The alarm bells are ringing loudly in California about the diminishing supply of potable water in its reservoirs, underground aquifers and of course the miniscule snowpack in its mountains. Many communities are totally out of water and are depending on water trucks to deliver what they need on a daily basis. The water truck companies are doing a booming business loading up water from sources still within the state that haven’t been tapped dry for about five dollars (USD) per truckload and selling it for five hundred dollars. This makes no sense to me and it can’t last long. But, folks there are desperate, and it’s only going to get worse over time.
While desalinization plants will take care of people living on the margins of the sea, it will do little for inlanders until pipes are laid and other required infrastructure is put in place at enormous cost. Because the California breadbasket feeds much of America, I’m pretty sure that everyone in the country will have to share the cost burden in the form of new taxes. This is all well and good for California, but what about the rest of the arid southwestern USA? And, what about the rest of the world who are about to be in the same situation, as their snowpack from remote mountain sources and related rivers dry up?
As an old desert rat, I learned to carry a sheet of transparent plastic in my backpack to create an emergency solar still for harvesting water vapor from the air when my canteen was empty with no prospects for a quick refill. This method is tedious, and sometimes frustrating, particularly when the daytime temperature requires that you transpire at least a gallon of water per day. With this in mind, I did a quick search today to see if the air-to-water technology had been commercialized and improved upon. Indeed it has. A variety of companies are now making products that do this as long as you have the money to buy them (they are very expensive), and the electricity to run them.
I did, however, find a website that has the instructions for building an inexpensive, do-it-yourself device that is good for supplying any homestead that has access to electricity such as solar panels or wind turbines. Here is the URL for the detailed plans:
http://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-Atmospheric-Water-Generator/
Bottoms up!
