Item — HN Reader

Here is the website for one of the winners: http://www.skysource.org/

From what I can glean online, the 150 gal/day unit costs $18k usd + $150-$300 in electricity a month if run 24/7 at $0.10Kwh. Ignoring electrical costs, it would take 1581 days to reach $0.02/liter. In that time you would use up $7.5-15k in electricity.

The best estimate I could find is that the average US household uses 240 gal a day.

A friend of mine had to drill a 980 ft well through bedrock. A well this deep requires a much stronger pump and more electricity. They are on their 2nd pump. I should ask them what that all cost.

4 comments

I think the competition guidelines are around manufacturing cost, not retail cost:

> The cost per liter of water extraction will also be calculated based on a pro forma Bill of Materials and estimated NRE and tooling costs. A more detailed description of this calculation is provided in the Rules and Regulations. The Affordability Index must be less than $0.02 (two cents). No prize will be awarded to a Team that does not meet that criterion.

https://assets-us-01.kc-usercontent.com/5cb25086-82d2-4c89-9...

Are you serious? 240gal/day is 900 liters/day!

We are four people living in a house & garden in france and I used 70m3 (70000 liters) last year. That would be about 190L/d or 50gal/day, 5 times less. Where do you dump so much water in the US?

My math says that's about 2 HCF (hundred cubic feet, which is what our water is billed as) per month? That's considerably lower than the typical water usage in drought-ridden Santa Barbara of 11HCF. It's also double the baseline usage of 4HCF (after 4HCF rates go up).

With 3 adults and 4 children in my house we used 4-6HCF per month with no garden (when we moved in the irrigation system used about 12HCF per month on its own, we landscaped the yard to eliminate the need for outside watering).

I'm going to guess that if you need to spend $18k on equipment to get your water then you probably aren't going to blow through 240 gallons a day.

150 gallons could be quite a lot of fresh water for a small remote village that otherwise lacks a good fresh water source. Useful for drinking and cooking, but not used for bathing or irrigation. I assume the system could be powered by a reasonably sized solar array.

On the other hand, given the cost of this setup it would probably be a lot easier and cheaper to install water filters.

All the pictures show the units operating in lush, green environments, which would indicate high(er) humidity where moisture extraction from the air is trivial. I'd like to see some action shots from the middle of the Atacama or Taklamakan.