Sigh, this is just a dehumidifier, not a solution to the water crisis, look up Fontus or Waterseer, or just google “water from air scam”.
The technology can’t work where it is needed, and isn’t needed where it can work.
It needs humidity, but if you are in a humid area then you will have access to water that you can filter/treat into drinking water for far less cost than this stupid idea, and in dry areas there isn’t any significant water in the air to extract, making it far more efficient to truck water in.
That’s a logical assumption. It says here that “The SOURCE Hydropanels are already being used by schools in Mexico, Syrian refugee communities in Lebanon and Jordan, and fire stations in Puerto Rico that have been hit by hurricanes” which, if true, shows possibility for wider application where needed.
One area where I think school fails us is that they tell us that fog and clouds are made of water vapor. They are actually made of aerosolized water. It seems like a pedantic difference, but it’s important in this case because fog has actually already condensed, it just needs to be collected.
To collect water in a non-foggy place, you need to drive a collecting surface below the dew point. To collect fog, you just need any surface for it to coalesce on, like a fog net (or even better, a fog harp). Adding power to a fog harvesting system would likely increase performance, but probably not as much as spending that same amount of space/money on more fog nets.
The ammount of energy to convert water vapor into liquid is very high, there have to be really hard getting fresh water by any other means for this system to be worth it in the long run.
If it is coastal, then it should have access to sea water, a reverse osmosis desalination plant will probably be more efficient and reliable in the long run.
The issue is that the energy required per litre of water is poor, even with high humidity. Other options, like long pipelines from other areas or desalination, start looking very appealing.
Yeah, this isn’t even an area where it’s a matter of technology getting better, or something like that. With high school level physics, you can calculate the amount of energy something like this would consume in perfect conditions and a perfectly functioning system.
It’s all just the economics of energy and how water should be used to determine when it makes sense to use a system like this. If you have an off-grid house that’s generating more energy than can be stored or otherwise used, sure, fire up the dehumidifier.
Hi! I am not part of the project itself but part of a publicly funded project aiming at making its production easier. Had lot’s of reads and discussions with protagonists of the vhelio.
No one says the vhélio will by itself solve the transportation needs. It is seen as a puzzle piece to fit in a precise niche (urban and suburban trips in flat areas). The motor is too weak for slopes and we really want to make the laws around the power limitations evolve. Anyway, you can have a bigger motor but then the vehicle enters a different category: it is not an electric-assisted bike but closer to am electric scooter.
The part that I find great in the vhelio is that it is open and friendly to modifications. We may be able to circumvent power limitation by putting two motors, someone I know would like to make a version where the pedals only ever charge the batteries and the vehicle is always motor-driven, so that you can pedal at a constant rhythm, much healthier.
The design will have to evolve, several parts are unsafe (notably it has a lot of hard corners and if you hit into a wall at high speed the driver breaks both legs). Another friend thinks it has far too many screws and could be simplified, the vhelio team is working on a soldered frame.
I think it is better to see it as a platform than a single product.
Very frustrating! And we know that the path to change that is ~10 years. In the meantime, we will have to find a way to homologate them as registered vehicles, a process that’s not exactly designed for small projects like that but thankfully we have a governmental agency on our side to open some doors. Right now we are mostly using a loophole (and a bit of a gray area) of “self build vehicles” that can be insured but not bought or sold. That’s a reason why these are only sold in kit.
As an early iteration it’s great, but without wanting to sound critical - it really does demonstrate a lot of problems.
To me, this format is too specialised to see much use in Australia for example. I can’t think of many suburbs that would be flat enough for one person to drag around 3 bodies plus the machine even with a bigger motor. I cycle regularly, but it wouldn’t take much of an incline with a headwind to make hauling 3 bodies plus machine a real challenge.
Don’t haul 3. See it as an electrical tricycle (=great because you wont fall even at low speed) that can occasionally carry some things, and that recharges while parked. Honestly with a 1000W motor, I think it would be a very good product.
Yeah, I think it’s really the EU e-bike regulations that are the limiting factor. In Canada, we can have 500W, and the US allows up to 750W or 1000W iirc. Much more feasible than the paltry 250W allowed by EU.
What is the magical method we are pimping this week and what is the fatal flaw which will be revealed that makes it entirely impractical for commercial or industrial scale uses? I ask because we seem to (re-)invent various version of the solar still (oh, look - that's what they're doing!) every year or two and it's revolutionary every time because the energy is free and all that's required is a way to scale it up, prevent the scaled up version from destroying the local ecosystem through hypersalination around the plant when operated at the level needed for efficient collection and distribution to a sizable population, and figure out how to move the billions of tons of water required in a typical year for a medium sized city/population center from the desalination location to a distribution system.
Also, sorry for being shitty. I'm in an especially intolerant mood today.
It's a solar still that can operate continuously without maintenance as it doesn't get clogged with salt. That's a pretty nifty and practical achievement.
They're also proposing it be used at household scale, because the system is so small, rather than scaled up to factory scale.
“The kids were each given small rations of food and water, and they were allowed—indeed encouraged— to fight over them. (…) Near the end of the first week the boys were divided into two groups and told to attack each other. (…) Every few years, one of the kids would die.”
The heck is this cliche straight out of anime and games. Even those have the sensibility to not portray something like this as a positive.
We have a large window in our living room the cats love but got way too hot. Planted grape vines to cut down on the light back there so we can keep the curtains open but still let the cats see birds.
On the actual "tech" side we've been going the opposite of new things to reduce usage. Wax paper wraps, older wooden everything where possible (cutting boards, furniture, wicker laundry baskets) most of which we got used from my wife's family, those all will get recycled somehow when their time comes.
I'm hoping when our water heater finally goes we can get one of the new heat pump models. Reduce some AC needs and not need a humidifier in the basement (which I try to run as little as possible already).
Ah yeah, also keeping most things in the “format” of wood here haha, just feels like much better quality most of the time and lasts longer, thinking specifically about kitchen utensils.
They do not need battery in it. This is just a gimmick to make you need to pay for battery service or replacement. I would never buy an appliance like this that’s dependant on a battery. It’s frankly disgusting and terrible as shit for the environment.
Not sure what an induction range is. But we have two types of cooking solutions: The combined oven and cooktop. Here you have knobs. And then you have integrated stovetops and standalone ovens. You get combinations og classic metal coils that stick out or ceramic tops with coils or induction in the combined ones. Are these ranges? The integrated ones are usually induction, but I think you can get the other ceramic ones as well.
But with regards to batteries what I was trying to say was that there are no reasons for them in Norwegian kitchens. We are used to having huge breakers for the stovetops alone. Our stovetop has 240v 25A and the oven has 240v 15A.
240V at 15A power draw gives 6000 watts power available. Because this thing has an internal battery it can supply 10 kW of power at peak. That’s a fairly substantial increase.
Do you need that kind of power for your stove? Well, I would say usually no, unless you are serious about your wok. Stir frying in a wok is just about the only type of cooking where most home stove tops are clearly inadequate (restaurant grade setups go up to 150000 BTU). If you don’t have enough heat output you are basically just sauteing the food, not stir frying.
Well I guess that extra peak is cool if you are into stir frys then. But I’ve never thought our cooking top wasn’t powerful enough. I guess sometimes when I’ve cooked something sous vide and needed a quick sear at as hot as possible, but then I’ve just used our barbequeue.
Also the battery makes it so deep. I would have to sacrifice a whole drawer for it. And I don’t have enough storage space as it is.
You trust those private systems every time you visit the hospital. It’s not ideal but I think a lot of people trust doctors and nurses more readily than they would trust Boeing not to sweep fatal flaws under the rug and cheap out on training pilots about those flaws. If that sounds strangely specific, well yes, it’s specific indeed. (check out the Boeing 737 Max fiasco if you’re not familiar)
Hibernation reduces probability of medical emergency
Also consider that you’re much less likely to have a medical emergency in hibernation. What happens now if you have a medical emergency on a 6 hour flight? You’re fucked if you need something other than CPR or basic medicine. In hibernation problems are much less likely to manifest than when your metabolic rate is normal (not counting what the stresses of air travel do to metabolic rate).
Hibernation increases survival rate if there is an issue
One of the main applications for human hibernation is actually medical emergencies. People being transported in ambulances are sometimes seconds away from death. So medics want to be able to put you on ice immediately & induce hibernation so that every second stretches to tens of seconds so they have time to get you to the hospital.
Thus your mortality rate drops if you’re hibernating on ground/sea transport as opposed to flying without hibernation.
UPDATE
Great timing! Shortly after saying you trust #Boeing with your safety more than medics, there is yet another safety scandal with the #737max.
Dont know where you live, but in GER most Hospitals are state owned and controlled. I wouldnt do something like full narcose in a private hospital lol.
If you think the infra cost is high for putting a doctor or nurse onboard a vessel, just wait until you see the price tag for tunneling under the Atlantic or Pacific ocean.
BTW, I don’t think anyone here proposed hibernation on an airplane. The hibernation would of course be done on the slow means of transport (train, cargo ship, airship) to get people off airplanes. IOW, it’s a way to get what you’re asking for: a culture that supports ground transport.
Obstacles to getting a train culture todayThe main problem with asking for a culture of train travel across very long distances /today/ is that it’s a very expensive culture (both in time and money). The trains are also a disaster in Europe administratively (different prices¹ for the same train purchased from different vendors, train tickets in Germany unbuyable unless you run their proprietary smart phone app, exclusive discounts only for app users, international rail ticketing site pushes CAPTCHAs [Belgium], GDPR-violating cookies [Germany], etc). In Belgium even a short 1½—3 hour trip is less than half the price by bus than by slow train, and the bus is about the same speed as the slow train. I’ve quit trains for these reasons. Getting a train culture in the US is also a tall ask considering how poorly networked it is. Many major cities have no train station for passenger trains. Amtrack is the only game in town and it’s slow diesel engines. When people take an Amtrack, it’s really just for the 1-off novelty of experiencing a train. 1. the EU tried to implement a policy to get consistent train pricing several years ago and that still has not happened.
Radiant heat using pumped hot fluid (I think usually a water antifreeze mix in a closed system) in tubes attached to the underside of the floor, seems like the closest, safer mix. Could be reasonably solarpunk if the source of heat is good
Yeah, it might be better to have it be a boiler system instead, with water piped around the house. Or since the house will have the heating in mind during construction, then make the heat source centralized with proper insulating house walls.
Is there a compelling and obvious reason we can't dilute brine back into the water we let outflow from our waste systems into the oceans rather than dumping it all at once? or maybe dribble flow at river deltas or so?
yes they do that in some facilities, it’s called sewer discharge and can be quiet effective in a well monitored and designed system, surface water discharge uses a similar method of dribbling brine into the water as part of a system that uses ocean currents and tides to disperse the brine back into the ocean.
While brine return is a complicated and important step it’s really not some major ecosystem destroying problem in any of the modern installs - it’s just important to model and monitor the system, the same way sewage systems find a location where currents carry stuff away and allow it to disperse brine return systems do, with brine it’s just stuff that belongs in the ocean anyway so it all mixes back in fairly quickly.
A lot of people seem to like to learn the difficulties involved in a new tech and then just use negative thinking to exaggerate it into a reason the tech will never be useful even after decades of improvement and investment. There are huge projects around the world which have done really positive things for local ecosystems, they’re even refilling the sea of galilee after decades of over extraction and allowing groundwater levels to restore.
You could but estuaries are incredibly important ecosystems and increased salinity might be harmful to them. Arguably the best place is oceanic areas with strong currents to promote brine mixing with normal seawater. The worst impacts are where the brine sinks and does not mix, creating a dead zone on the sea floor.
It might be. But I don’t consider this to be a real system until it’s been scaled up and has the cost established. Biofouling isn’t likely to become much of an issue until the system is in use for a time. But since it has no filters it might not need it, I’m not sure.
I mean, if there is a reason I really want to know it. That we aren't doing so suggests there's some reason, although there's a decent chance that answer is, "That would cost anything more than dumping it out the nearest window."
I mean, yeah. Not only do they have all the people under them doing all the actual work, but the fewer authorities you have over you and the fewer peers you have, the less you are accountable. CEOs have no peers, and the only authorities over them are the board of directors and the capitalists (major shareholders). And a CEO who is also one of the capitalists circumvents the board, has no authorities above them, and has only the other capitalists (if there are any) as peers. Its a great position to be in…if only the people doing the actual work could share that position (socialism) rather than being victims of it (capitalism).
Elon can literally do nothing. He should do nothing. Everything he does do simply fucks people over. And that’s true in general of CEOs and capitalists. Their only real job is to discipline the labor they are exploiting under them, in order to maximize that exploitation. Everything else can (and generally does) take care of itself.
Musk’s management philosophy — his “production algorithm”: (1) Question every requirement, (2) Delete any part or process you can, (3) Simplify and optimize, (4) Accelerate cycle time, (5) Automate.
complete techbro bullshit
steve jobs’ biography says this:
Although Jobs cooperated with the book, he asked for no control over its content other than the book’s cover, and waived the right to read it before it was published.
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