wassollderscheiss33 I think for prizes like this, it's just for the upfront PR then they don't care if these projects actually work out. I think it's fair to say most people who hear about these things forget about them pretty quickly. I doubt there's any media outlets acrually tracking if the winners of these awards accomplishes anything afterwards. As for investors, I have to wonder if there is some kind of tax shenanigans going on.
That is because you should never look at the sun, duh! Didn't your parents teach you that? Solar panels clearly have good parents! Though, I guess my parents also tought me never to play in the road, and I've seen a lot of solar panels actually pretending to be a road, so maybe their parents aren't so great after all.
Instead of investing in this, send the $10,000 (+ shipping expenses) to me and I will ship or hand deliver you a bucket of water whenever you ask for it! 😂 Disclaimer- Time delays may apply, especially on hand deliveries. Limited to 1 ea. 5 gallon bucket(s) per transaction. 15 year guarantee on all purchases before 4/15/22. World wide coverage where permitted by law.
I'm in 10,000 bucks is spare cash for me...I'm only worried that you might be in danger as you travel along those vast long stretches of road to reach my house..someone might "jump" you to steal my bucket of life giving water!
@@KoolKman I have another plan where an armed special forces retiree accompanies me! It is more expensive, though. Also, the coverage is not world wide due to restrictions in certain countries!
@@KoolKman Who knew it would be this easy to start a lucrative internet business? I should have done this years ago!!! I am going to get busy working on some more plans! If you are interested, I think I will start looking for investor/partners!
I've made a portable, car camping, RO water filter that runs on a couple of 40 watt solar panels. $200 for the RO filter setup, plus $80 in panels, wire, etc. It will easily fill the 4 gallon water storage tank that came with the filter in a couple hours of average sunlight.
I love channels like yours. You call out these frauds. THis is the equivalent to those crypto scams. You make some b.s start up group, you pay a famous person to push it, you get all these donations, and then bam! You're off in the wind and the project goes silent.
I wonder if the celebridiots really do get paid for this shit. Did Fillion get a check from solar roadways, or did he just genuinely get excited for something he's too goddamn stupid to understand and want to tell people? Did Fiasco decide that a couple bucks to participate in a fraudulent advertisement was worth more than his career? It's a toss-up at this point. I used to think shit wasn't this cynical and mercenary (and I'm a cynic!), but with the outrage marketing stuff going on, I really wonder if ANYTHING celebrities do isn't completely calculated and choreographed. A certain slap comes to mind.
Every time they try this they should be forced to set up one of their units in some place like death valley, the sahara, attacama, or the gobi and prove they can live off the water it generates.
@@Meleeman011 Blackrock is not stupid. It has to be some kind of elaborate tax dodging operation, because these products that go nowhere spawn every day.
@@UhOhUmm I think they don't look too closely into everything. They just hedge the risk by investing into all sorts of stuff they think might become profitable and if some of them turn out to be scams it doesn't hurt them a lot
I was in a research funding meeting a few years ago where someone was trying to pitch a “portable water from air device” project and asking for $300K in funding. I spoke out, did some quick math to show that reverse osmosis is at least an order of magnitude more efficient, and killed it. A couple of colleagues still hate me for that. Next time, I’ll just turn on one of these videos.
Could you point me towards your fellow investors, I have just created my new solar powered drier and am in need of small investment of a million dollars.
@@Lh0000 One trick is to find funding organizations more interested in spending their budget than in getting their money’s worth out of it. The other is to sell the hell out of your idea to well-intentioned and generous people who lack the knowledge or motivation to properly scrutinize your work. Most of these projects amount to some combination of these.
I enjoy your debunking videos, but with this one you're getting off point as well as fast and loose with the numbers. The stat from the Mayo Clinic said 3.7/2.7 litres per day. I think that would round to about 3 litres, not 5. This makes you seem less reasonable. I think we can handle it if you need to do slightly more complex math to show that this isn't a good idea. And about the millions of litres which go to agriculture, I think these units are meant to supply homes with drinking water. When you go big and talk about the entire farming requirements, it seems like you're fudging the issues. Stay on point, friend.
Seeing the expression on some kids faces when you tell them milk comes from a cow and not from a factory has made me aware of what "lack of understanding" means.
As an engineer I have lots of experience of cooling systems. To try and keep water free of pathogens is almost impossible without non potable chemicals. Installing one of these without treating the water produced would probably kill you very quickly.
To make dehumidifier water drinkable, you have to filter it and bring it up to almost boiling temperature, which takes lots of energy to do. Not so "low-energy" after all.
what is your thoughts on desalination plants? ones that pump the "brine" onto a large uninhabitable area instead of back into the ocean? the concentrated brine can create zones that are too salinated for life
@@Apodeipnon Why not? Say you want to build a desalination plant. The first thing you do is a cost/benefit study. What parts already existing can you use? What needs to be custom-made? What will be the salaries for building and maintenance? How much clean water output can you expect? etc., etc. If the benefits outweigh the costs, you build it. If not, you try to convince people that you had a revolutionary idea which completely tramples over the laws of physics and they should give you money before you prove squat.
@@DoctorZisIN Right. I don't think what's most rational in a "free" market is necessarily most rational from other perspectives though i guess. that being said, solar panels seem to be competitive in the market as well.
This channel is never depressing, it fills me with an undeserved feeling of superiority over others, but unless I critically analyse what is being said (work out the figures myself) I’m likely to become a cult member of thunderfoot. Must not simply accept unquestioningly what he says, must verify his conclusions.
Fortunately, most of his conclusions are based on VERY simple math, and honestly are manifestly obvious with a little bit of thought. Frankly, quite a few of these are so astoundingly obvious, it's mind-boggling that anybody could be sucked in by these investment schemes. Solar Freaking Roadways, for example.
It's just plain healthy to always be a little bit skeptical. But especially with thunderfoot! He ALWAYS goes for the "busted" angle, so guaranteed he's not always going to be correct. His space videos can be pretty bad, and if it's specifically about Space X, you can bet money over 90% of the vid will be memeing "Lol Elon Musk is DUMB" and talking about HyperLoop/Boring company failures, rather than the actual topic. I like his videos like this, calling out these supposed brand new inventions for what they really are: a fancy dehumidifier. But even in this video, at 14:55 he says a year is "400 days", probably just to make his own math easier. He likes to fudge the numbers a lot like this, so you really do need keep track of him doing it, and always double-check his math. You can see here how he does it, says it softly, "let's not quibble" and quickly moves on hoping you don't notice or question it. But calling a year 400 days is a pretty BIG fudge of the numbers. 400/365 = 109.5%, he basically made a year 10% longer, that's a pretty significant amount.
@@TheLargeHardonCollider In the terms of what he's dealing with, the difference between 365 and 400 is only 9%, which, when you're talking about systems which fall short of feasibility by several orders of magnitude, is insignificant. There are many people doing the same fact-checking on Elon Musk that Thunderfoot is doing. Some of them are much harsher about it.
@@TheLargeHardonCollider In rough calculations it's plenty accurate enough when the end results demonstrate excesses or shortfalls of orders of magnitude, for instance. If the first pass were to be more promising it could easily be redone with more precise figures - and 365 days would not be accurate either with something highly dependent on the diurnal cycle and thus, for a solar powered gizmo, it's really the equivalent "sun-hours" that matter (1000 watts of energy shining on 1 square meter of surface for 1 hour) and that in turn depends highly on factors too numerous to mention - but which are irrelevant if the concept has no merit to warrant such detailed further consideration.
Top Universities... As a 60yr old BSc I'm stunned by the decline of educational results over the past 20 years. Almost daily I have to pamper engineers of highhprofile businesses through basic solutions, logic thinking and the reading of catalogues and manuals 😥
@@katiebarber407 not true everywhere. Modal income, one child in university (masters) and one in higher vocational (BSc). Very normal in most of Europe.
There is already a invention that can do this without solar panels only a net, some long sticks and a bucket its called a fog catcher it catches water through a net no electricity required and very cheap
I suspect that would work best in, er, foggy conditions. When the air is saturated with water, and there's no sun to re-evaporate the water off the net before you can collect it. If those are the conditions you've get, then fine, use it. This 'source' solar-powered dehumidifier would work**, I guess, when the sun is shining, provided the humidity is also high enough. (**For sufficiently small values of 'work' :)
As well as there is about the difference between avoiding death by dehydration and waterboarding. I mean fiveish liters sounds like ancient roman torture or maybe CIA practices at Guantanamo.
I am currently completing my PhD thesis at Ulster University, a second rate university according to my Russell Group peers. How is it that our departments and many other 'second rate' ones can produce pretty significant work, yet all the leading universities regularly publish outright BS or pseudoscience. It genuinely baffles me how little some experts actually seem to know about their chosen field. Looking at the criticism levelled at yourself by other "academics" is a perfect example of this, as you have produced some amazing work in organic chemistry that they all just seem to ignore! Despite this though you always seem to have the right response, and have never let it hold you back. Not trying to kiss your ass, but over the years you have been a massive inspiration for me to pursue practical science over popular/prestigious, and this has been reinforced many times through the content you produce. Thank you for all the hard work you have put into videos like this over the years 👍
@@katiebarber407 It generally does, but the reality is that those universities are filled to the brim of fucking idiots. The government also nationalized the student loan industry, and you have a lot of cockwombles college kids that go to big universities for credentials, but come out stupid as they came in. This is what happens when you push for equality, and nationalize at least partially an industry in the name of equality and cutting out the "greedy" banks that won't give no loans to stupid people who have low credit and cannot repay their debt because it's uneconomical. And now a few years later, none of the problems were solved, in fact, college is more expensive than ever, and the standards are lower. Just like healthcare, same stuff different paint. The government has a simple 2 step plan for making everything as inefficient as possible. 1: the government makes healthcare or college etc a right, 2: the government nationalizes the sector at least partially to cut out the "greedy" evil businesses in the name of equality. And just like magic everything starts costing more and have lower standard of quality.
Berkeley, and other top universities, publish a great deal of good research on a consistent basis. The fact that they supported one project with a very low return on investment is not evidence that they "regularly publish outright BS or pseudoscience."
MIT. Responsible for some of the biggest CS breakthroughs ever, including basically creating the web as it's currently known, as well as creating the X Window System, GNU, cryptography, and a couple major programming languages among other things, and also peddling glorified dehumidifiers. MIT, stop embarrassing yourself like this, please, your rather storied legacy isn't worth smearing over peddling crap like this.
The water usage of everything blew my mind, I had to go look it up. Fell into a rabbit hole and ended up spending an hour researching water footprints and getting a rough estimate of my family's print. I wish the internet was used like this more often by people instead of all the nonsense. It boggles my mind we have such an amazing wealth of knowledge avaible to us all and we neglect it for all the nonsense... 😅😢
Water usage numbers are misleading in some ways. I've seen them count rainwater, landing in a field as "water for the cows" While it's somewhat true, you could have made a massive rain collector and saved it all, it's disingenuous and misdirection. The cows don't magically use up the water either.. they return it to the soil, which is filtered by the dirt, and it returns to the waterways. That said, the amount of knowledge and data out there is quite amazing, and undervalued by many. Just be aware of how it may be manipulated or twisted to present a specific narrative.
The trick is it's green water. It's rain water required for the grass to grow, which is then eaten by the cow, then you throw away the parts of the cow you don't want to eat and apportion the water used to grow all that grass. That water was going to fall on the grass and be absorbed anyway, even if you didn't eat the cow. The water that matters for people is the water that was used to irrigate the wheat so you could feed the cow the wheat because it's cheaper to do it that way (then you have to give the cow antibiotics too because that's a really terrible diet for a cow).
@Thunderf00t doesn't recognize _the potential_ of this product. But, I do. As a boy, in the 1970s, I saw a movie in 1977. Full of _industrial_ lights & magic --- an entire world appeared. A _desert world,_ far away and long ago, yet named after a town in Tunisia. There, lived a family of _moisture farmers._ Are you beginning to see _the potential_ of this product? I could be _Uncle Owen!_ Or _Aunt Beru!_ Pronouns be damned! My nephew could become a Jedi Knight! He could _save the whole galaxy!_ I'll be dead, of course. Slaughtered --- point of fact --- _these are the droids they're looking for._ But, _the moisture farm_ lives on! Not mentioned in the product specs... these things are _blaster-proof[1]._ [1] Not bullet-proof. Never shoot them with bullets. Only blasters, phasers, and other _fictional_ weapons; i.e. also impervious to _dragon-fire, magic spells, witchcraft, and wizardry._ :-)
This seems like a way for people to siphon as much of the money they can from a gullible and naive public (directly or through taxes). They are literally trying to sell an extremely expensive piece of scrap that doesn't even do what it claims it does.
"you have no transparency of what is in that water..." - absolute Bullshit! I have transparency what is in my water because my local german "Wasserwerk" where the water out of my tap comes from and which supplies it to the area I live in does extensive monthly quality testings for HUNDREDS of chemicals, minerals et cetera in a lab!! and publishes those results regularly on their website! They even guarentee that water quality up until their pipeline to the curb, where it meets with my pipe towards my house... So it is in reality exactly opposite as stated - at this point I can just laugh at such a stupid remark! The water you collect in their devices has NO quality control whatsoever and might contain quite a few pollutants. My water from my tap is pure and of VERY high quality here in northern Germany! it stems from an artesian source out of deep grounds and is filtered and controlled many times!
You are wise. Water is a very strong solvent. Consumed distilled water would indeed leech certain nutrients from one’s body. And then there is the issues of what such water would leech out of the apparatus and plumbing. _“I love the taste of PVC in the morning.”_
@@christopherbiomass7155 I'm pretty sure drinking only distilled water as your water source does leech vitamins and minerals from your body not that they can't be replaced but it does happen
As a great man once said "When you want to insert a nail into a piece of wood, don't do anything fancy or glamorous. Just take the damn hammer and hit the son of a bitch until it's in." Getting the nail in in this case is producing drinkable water, where a simple solution of the hammer could be a desalination plant and then pipeline to transport it further inland. Granted, it's not overly simple and requires investment of time and money, but it uses tried and true technology that works perfectly fine now. The solutions being created as this one here, some high-tech-super-hyper-free-energy-macguffin just ends up being in the works for so long the nail just disintegrates into nothingness. Just like the dreams of the magical macguffins.
Alternatively, they could just try to improve the whole "digging a well" thing to make it more affordable/efficient. *That* would do so much more for struggling villages in the middle of nowhere than a hypothetical device that doesn't pass the "back of the envelope" test.
I would like to see research done into the distribution of wellsprings in arid regions. I can't imagine they're that dispersed, and simple infrastructure would greatly reduce the need to travel for water. Although I have read that often infrastructure is ripped apart to be sold as scrap...
Dude 1.5 litres per day is sufficient for an average human, 2 litres per day is recommended. 5 litres is crazy. It doesn’t really change the calculation, but it is odd to quote such a huge number.
I am a chemist in Arizona, had an interview with this company during COVID. They asked me what I know about Source. When I mentioned that I know they used to be zero mass, they were surprised. Then they mentioned they changed the project to include confidential hydroscopic media, and when I said "oh, like lithium chloride?" the expression on their face was priceless. I think it was difficult to hide my skepticism during the interview because I didn't receive an offer lol.
1:29 "There's nothing on Earth like Source." You mean other than literally every dehumidifier company out there _and_ other than the handful of failed renewable energy water-from-air products that also claimed to be able to do the exact same thing you pitched? Yeah, I guess there's really nothing out there like Source.
I've got it ! A water purifier that collects all the drips from your air conditioner! 1 year later: The MIT prize for most useful invention to humanity goes to........
I love how the money spent on these "something for nothing" fantasy products instead of ways to improve well-digging to make it more affordable and more practical, so that a *real* charity could add more wells to impoverished places that desperately need them.
@InfernosReaper Wells aren't much use if there isn't drinkable water or even cropping suitable water down there. Would wells help? Is the shortage temporary or ongoing? Weather or human action? Perhaps a nearby mine has tapped all the ground water to mine minerals for smartphones? Are water wells and improved agriculture enough? Ethiopia 1970s, famine, Population 30 million, much aid sent. 1980s, famine, Population 40 million, much aid sent. 2010s Famine and poverty continues, Population 110 million. Aid continues. 5th highest recipient of international aid. 45 years ~$100 billion in aid($2019).
@@johncarlaw8633 And do those things invalidate the benefits of better(or any) wells for those who live in places where digging a well is possible but not feasible with their resources? At least with the wells thing, *some* impoverished people actually benefit instead of *none* of them getting any benefit
@@johncarlaw8633 You assume that the "aid" is meant to help.. It is not.. every single penny comes along with rules how or for what to spend or not to spend it.. And these make sure the recipients stay dependent and will never achieve self sufficiency.. where else would we dump all the cheap crap nobody wants here, preventing the establishment of a competitive domestic production/market providing stable incomes for the population a.k.a. a healthy economy. (By the way, the climate theology fits perfectly into this scheme as it denies THE most fundamental necessity for development - a stable energy supply..)
One day you'll have more episodes debunking fancy humidifiers than anything else. Might as well create a playlist or new channel just to prove your point of how many times you debunked this stuff
Or you could just buy solar panels and a dehumidifier. Cheaper and about as ineffective. Maybe connect it to a big diesel generator for more power. There’s no limit to how much water can cost!
The main flaw of the math here is that Source is drinking water only, not ALL of your water. So that cuts the cost down to something totally reasonable for a normal suburban home, especially when you compare the quality of the water to bottled water which costs 2-10x as much. Agree it won't solve all the worlds water problems, but it definitely can help in certain applications. Next time just ask for help w/ the math maybe?
I once had the same idea when i saw condensated water on a cold window in middle school. I asked my physics teacher about it and he promptly calculated for me how much energy it would cost to condensate water from the air at average humidity levels, i think he arrived at around 0.5-1kWh per liter of water. He then pointed out that a desalination plant can put out a thousand liter for that amount of energy, and a simple pump can pull up even more groundwater with that. He then jokingly congratulated me on inventing "affordable water for millionaires". My favorite teacher to this day.
Hah great ending!
Lol, then you high fived your favorite celebrity and everyone got ice cream. Cool story, bro.
@@BarronVonSchnoot I mean his story is pretty believable.
@@BarronVonSchnoot You just had shitty teachers man, science is the one of the few classes where you can show the application of the theory all around you. It's about as far off as saying that it's unbelievable that a teacher would bring a toaster to show the effects of carbonization.
@@flyingsky1559 lol, you have anger issues.
Finally a much deserved busted video on the Source engine, Valve finally gets its reckoning.
Curse you, Source! Your day of reckoning has come!
The solar powered anticheat will make the naysayers eat their words
I know this is a Joke. I know this is a Joke. I know this is a Joke...I hope this is a joke.
Watch your back, Gabe!
It is pretty bad tbh, or at least it is in 2022. It was probably fine in 2004.
Lupe was right on one point, there is an obvious lack of education on how we get water. Problem is he and this group are also affected by this lack of education.
At first I thought it was a solar still, i.e. you put dirty water in and it distills clean water out of it. Because you can actually make that quite cheaply, and it's very useful to a lot of people around the world without a clean water supply. Instead it was woo magic.
Seriously, helping give people more access to clean water is much more useful than trying to magic water out of the air.
I had the same thought. A solar-powered water purification system like their boxy trash? That might work. Capture the heat and maybe some sunlight to power a heater and boil off all the impurities, that wouldn't be completely idiotic, although it would be HORRIBLY inefficient and a nightmare to maintain.
But no, it's another goddamn dehumidifier scam. Fuck's sake. Humanity needs an enema.
You don't make a profit on those though. These people just want to fleech the gullible
Yes solar still works, and is cheap to make, and every place in Africa has both the brackish water, and enough discarded glass, to make them up.
You'd get distilled/deminiralized water out of it, just like with these glorified dehumidifiers. For some reason nobody mentions the basic fact that it's a really bad idea to drink that.
No, but I'd wager that it's easier to make distilled water safe to drink than brackish water.
I've seen egg shaped rocks maybe 4ft long, 2ft wide, in the aired desert, dripping water slowly, a drip every few seconds. I know not why
I invented a machine that makes clean drinking water from just sunlight and piss.
Thunderfoot is looping
Because the science communicators are looping
Because the scammer startup companies are looping
This is a never ending nightmare.
The very second i read this title, my brain went... Water Seer lol
I hope Elon Musk never goes into humidifier production. Thunderfoot will fucking explode. 😂😂
Help, I think I'm stuck in some kind of timeloop.
one thing to consider is that distilled water is unhealthy to drink in the long run. It tends to leech vitamins and minerals from your system. Distilled water has actually contributed to water intoxication deaths.
Since when did you have 1 million subs? Congrats!
its all in the name. fiasco means...failure.
We had a solar self filling water source years ago when we had a garden.
It was a rain barrel connected to a downspout off the garage roof. Rain filled it up, and you poured the water on the plants. My 1920 farmhouse had an underground cistern hooked to the house gutter and downspout. The water was used for washing and dishes, well water was used for drinking and cooking.
The grift never ends.
Dave if you and Philip could stop pointing out there is, in fact, an objective reality... maybe some of these companies could succeed. Please stop tanking the economy.
At first glance, i thought that it was a fancy solar water heating panels or an solar oven.. But...Its WORSE and useless... Why those people don't really make useful things
right on commander
Oh man it's like a huge self filling water bottle.
Edit: here's a tip people, if you live in a place humid enough to pull water out of the air and sunny enough to power the machine just wait a few hours it's gonna rain because you already live in the tropics.
I reckon desalination technology is the only way to make useful volumes of drinking water.
@Christopher Grant glacier mining?? What in the natural disaster lol
@@paulmurgatroyd6372 besides normal boring water treatment and better water use and conservation, too.
There is this amazing invention called a 'well'. You dig a hole and it fills with water. It requires only men with shovels. It sounds too good to be true but it isn't :) It works perfectly fine in dry climates. You just need a deeper hole. The earth has tons of water.
There is no water shortage. There can be water distribution problems. But that is poor government. Period. If your government can't provide clean water then you need a better government.
The earth is a closed system. Global warming is not going to make water scarce. There is nowhere for it to go. It will make the earth wetter because the icecaps will melt. An ice age makes it drier.
Climate alarmists: all our cities will be underwater.
Also Climate alarmists: we won't have enough water
I know what you're thinking. Yes there is a difference between water and drinkable water. So tell me what happens to 'undrinkable' water when it evaporates? Only water evaporates. Rain water is more or less pure drinkable water. No matter where it comes from. Is global warming going to cause more evaporation or less? So you have the icecaps melting and increased evaporation. Not exactly a formula for a water shortage. We'll be practically swimming in it.
@@Jordan-Ramses such a first world view
I once went to Africa with a team of people to build a well in a remote village. A year later, some of us returned to the village to see how the people profited from the new well. Immediately we noticed the well looked unused, so we asked one of the people and the reply (through the translator) was that all the villages gather water from one location, though it is a long walk, it is where the people meet and get news of the world.
So essentialy a 2-wheeled cart would benefit them way more, so these women wouldn't have to walk "several times per day". With this groundbreaking device, 2 women would be able to bring the water for several households.
The proverbial workplace water cooler.
@@bezimienny_andzej6425or automobile with a bed for carrying stuff
That's actually quite interesting. Leave it to westerners to solve problems for people who dont view it as a problem 😂
"After walking for hours to fill their containers with water...." Hold up...so they DO have water! Just not anywhere nearby...Why not just invest in infrastructure to pump, clean and deliver that water to somewhere closer?
But that's not a sexy scam on VC money!
Oh the humanity. That water could use some modern water treatment too, a plenty of these wells contain metals.
Or they could move
Maybe they think of Africa as some magically hellish place that needs magical technological solutions instead of a normal place that's simply impoverished and needs infrastructure.
Honestly in those areas walking to get your water is probably safer then living near the water since that is also the water source for every predator in the area
@@Apodeipnon bringing up Africa for your American suburban scam is just marketing, no one actually thinks about Africa.
I feel like I've watched enough of these to be able to come up with a scam... er, I mean invention... of my own. Only two things standing in my way. I'm pretty good at math and I have a conscience.
I need to work on raising my sociopathy index...
If you get your sociopathy index high enough, you can run for federal office.
@@BobPagani Hmmm... that might be even more lucrative. And they almost never go to prison...
There's really only ONE thing standing in your way. If you can get rid of your conscience, you can make mathematics say anything you want.
@@Arfonfree There's LOTS of money in telling the public what it wants to hear.
Don't forget the computer graphics, smiling people with sunshine and plinky plonky music on your videos to really sell you scam... Erm invention 😁
This makes me wish I had gotten an MBA, rather than majoring in engineering. Imagine being able to get $150 million in funding for setting up a business that has no chance of working.
As an engineer you know you can't do this. These are scams to steal money from taxpayers. These are government funded, and the people that are redirecting the money get kickbacks.
Don't trust who supposedly is funding these things.
All this garbage is to steal money or launder it.
I suspect some of these scam companies are laundering fronts.
Why settle for begging billionaires for $150M, of which you'll only legally be able to personally enjoy a small fraction, when with the engineering knowledge you can just build something that does work and become a billionaire yourself?
Hey, don't think like that! If anything, an engineering degree would give you more legitimacy & ability to design something even more convincing should you ever decide to run some kind of tech scam.
ngl i don't think MBAs are getting that either, last one i met was a manager for 7 eleven
I remember back when I was a kid there was a plan to push icebergs to areas in need and honestly I wouldn't mind seeing a cost comparison with these dehumidifiers.
Some of the top engineering channels did a review of a modern day project of exactly that - capturing and moving iceberg.
It’s not like there’s gonna be many bergs left with the ways things are going right now.
Cheaper to just move the people to the water. ruclips.net/video/P0q4o58pKwA/видео.html
When I was in middle school the “experts” said earth was heading for another ice age. There would have been plenty of water for everyone.
@@lookingbehind6335 That was actually a hypothesis that never gained acceptance in the general scientific community based on the Earth's elliptical orbit which takes us slightly further from the sun.
"Usually when a science guy says it cant be done to me that's validation that i can be done" *cheers*
THIS is the issue. The sheer fucking hubris of these people to think they know better than a person that most likely spent the majority of their adult life working and trying to understand thier respective fields.
everyone watched steve jobs whip engineers into pushing the proverbial envelope for decades; now every ego in a suit thinks they can moxy away any physics obstacle. sheer fecking hubris
"Usually when an expert in the field says it cant be done to me that's validation that i can be done"
Of course, if you substitute "expert in the field" for "science guy" it suddenly doesn't sound so incredibly stupid... cause we ALL know that those slick scientific bastards, with their diplomas and their white (*gosh!!) lab coats, are good for nothing (read this with Homer voice and mockingly moving your fingers in the air, please)
I assume the corollary would be "when a science guys says it can be done, that's validation that it can't be done". If not, then what he is in effect saying is it is a waste of time to ask a "science guy" whether or not something can be done because no matter what he answers, yes or no, will be validation that it can be done. Can't wait for my perpetual motion machine!
I have a friend who is a civil engineer (the original kind, makes buildings).
He wanted me too look into using magnets to make generators.
I immediatly asked him "This isn't going to be perpetual motion nonsense right?" and he sends me a link to the SAV. I guess that was his way of say "Yes, yes it is"
Dude has a masters....
I told him I wasn't interested, my education is called mechatronics and is only a bach, so I'm not an electronics engineer and I'd let an actual expert "deal" with this, and asked him what he thought he could bring to the table.
"It's because people just haven't made it right yet! I get the friction stuff but there has to be a way to make it have little enough friction!"
laws of thermodynamics are only valid for fool engineers xD dehumidifying air in a dry environment is possible but consumes an insane amount of electricity to get a reasonable amount of water. the ressources for such projects are better in spent something climate change related which keeps the hope alive that it is raining from time to time.
funfact: you can exactly calculate the energy demand and output for given ambient temperatures and humidities with the technical characteristics of air conditioners
I’d buy into this incredible “technology” but right now I’m saving my money to buy this amazing composting device that you keep on your kitchen counter top! 🤪
Gonna connect the Source to my vacuum powered clothes dryer!
My plan is to put ultraviolet lights in the Spin launch and use it as the largest Vacuum powered clothes drier.
Powered by solar roads!
if there was money in moisture farming, Luke would have been rich
Well he kinda was, at least his uncle was. Rich enough to have his own moisture farm, several droids and had enough cash, to buy Luke a speeder and a freaking T-16 skyhopper.
Thats like having a car and a P-51 mustang with the machineguns still attached. And Luke was talking about going into the Imperial academy, which implies they have money for that too.
@@ChocorocK His uncle was still paying off his moisture vaporator, all those other things were on least-to-own plans. Poor uncle Owen, sucked in by cleaver marketing.
@@tomservo5007 well hutt marketing probably involves a 20% markup and a "payup or we cut off one or several of your limbs" payment method.
Who is Luke and why arent you praying to me ?
@@PutsOnSneakers If you have to ask, you wouldn't understand it anyway.
I’m having trouble believing this water-from-the-air scam can come around again.
PJ Barnum had something to say on this I believe…..
The 'investors' ned something vaguely in the 'green energy' sector to pump money into for tax reasons. When the company falls apart they get it back in tax relief
on the plus side, it provides a steady revenue stream for Thunderfoot's youtube channel because he can keep producing busting videos.
I guess it is brough to you by the same people who applauded Zelenky's Volkssturm calling a murderous despot in his bunker a hero fighting for freedom and democracy.
And again, and again, and again……..
You know, when someone says "I know this looks like a scam, but don't listen to your gut feeling. Be open-minded and just believe it'll all be okay", that *immediately* makes them more trustworthy.
Thunder foot misses a key point. Gates and the other investors are going to have western governments buy these with tax dollars and give them to poor countries. They tried really hard to do this with the vaccine. They are repeating the same strategy
"you're overthinking!" = "please stop thinking critically!"
Don't listen to science guys! Go on faith, not on provable data because nobody ever lost money investing on faith!
Even if what they were selling was completely legit, that pitch would make anyone dubious.
@@ashleybrooke2087 I'll say as Luke Skywalker once said:
*_Amazing. Every word of what you just said... was wrong._*
@@electric7487
I'll quote Yoda then.
"Fucking sarcasm, that was."
Like two days ago, there was news post on the greatest Czech media outlet Novinky(cz) that S.A.W.E.R (another solar water generator) made by CTU in Prague has won the first price for the greatest innovation on some Dubai EXPO. I was comment shelled after I said it's just a magnified heatpump from a tumble dryer lol.
Iam sorry, but i have bit of insight myself. Calling Novinky “greatest“ media outlet is kinda strange. The main focus of that site is conflict, gossip and headlines that will attract low info audience. Only thing worthwile there is their weather forecast model and maybe e-mail client to use as spam adress for online shops. If you commented there and expected anything else than shelling from local dinosaurs, than iam affraid you are bit naive.
Well, where they call the Quran a source of science...
Took one for the team. Good work.
I swear this must be like the 10th time you've debunked water from air devices. You'd think people would learn that they don't work by the sheer amount of projects that try and fail miserably.
What is rain?
The majority of people are sheep and will believe everything they are fed by the mass media.
Also, Thunderf00t mentioned something in this video that mirrored something I watched in another one about carbon footprints in how these huge corporations (like oil) push the whole carbon footprint problem onto the people and say that "we need to be more mindful of what we put into the air" when they are the ones that produce the products that we consume and put the stuff in the air. They shift the blame to the people who have no choice but to buy their products. It works like this too, they're saying that we are the cause of climate change and that's why we need to buy their solar products.
People need to wake up, but they won't.
But the other times the devices looked silly and had silly names like Waterseer and Pontus. This time the project looks totally different and has a cooler name, so surely it works this time!
They probably know, but greed can overpower one's integrity.
@@lexiecrewther7038 Rain already happens without buying an expensive device, and buying an expensive device won't make it rain more.
"There's nothing on earth, like source"
Am I the only one who thought "Monorail!"
Wow, I had no idea the 5,000 litres of water in the tanks I have catching rain water from my roof was so valuable, and all this time I have been using it to flush toilets. I feel really stupid now.
You probably know better than me but IIRC untreated rainwater is as good as greywater. Not potable.
@@tylerfricks7369 He's using it to flush his toilet... Some houses out there use gray water to, well... Flush the toilet... So he's doing pretty much the right thing with his rain water.
@@Donnerwamp I am aware. Just in reference to the topic at hand. Source supposedly makes potable water. Dehumidifiers usually don’t make good water at all though.
@@tylerfricks7369 Oh, that seemingly got lost in translation... Yes, dehumidifiers usually make no good water, good enough to flush the toilet or watering the plants outside, but that's about it.
@@tylerfricks7369 In a crisis will treat the rainwater and use it for drinking water but I currently use all the rainwater I catch for flushing and that saves me the cost of using potable water for that. If I add a tank or two in future the plan is to keep one small tank reserved for potable use with some extra filtering and treatment but using what I have now for drinking would mean I would have to revert to using potable for flushing sooner, so it makes no sense at the moment.
Every few years someone comes out with a variant on this thing and no one ever learns.
They learn there is tons of money to be made with each variant of this... I think the CEO of 'source engine' earns more than most of us do :)
Free energy.
@Paul Murgatroyd And they are solving a problem that doesn't really exist in the worst way, even if it had a hope of working at all.
There aren't many places in the world that don't have have some water within a few km. Even the Sahara has water under it fairly near the surface in many places.
Problem is it isn't anywhere near drinkable due to salt or other mineral contamination.
Less than 1% of water is fresh water, and a lot of that isn't immediately drinkable, or near where the people or crops could use it.
All you have to know about the expensive scams is large scale commercial desalination plants using seawater source, at the expensive end of desalination, can desalinate it at between 6-3 kWh per cubic metre. 1,000 litres for a dollar or less. Smaller scale are not quite as efficient but a couple of $k for a couple of 1kW panels and desal hardware can give you a kilolitre a day with decades old industrially proven technology.
Cropping water needs to be a few cents per ton to be cost effective in open field farming. Desalinated water isn't much use for cropping except in intense hydroponic farms inside greenhouses designed to prevent moisture loss to atmosphere. Expensive but working commercially. e.g. sundrop farms port augusta
Just a working example, not the future of most farming unless the world gets to 50+ billion people or the world goes into a sci-fi armageddon drought , or something :-)
Because it's a perfect demoneydifier!
That's my evil plan, wait 'till thunderf00t forgets and start my company.
Almost completely I agree with the approach, calculations, and conclusions of Thunderfoot, but I must point out an error. To quote: "To just not die from dehydration, your typical human needs to drink 5 'ish' litres of water a day..." Er, no! First, that's almost twice the quoted figure and, second, that is fluid intake, which is entirely different.
If you are going to be methodical and precise, DO NOT make statements so patently wrong!
Yeah, he definitely got carried away there.
5-6L of water per day would be more accurate for a family of three, not (for the majority of cases) one person. That 5L per day per person would mostly be for someone who does a lot of hard physical labour, like landscaping or railway track maintenance. So if I were him, I'd fix that by saying 2-5L per day.
The NAS suggests 3.7 liters per day. This includes water contained in food and other liquids people normally consume. But if you live in a poor area where food is scarce, drinking water may be the main form of fluid intake. Also, the same institution makes it clear that this estimate can fluctuate a lot depending on the individual, so I don't think you can be "so patently wrong" about a very variable number, like you could about a mathematical principle or a universal constant. Also the use of the suffix "ish" means a rough estimate, which even if it's too high, still doesn't affect the fact that this device is completely impractical.
It's an over-estimate for the average person, sure. But if you're working outdoors in a hot climate, or especially in a hot and high humidity climate, you would be sweating a lot. In that kind of situation, you could easily need 5 litres per day, possibly even more.
I live in the Northeast, and I would have to estimate that I drink about 1.5 to 2 liters of fluids (not just water, but also other stuff too) per day, but then I am not typically doing hard labor outdoors. Where I live, it is commonly humid and we get summers of ranging from 85 to 95F, and humidities of 50%+ are common. So when he said 5L per day I was like "uh, no?".
Also, if you live in a hot but arid climate, your sweating mechanism works so much better than if you were living in a hot and humid climate, therefore you don't need quite as much sweat (and thus, less water) than you would if you lived in the tropics.
If a US citizen's average daily water consumption is ~600 litres/day (and total water is ~ 2000 litres/day), the difference between 5 litres of drinking water a day and 2 litres amounts to a rounding error. 3/600 is 0.5% and 3/2000 is around 0.1%, which is about one order of magnitude away. That means it should not effect the end result in any meaningful way.
What is depressing is how quickly people forget about the previous snake oil sales pitch and lap up the same story and believe that it is a new story, because the storyteller says it is new. There is such a desperate need for critical thinking skills to be taught from the very first year of schooling and continue as a default part of every class thereafter.
I like how everything is done in Africa, here's corporate to save the day, but in Africa, and nobody thinks, "Maybe people will get the wrong idea about Africa."
Problem is most teachers can't tell the difference between critical thinking and their own ass... Critical thinking is part of the school curriculums in many countries already. On paper, that is.
@@skaruts critical thinking education is impossible in America. Every curriculum and lesson plan will end up in the court system as conservatives and liberals howl about bias in every single sentence.
@@skaruts gotta hope the kids critically think while going through the critical thinking classes. I assume teachers could really screw up someone learning critical thinking if taught wrong. I can see the possibility of people out and about thinking that critical thinking means being thinking about something and be critical about it. As if it's just one thinking about a subject and engaging in critiquing what one feels should be different or if anything should be. I can even see people thinking along the lines of critical meaning something like "very important". So they end up thinking about what they feel is most important, what "matters" to them, about the subject.
The last 5 years I feel like i've noticed the ratio of people actually seeming to have a well rounded base education going down. Maybe I'm just noticing things more now, or maybe there's just more examples able to be seen because of the growth and changing of the internet. Idk, but it seems like it.
I think they just never got the memo. They never looked up what happened to all those fake projects. They just forgot about the product and got excited for the next thing.
Another solar powered dehumidifier busting video.
I love Thunderf00t's BUSTED! videos, I just wish there wasn't such a great need for them.
I wonder if he will still be busting solar roadway water-from-thin-air projects in 20 years? It doesn't seem to end.
This idea is straight out of Star Wars.
Remember what Luke's uncle Owen did for a living - moisture farmer.
Everybody knows thorium dehumidifiers are the wave of the future
@@Enkarashaddam We'd probably have Thorium power if those idiots at places like the Gates Institute of Stupidity would stop wasting money by the truckload.
But as usual unless BG can get his grubby hands on the patents he's not interested.
@@kwinzman No cure for stupid.
It's always fun when people think you can efficiently syphon water from the air in places where the air is about as moisture free as the proverbial rock most of the time.
How many more "Water from Air" companies (Backed by "Big Names" or not) are going to crop up and fail?
Seems like the life cycle of these scams is about three years, but with truth and fact systematically being destroyed there might be a new one every six months by 2025. I don't expect they'll get much more regular than that, though, since there' s a finite amount of money to be extracted out of thin brains.
Expect MANY more to come as water becomes more scarce.
Its a Tax scheme.
@@justice5150 How? Last time I checked Google Maps, there was a lot of blue pixels on my screen.
@@tolep Too much salt in most of those blue pixels. *Drinking* water is the issue, most people are lazy and just imply it.
That huge array of Source water panels, looks like a breeding ground for Legionnaires' disease.
Bill gates is using the same idea to make money as he did with the vaccine: he is going to get western governments to buy these products for poor countries so the cost and viability don’t matter.
UV blasting the water to clean it would probably be the least difficult part of the problem haha
That's the problem with all of those dehumidifier water collectors is that somehow people seem to forget all the other things like dust & pollen that are in the air with the moisture & how all of that would get collected as well.
I also have to question efficiency. I mean if you have 100 of these things in that tight grouping wont you basically start stripping out the water so quickly that the local area's humidity would sharply fall below the ability to condense in the ambient air temperature thus cause sporadic operation and hurt the efficiency badly?
No because wind exists, and they are so inefficent
The sad cop out most these scams always use is "It will pay for itself in time". Ignoring maintenance or problems given a lot of them "pay for themself" over a period of decades. Plus this one would have all the problems of a solar panel plus a water system. I can only imagine the pipes get nasty as mold and other things grow inside them. Requiring frequent cleaning or replacements.
$150 million dollars in funding for vaporware? Hmm, let's see the cost to drill a well is $15000? that's 10,000 wells. What a waste.
On the high end Maybe, you can get a well done much cheaper than that.
@@ryanfritts1574 Haha. Even better. Though it sounds like even 1 well for $150,000,000 has a higher output than these things. Anything more is gravy!
Well its not vaporware, this is vapor collection
@@azargelin Fair. But also, effectively, vapor distribution. ;)
Wells are infinitely scale able. Need water anywhere on the planet, sink a well. What if groundwater is not replenished at an infinite level? Just drill deeper?
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe!" Albert Einstein.
Frankly the second I hear the words "Infinitely scalable" I mostly tune out because I know whatever follows will be some full on bullshit that straddles the line between science fiction and science fantasy.
To be fair, whilst not infinite, there is a lot of space over the oceans around the world that they could build these things. Ok, so some people might argue that there are better approaches to getting water from ocean regions, but they just don't understand how revolutionary this not-really-a-dehumidifier approach is.
(Yes, the use of the word "infinite" is also a reality red flag for me as well.)
It doesn't even scale at all, the first unit dries the air before anything gets to the next one.
Using the words "perfect water" has the same effect.
@@DreadX10 The word "perfect" when used to describe anything that isn't strictly theoretical, really.
Edit: ...or strictly opinion.
@@philrichards7240 This whole line of solutions is akin to creating a Rube Goldberg machine to flip the light switch. It is a wildly over-engineered solution at best, and a complete waste of time, material and energy at worst.
If only George Lucas never made Luke and his family moisture farmers in the original Star Wars. Because it seems like a lot of people are drunk on the idea of moisture farming.
Finally - looking down the list somebody else got it.
I'm an engineer (aerospace) and it just infuriates me that here's another con-job exploiting the ignorance of main stream media. Theranos should have been obvious that it was ripped off from the film Gattaca. This is equally a rip off of Star Wars and a few other films.
It really is infuriating how ignorant mainstream media is these days. And after they convince the general public about this crap we have to spend days, weeks, months, years explaining this stuff again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.............
Well, if it's possible in Star Wars, then it must be true. :-)
Granted, water on Tattooine is so expensive, that "Moisture Farmer" is literally a profession there. I believe, in the Star Wars Galaxy, it's only slightly less expensive, to get the water out of the air, than it is to literally fly it in from another planet, that has liquid water.
Well, SW moisture farming is obviously based on SW fantasy tech. Here's their description: _"The devices were stationed at ground level and coaxed moisture from the air by means of refrigerated condensers, or chilling bars, _*_which generated low-energy ionization fields. Captured water was then_*_ pumped or _*_gravity-directed into a storage cistern,_*_ which adjusted its pH levels. _*_Vaporators were capable of collecting 1.5 liters of water per day,_*_ even when the relative humidity of the air was only 1.5 percent."_
Basically tech gobbledygook with "chilling forcefields" and "gravity manipulation".
@@Vladimir_Kv 1.5 liters? From 1.5% humidity..... These things appear to be pumping at least 100 kilograms of damp air through them.
And they don't solve the dehydration. Because by removing the water from the environment it just leaves the environment as a whole even more dehydrated!
It's mandatory to have rain water tanks on a new house here in Australia, but i'm sure it would be cheaper and more effective to install some of this garbage on the roof instead right...
I looked up the Source specs from the official website. There's no way this unit costs more than $700 to produce and ship. I understand a cost markup relative to service life and sale volume, but $6000 is absurd for something expected to make less than 4 liters per day per year (Source's own numbers). Could literally run a $200 dehumidifier from a $300 single panel solar system and get the same, heck probably better, performance.
Not to mention crap like hydrocarbons and sulfur that are at this air level too. Drinking water this way is like having toxic pollution smoothie.
The water from a regular dehumidifier will be full of random bacteria and shit. So you have to add the cost of a filter, UVC led, and a pump. The filter just needs to be small (micron size) enough to filter out the dust & grime. The UVC led will do the heavy lifting on sterilizing the water. However, I highly suspect that the con-men involved in these projects bother to build all that and figure they'll be long gone with a bag of cash before you can say legionella.
@@Shadi2
Yep, that's the rationale of those of full-of-crap solar panel companies, too. They take their fat govt. subsidies for starting up, take your money for punching holes in your roof to install idiotic solar panels, and then go out of business before you can collect damages for them screwing up your roof and getting major water damage (happened to a co-worker of mine, I told him not to do it, so he had to make the claim to his homeowners insurance and is now getting ass-raped on his premium). End result: a bunch of pissed off customers while this guy and his girlfriend are on their way to the Caribbean in a Lear-jet stuffed with duffle-bags of cash while the employees come to work Monday morning to find the building locked-up and dark, they have an e-mail in their inbox informing them that they're fired, and they get stiffed on their last paycheck.
Look up into printer catriges prising and producing costs. Free market is like pure evil.
And to think two $5 buckets and a $30 filter could provide cleaner water at a faster rate...
"someone already did the due diligence for me, I assume" this is the best quote I've ever heard
That's what religious belief in efficient markets get you.
It worked fine with the vaccine, right?
„Water, an essential ingredient for-“
„ITS A SCAM“🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
The only "liquid" these panels will ever be able to reliably produce, is the liquidation of investor money in due time.
About two decades ago, San Antonio increased their available water supply by roughly 25% (iirc) by aggressively finding and patching leaks. More recently, they reduced usage by about 50% by instituting conservation measures. Common sense FTW.
A friend was shocked when I bent the shift attached to the float in his toilet that was running all the time. Cut his water use by 25%.
Then promptly raised the price per gallon to make up the cost of people using less water.
@@DCBChump Which is ALSO a conservation measure. California needs to raise their water rates to discourage people from building swimming pools and growing turf lawns in a desert.
@@colormedubious4747 like that would discourage the rich they have multiple people stupid enough to jet ski in their pool during droughts
@@ayajade6683 Then they'll be funding water system improvements and posting hilarious videos of nearly fatal backyard Jet-Ski crashes. Everybody wins!
I'm always shocked when people think they can magically pull water out of the air in places where there is a general lack of humidity.
Anyone trying to sell a product with fear mongering is typically a red flag for me.
I love the Dr. Strangelove clips, TF!
It's really disappointing to see the "top minds" and great universities getting so reckless and lazy to be involved in such things..
I'd love to see your take on how come these projects, which are nothing new or innovative, go through programs like MIT/Berkeley and are deemed great innovations or even win prizes!? What the heck are they using as criteria and who is the competition to allow this stuff to win? Good lord..
I was gonna say I'd like to see more science / what is possible with X humidity but I am guessing you covered in previous similar scams..
Love the channel. Cheers from Brazil.
I'm guessing that these prizes no longer have scientists judging them. They just pick what is the most advertiser-friendly to appeal to people who think any miracle is possible as long as it's associated with clean energy.
There is a huge difference between the rigorous and competitive programs and the marketing-led corporate programs. Essentially, consider whether involvement in a project sounds like it would be costing them money or making them money - if they would cost them significant money, it's much more likely to be a strict and rigorous program.
@@fattiger6957 And for that they give away their good names, like MIT? Isn't their word supposed to carry some weight, don't they have to maintain some dignity? And how come big investors are drawn into this, too? Are they just looking for small startups to realize a short term investment gain? In that case they couldn't reasonably be counted as backing the project.
@@wassollderscheiss33 I think for prizes like this, it's just for the upfront PR then they don't care if these projects actually work out. I think it's fair to say most people who hear about these things forget about them pretty quickly. I doubt there's any media outlets acrually tracking if the winners of these awards accomplishes anything afterwards.
As for investors, I have to wonder if there is some kind of tax shenanigans going on.
Stop being a hater and BELIEVE! That's all that's needed - optimism - physics and thermodynamics be damned! 🤣
Gotta love how their promotional shots show the solar panels pointing _away_ from the sun.
Obviously they have to be pointed away from the sun to generate water instead of electricity
That is because you should never look at the sun, duh! Didn't your parents teach you that? Solar panels clearly have good parents! Though, I guess my parents also tought me never to play in the road, and I've seen a lot of solar panels actually pretending to be a road, so maybe their parents aren't so great after all.
Instead of investing in this, send the $10,000 (+ shipping expenses) to me and I will ship or hand deliver you a bucket of water whenever you ask for it! 😂
Disclaimer- Time delays may apply, especially on hand deliveries. Limited to 1 ea. 5 gallon bucket(s) per transaction. 15 year guarantee on all purchases before 4/15/22. World wide coverage where permitted by law.
I'm in 10,000 bucks is spare cash for me...I'm only worried that you might be in danger as you travel along those vast long stretches of road to reach my house..someone might "jump" you to steal my bucket of life giving water!
@@KoolKman
I have another plan where an armed special forces retiree accompanies me! It is more expensive, though. Also, the coverage is not world wide due to restrictions in certain countries!
Just send dehydrated water, it’ll be cheaper postage.
@@WEStern-sm3ot Yes well, seeing I live in Thailand..But it'd be a great adventure for you 🐘🐗🦍🛕
@@KoolKman
Who knew it would be this easy to start a lucrative internet business? I should have done this years ago!!!
I am going to get busy working on some more plans!
If you are interested, I think I will start looking for investor/partners!
I swear I lose a few IQ points whenever I have to listen to these scam artists.
I love it when they get some rapper to promote it. This all has the same stink as the Fyre Festival.
@@Skank_and_Gutterboy It's not just Fyre Festival, it's Fyre Festival and Theranos combined, then put on infinite steroids.
@@electric7487
No doubt!
Thunderf00t, do you ever doubt yourself despite knowing your maths is correct?
This is getting old. Fortunately I'm investing in Thunderf00t through Patreon instead of throwing it at these scams artists.
Source did for water what Solar Roadways did for roads.
I've made a portable, car camping, RO water filter that runs on a couple of 40 watt solar panels. $200 for the RO filter setup, plus $80 in panels, wire, etc. It will easily fill the 4 gallon water storage tank that came with the filter in a couple hours of average sunlight.
When investors far outweigh researchers, you are looking at "Theranos 2.0"
I love channels like yours. You call out these frauds. THis is the equivalent to those crypto scams. You make some b.s start up group, you pay a famous person to push it, you get all these donations, and then bam! You're off in the wind and the project goes silent.
I wonder if the celebridiots really do get paid for this shit. Did Fillion get a check from solar roadways, or did he just genuinely get excited for something he's too goddamn stupid to understand and want to tell people? Did Fiasco decide that a couple bucks to participate in a fraudulent advertisement was worth more than his career?
It's a toss-up at this point. I used to think shit wasn't this cynical and mercenary (and I'm a cynic!), but with the outrage marketing stuff going on, I really wonder if ANYTHING celebrities do isn't completely calculated and choreographed. A certain slap comes to mind.
I swear to god every year someone just reinvents the dehumidifier.
I love how these things advertise their use in really dry environments where they barely work.
They first tried to sell ice to the Inuits but that didn't give them the return on their money they hoped for.
Every time they try this they should be forced to set up one of their units in some place like death valley, the sahara, attacama, or the gobi and prove they can live off the water it generates.
Because the humidity is very low.
There's so many scam artists these days, keep up the great work Tf00t.
You HAVE to be critical and judgmental about these things, otherwise you and a lot of other people lose their shirts.
at least blackrock is going to lose some money lol
You know the name Fiasco means fraud in Spanish which makes it even more hilarious
@@Meleeman011 Blackrock is not stupid. It has to be some kind of elaborate tax dodging operation, because these products that go nowhere spawn every day.
@@UhOhUmm I think they don't look too closely into everything. They just hedge the risk by investing into all sorts of stuff they think might become profitable and if some of them turn out to be scams it doesn't hurt them a lot
I was in a research funding meeting a few years ago where someone was trying to pitch a “portable water from air device” project and asking for $300K in funding. I spoke out, did some quick math to show that reverse osmosis is at least an order of magnitude more efficient, and killed it. A couple of colleagues still hate me for that. Next time, I’ll just turn on one of these videos.
They hated that you didn't want to spend 10x as much as you should for an investment?
@@Moosetick2002 yep. It’s too easy to waste other people’s money.
Could you point me towards your fellow investors, I have just created my new solar powered drier and am in need of small investment of a million dollars.
You should wear your colleagues' hatred like a badge of honor.
@@Lh0000 One trick is to find funding organizations more interested in spending their budget than in getting their money’s worth out of it. The other is to sell the hell out of your idea to well-intentioned and generous people who lack the knowledge or motivation to properly scrutinize your work.
Most of these projects amount to some combination of these.
Wow... Imagine trying to monetise condensation and making it sound magic.
Hey! It's money out of thin air!
I enjoy your debunking videos, but with this one you're getting off point as well as fast and loose with the numbers.
The stat from the Mayo Clinic said 3.7/2.7 litres per day. I think that would round to about 3 litres, not 5.
This makes you seem less reasonable. I think we can handle it if you need to do slightly more complex math to show that this isn't a good idea.
And about the millions of litres which go to agriculture, I think these units are meant to supply homes with drinking water. When you go big and talk about the entire farming requirements, it seems like you're fudging the issues.
Stay on point, friend.
The 5L per day would be more accurate for a family of three, not one person, so just substitute that in.
'There is a heavy lack of understanding from where we get our drinking water.' Wow, that's heavy.
“There’s that word again, heavy. Is there something wrong with the earth’s gravitational pull in the future?”
@@ajclements4627 No, we just all get fatter
Seeing the expression on some kids faces when you tell them milk comes from a cow and not from a factory has made me aware of what "lack of understanding" means.
Hydropower would be the perfect energy source for a dehumidifier. I mean, solar and wind is busted - now its time to use water to make more water!!
How bout water from dirt?
As an engineer I have lots of experience of cooling systems. To try and keep water free of pathogens is almost impossible without non potable chemicals. Installing one of these without treating the water produced would probably kill you very quickly.
To make dehumidifier water drinkable, you have to filter it and bring it up to almost boiling temperature, which takes lots of energy to do. Not so "low-energy" after all.
was about to comment the same thing, i have a dehumidifier and that water is really dirty after i used it a few times, i wouldn't drink that..
@@fuzzyone4254 the dirt you _see_ is basically inert stuff in your air, but you're right, it is pretty manky
what is your thoughts on desalination plants? ones that pump the "brine" onto a large uninhabitable area instead of back into the ocean? the concentrated brine can create zones that are too salinated for life
This machine uses UV lighting
it would be interesting to evaluate the amount of water required to produce the panels vs. the expected total lifetime output
Similar to the co2 produced to mine, manufacture, and transport a photovoltaic panel
@@bullschitt3666 already done and it's carbon positive over 25 years.
@@bullschitt3666 mining and production are required for all forms of energy tho, so that may not be a great argument against panels
@@Apodeipnon Why not? Say you want to build a desalination plant. The first thing you do is a cost/benefit study. What parts already existing can you use? What needs to be custom-made? What will be the salaries for building and maintenance? How much clean water output can you expect? etc., etc. If the benefits outweigh the costs, you build it. If not, you try to convince people that you had a revolutionary idea which completely tramples over the laws of physics and they should give you money before you prove squat.
@@DoctorZisIN Right. I don't think what's most rational in a "free" market is necessarily most rational from other perspectives though i guess. that being said, solar panels seem to be competitive in the market as well.
This channel is never depressing, it fills me with an undeserved feeling of superiority over others, but unless I critically analyse what is being said (work out the figures myself) I’m likely to become a cult member of thunderfoot. Must not simply accept unquestioningly what he says, must verify his conclusions.
It's nice to see the meeting between fever dreams, money printing, and actual hard science. :)
Fortunately, most of his conclusions are based on VERY simple math, and honestly are manifestly obvious with a little bit of thought. Frankly, quite a few of these are so astoundingly obvious, it's mind-boggling that anybody could be sucked in by these investment schemes. Solar Freaking Roadways, for example.
It's just plain healthy to always be a little bit skeptical. But especially with thunderfoot! He ALWAYS goes for the "busted" angle, so guaranteed he's not always going to be correct. His space videos can be pretty bad, and if it's specifically about Space X, you can bet money over 90% of the vid will be memeing "Lol Elon Musk is DUMB" and talking about HyperLoop/Boring company failures, rather than the actual topic. I like his videos like this, calling out these supposed brand new inventions for what they really are: a fancy dehumidifier. But even in this video, at 14:55 he says a year is "400 days", probably just to make his own math easier. He likes to fudge the numbers a lot like this, so you really do need keep track of him doing it, and always double-check his math. You can see here how he does it, says it softly, "let's not quibble" and quickly moves on hoping you don't notice or question it. But calling a year 400 days is a pretty BIG fudge of the numbers. 400/365 = 109.5%, he basically made a year 10% longer, that's a pretty significant amount.
@@TheLargeHardonCollider In the terms of what he's dealing with, the difference between 365 and 400 is only 9%, which, when you're talking about systems which fall short of feasibility by several orders of magnitude, is insignificant. There are many people doing the same fact-checking on Elon Musk that Thunderfoot is doing. Some of them are much harsher about it.
@@TheLargeHardonCollider In rough calculations it's plenty accurate enough when the end results demonstrate excesses or shortfalls of orders of magnitude, for instance. If the first pass were to be more promising it could easily be redone with more precise figures - and 365 days would not be accurate either with something highly dependent on the diurnal cycle and thus, for a solar powered gizmo, it's really the equivalent "sun-hours" that matter (1000 watts of energy shining on 1 square meter of surface for 1 hour) and that in turn depends highly on factors too numerous to mention - but which are irrelevant if the concept has no merit to warrant such detailed further consideration.
Emotional manipulation at it's finest.
Truly despicable.
Oh also these things get less efficient the more you have. Since they're inevitably going to be reprocessing air that's already been squeezed dry.
@Nonna_SoF Good point. :) After all, the *real* purpose of a dehumidifier is to dry the air!
Top Universities...
As a 60yr old BSc I'm stunned by the decline of educational results over the past 20 years.
Almost daily I have to pamper engineers of highhprofile businesses through basic solutions, logic thinking and the reading of catalogues and manuals 😥
higher education is for the rich and privileged, not the smart
@@katiebarber407 not true everywhere. Modal income, one child in university (masters) and one in higher vocational (BSc). Very normal in most of Europe.
Wow, the peddling of nonsense continues unabated.
There is already a invention that can do this without solar panels only a net, some long sticks and a bucket its called a fog catcher it catches water through a net no electricity required and very cheap
I suspect that would work best in, er, foggy conditions. When the air is saturated with water, and there's no sun to re-evaporate the water off the net before you can collect it. If those are the conditions you've get, then fine, use it. This 'source' solar-powered dehumidifier would work**, I guess, when the sun is shining, provided the humidity is also high enough. (**For sufficiently small values of 'work' :)
There are also dew ponds.
"There's a heavy lack of education about how we get our water". You got that part right, at least.
As well as there is about the difference between avoiding death by dehydration and waterboarding. I mean fiveish liters sounds like ancient roman torture or maybe CIA practices at Guantanamo.
@@hans-joachimbierwirth4727 Yeah, that 6 litres a day sounded off... I rarely drink more than 2l.
@@njones420 So all your food is 100% dry?
@@unsafevelocities5687 Yep, just cat biscuits for me ;)
@@njones420 Hahaha!
I am currently completing my PhD thesis at Ulster University, a second rate university according to my Russell Group peers. How is it that our departments and many other 'second rate' ones can produce pretty significant work, yet all the leading universities regularly publish outright BS or pseudoscience. It genuinely baffles me how little some experts actually seem to know about their chosen field. Looking at the criticism levelled at yourself by other "academics" is a perfect example of this, as you have produced some amazing work in organic chemistry that they all just seem to ignore!
Despite this though you always seem to have the right response, and have never let it hold you back. Not trying to kiss your ass, but over the years you have been a massive inspiration for me to pursue practical science over popular/prestigious, and this has been reinforced many times through the content you produce. Thank you for all the hard work you have put into videos like this over the years 👍
There are only three great universities - Oxford, Cambridge and Hull.
@@francisking708 I wish someone could tell that to the quality of their outputted work.
contrary to popular belief being rich doesn't equal smart
@@katiebarber407 It generally does, but the reality is that those universities are filled to the brim of fucking idiots. The government also nationalized the student loan industry, and you have a lot of cockwombles college kids that go to big universities for credentials, but come out stupid as they came in.
This is what happens when you push for equality, and nationalize at least partially an industry in the name of equality and cutting out the "greedy" banks that won't give no loans to stupid people who have low credit and cannot repay their debt because it's uneconomical. And now a few years later, none of the problems were solved, in fact, college is more expensive than ever, and the standards are lower.
Just like healthcare, same stuff different paint. The government has a simple 2 step plan for making everything as inefficient as possible. 1: the government makes healthcare or college etc a right, 2: the government nationalizes the sector at least partially to cut out the "greedy" evil businesses in the name of equality.
And just like magic everything starts costing more and have lower standard of quality.
Berkeley, and other top universities, publish a great deal of good research on a consistent basis. The fact that they supported one project with a very low return on investment is not evidence that they "regularly publish outright BS or pseudoscience."
MIT. Responsible for some of the biggest CS breakthroughs ever, including basically creating the web as it's currently known, as well as creating the X Window System, GNU, cryptography, and a couple major programming languages among other things, and also peddling glorified dehumidifiers.
MIT, stop embarrassing yourself like this, please, your rather storied legacy isn't worth smearing over peddling crap like this.
The water usage of everything blew my mind, I had to go look it up. Fell into a rabbit hole and ended up spending an hour researching water footprints and getting a rough estimate of my family's print. I wish the internet was used like this more often by people instead of all the nonsense. It boggles my mind we have such an amazing wealth of knowledge avaible to us all and we neglect it for all the nonsense... 😅😢
Water usage numbers are misleading in some ways.
I've seen them count rainwater, landing in a field as "water for the cows"
While it's somewhat true, you could have made a massive rain collector and saved it all, it's disingenuous and misdirection.
The cows don't magically use up the water either.. they return it to the soil, which is filtered by the dirt, and it returns to the waterways.
That said, the amount of knowledge and data out there is quite amazing, and undervalued by many.
Just be aware of how it may be manipulated or twisted to present a specific narrative.
The trick is it's green water. It's rain water required for the grass to grow, which is then eaten by the cow, then you throw away the parts of the cow you don't want to eat and apportion the water used to grow all that grass. That water was going to fall on the grass and be absorbed anyway, even if you didn't eat the cow. The water that matters for people is the water that was used to irrigate the wheat so you could feed the cow the wheat because it's cheaper to do it that way (then you have to give the cow antibiotics too because that's a really terrible diet for a cow).
@@Unsensitive Excellent point. And the learning continues 👍
I love how every 6 months or so Thunderf00t manages to expose idiots who are trying to sell dehumidifier as another type of breakthrough technology.
Was just going to comment the same thing.
They are not idiots, they're crooks.
@Thunderf00t doesn't recognize _the potential_ of this product. But, I do.
As a boy, in the 1970s, I saw a movie in 1977. Full of _industrial_ lights & magic --- an entire world appeared. A _desert world,_ far away and long ago, yet named after a town in Tunisia. There, lived a family of _moisture farmers._ Are you beginning to see _the potential_ of this product?
I could be _Uncle Owen!_ Or _Aunt Beru!_ Pronouns be damned! My nephew could become a Jedi Knight! He could _save the whole galaxy!_ I'll be dead, of course. Slaughtered --- point of fact --- _these are the droids they're looking for._
But, _the moisture farm_ lives on! Not mentioned in the product specs... these things are _blaster-proof[1]._
[1] Not bullet-proof. Never shoot them with bullets. Only blasters, phasers, and other _fictional_ weapons; i.e. also impervious to _dragon-fire, magic spells, witchcraft, and wizardry._ :-)
I've so been waiting for this! I had no idea it's got "White Savior" written all over it too! it's doubly juicy
This seems like a way for people to siphon as much of the money they can from a gullible and naive public (directly or through taxes).
They are literally trying to sell an extremely expensive piece of scrap that doesn't even do what it claims it does.
"you have no transparency of what is in that water..." - absolute Bullshit!
I have transparency what is in my water because my local german "Wasserwerk" where the water out of my tap comes from and which supplies it to the area I live in does extensive monthly quality testings for HUNDREDS of chemicals, minerals et cetera in a lab!! and publishes those results regularly on their website!
They even guarentee that water quality up until their pipeline to the curb, where it meets with my pipe towards my house...
So it is in reality exactly opposite as stated - at this point I can just laugh at such a stupid remark! The water you collect in their devices has NO quality control whatsoever and might contain quite a few pollutants.
My water from my tap is pure and of VERY high quality here in northern Germany! it stems from an artesian source out of deep grounds and is filtered and controlled many times!
Wouldn't drinking distilled water as your only source eventually leech minerals and vitamins from your body detrimentally?
Only if you are a breatharian.
Yeah, and water from dehumidifiers is also chuck full of bacteria, dead bugs and just plain dirt.
You are wise.
Water is a very strong solvent. Consumed distilled water would indeed leech certain nutrients from one’s body.
And then there is the issues of what such water would leech out of the apparatus and plumbing. _“I love the taste of PVC in the morning.”_
Just re-add the minerals
@@christopherbiomass7155 I'm pretty sure drinking only distilled water as your water source does leech vitamins and minerals from your body not that they can't be replaced but it does happen
As a great man once said "When you want to insert a nail into a piece of wood, don't do anything fancy or glamorous. Just take the damn hammer and hit the son of a bitch until it's in."
Getting the nail in in this case is producing drinkable water, where a simple solution of the hammer could be a desalination plant and then pipeline to transport it further inland. Granted, it's not overly simple and requires investment of time and money, but it uses tried and true technology that works perfectly fine now.
The solutions being created as this one here, some high-tech-super-hyper-free-energy-macguffin just ends up being in the works for so long the nail just disintegrates into nothingness. Just like the dreams of the magical macguffins.
Biggest desalination plant in the world is in Australia...check out how well that's working out.
Alternatively, they could just try to improve the whole "digging a well" thing to make it more affordable/efficient. *That* would do so much more for struggling villages in the middle of nowhere than a hypothetical device that doesn't pass the "back of the envelope" test.
I would like to see research done into the distribution of wellsprings in arid regions. I can't imagine they're that dispersed, and simple infrastructure would greatly reduce the need to travel for water.
Although I have read that often infrastructure is ripped apart to be sold as scrap...
Or in the example in the video of walking hours to get water, MOVE TO WHERE THE WATER IS.
@@gblargg or come up with a better way to take water where you need it, like a jugs on a cart or something...
Dude 1.5 litres per day is sufficient for an average human, 2 litres per day is recommended. 5 litres is crazy. It doesn’t really change the calculation, but it is odd to quote such a huge number.
The whole "water from air" horseshit is the grift that keeps on giving.
I am a chemist in Arizona, had an interview with this company during COVID. They asked me what I know about Source. When I mentioned that I know they used to be zero mass, they were surprised. Then they mentioned they changed the project to include confidential hydroscopic media, and when I said "oh, like lithium chloride?" the expression on their face was priceless. I think it was difficult to hide my skepticism during the interview because I didn't receive an offer lol.
Rofl-mah-popz I almost wish I'd be surprised by that.. but then I work in real labs, so.. yea, hope you found better uses for your time :)
Be happy that you didn't get the job. The cognitive dissonance would have been deafening.
Man, you really dodged a bullet.
Confidential hygroscopic media being LiCl? The most no brainer material? Lmao
1:29 "There's nothing on Earth like Source." You mean other than literally every dehumidifier company out there _and_ other than the handful of failed renewable energy water-from-air products that also claimed to be able to do the exact same thing you pitched? Yeah, I guess there's really nothing out there like Source.
If there was that much water in the air, how come you can't just breathe and be hydrated?
I don't wanna drown in wet air.
@@spacejihadist4246 lmfao that sounds nasty.
How effective is it if there isn't any humidity in the air? Like ... in places that suffer from water scarcity.
No humidity in the air then the panel will not produce much if any water. Can't squeeze blood from a stone and can't squeeze water from dry air.
LMAO!! I f'ing love thunderf00t videos!!
btw, who's "Mark Zookenburg"? ( 1:50 )
I've got it ! A water purifier that collects all the drips from your air conditioner!
1 year later: The MIT prize for most useful invention to humanity goes to........
No i will not make it Solar until i need a new reward for another useless already invented invention.
I want to invent a dehumidifier someday, seems profitable somehow
I love how the money spent on these "something for nothing" fantasy products instead of ways to improve well-digging to make it more affordable and more practical, so that a *real* charity could add more wells to impoverished places that desperately need them.
Would that make them more rich?
@InfernosReaper Wells aren't much use if there isn't drinkable water or even cropping suitable water down there.
Would wells help? Is the shortage temporary or ongoing? Weather or human action?
Perhaps a nearby mine has tapped all the ground water to mine minerals for smartphones?
Are water wells and improved agriculture enough?
Ethiopia 1970s, famine, Population 30 million, much aid sent.
1980s, famine, Population 40 million, much aid sent.
2010s Famine and poverty continues, Population 110 million.
Aid continues. 5th highest recipient of international aid. 45 years ~$100 billion in aid($2019).
People prefer to think they do something rather than doing it. Remember religion!? ☝️🤨
@@johncarlaw8633 And do those things invalidate the benefits of better(or any) wells for those who live in places where digging a well is possible but not feasible with their resources?
At least with the wells thing, *some* impoverished people actually benefit instead of *none* of them getting any benefit
@@johncarlaw8633 You assume that the "aid" is meant to help.. It is not.. every single penny comes along with rules how or for what to spend or not to spend it.. And these make sure the recipients stay dependent and will never achieve self sufficiency..
where else would we dump all the cheap crap nobody wants here, preventing the establishment of a competitive domestic production/market providing stable incomes for the population a.k.a. a healthy economy. (By the way, the climate theology fits perfectly into this scheme as it denies THE most fundamental necessity for development - a stable energy supply..)
One day you'll have more episodes debunking fancy humidifiers than anything else. Might as well create a playlist or new channel just to prove your point of how many times you debunked this stuff
Or you could just buy solar panels and a dehumidifier. Cheaper and about as ineffective. Maybe connect it to a big diesel generator for more power. There’s no limit to how much water can cost!
It is really concerning how media think of the viewers intellect
I find it concerning how often they are right.
Thunfderf00t, where pipe dreams are hilariously shattered 😂 and scammers are exposed 👍🏻
The main flaw of the math here is that Source is drinking water only, not ALL of your water. So that cuts the cost down to something totally reasonable for a normal suburban home, especially when you compare the quality of the water to bottled water which costs 2-10x as much. Agree it won't solve all the worlds water problems, but it definitely can help in certain applications. Next time just ask for help w/ the math maybe?