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Finally, I can achieve my dreams of becoming a moisture farmer.
Hope you enjoy a whiny nephew
I swear to god if that kid brings up the academy one more time, just kill me
But crying about not getting to go to Tashii station is okay?
Shut the FUCK up we have a shed literally full of power converters, your friends are absolute trash anyway and come on what kind of name even is "Biggs Darklighter" it sounds like his parents were from a Flash Gordon ripoff
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Well, unless he sells the patent to Nestle, it's COMMUNISM. Water is private property. /s
It's a dehumidifier. There's nothing to patent that hasn't already been patented.
I used to work for a company making a similar device, the chemistry behind the technology is actually a well researched topic, and there are many kinds of various chemistries that can achieve a similar effect. Silica gel packets are the most common, a cheap solution that extracts moisture from the air, but is non-reusable.
These MOF compounds are useful because they have a fundamentally different method of collecting the water molecules. The framework traps the molecules inside, which can be later released with heat. Thermal solar power is free, but does require careful management of the rest of the device such that the material can get hot enough (usually around 100c), which also providing another surface to condense the vapour. I spent alot of time designing and testing such panels. They do work! I can post pictures of fishtanks of water later.
There truly couldn't be much of a downside to these technologies. The real alternative is desalination, which produces hyper concentrated salt pools, or well water extraction, which is also bad...
The reason these technologies is usually due to the cost effectiveness to produce the material, and to build the enclosure around the material. The panels have to scale very large to get any reasonable about of solar power, plus the condensing and collecting mechanisms also add weight and cost. Water is not an expensive product, so at the end of the day, the economics don't always work out favourably.
Happy to answer any questions about the technology.
Here's a picture of one of our tests generating water from air! We got 21kg from a large-ish panel.
I can't show much else but I can guarantee we did harvest the water from the air.
Well... There would also have to be water to actually collect from the air. Thunderfoot made a really good video about these dehumidifiers when yet another one popped up on Kickstarter claiming to end water shortages.
You're absolutely correct that there has to be water in the air. However part of the trick to these panels is that they're not steady state. They have a day cycle and a night cycle. During the night is where they do most of the work of absorbing the water from the air. Over a number of cycles I have overseen, the humidity in the air rises dramatically during the night. This helps these panels in terms of air extraction, since they work on a humidity basis, rather than a total-air-water-content. Think dilution or osmosis when it comes to the actual absorbtion mechanism.
When you do the math, it also doesn't really seem like there's alot of water in the air. Only something like 10-40 grams of water, especially depending on the outdoor temperature. We ran indoor tests with a panel a few sqm in size, and even in a small indoor warehouse, it was not able to dehumidify the warehouse to any significant levels. Maybe at most 5% humidity delta. However air is not static, and wind is always blowing, even when it seems really weak. There's a huge amount of atmosphere above the ground, and unless the panels can absorb the water from the clouds too, the localized de-humidification that happens isn't going to be significant. It's like trying to suck up all water on a beach. The waves are going to replace it shortly enough.
So the one practical limit of these panels that is most frequently missed is the solar aspect. The MOF materials are like a sponge. You can absorb all the water in the air, but you still need to take the water of the MOF. The limit depends on the sensible and latent heat of the water, while in the sponge. MOF doesn't actually really change the boiling point of water at all, so you're really essentially creating a water distillation tower. In 1sqm of land, the most irradiance you're going to get is about 1kw/sqm. 1kwh can boil about 10 liters of water. Taking that into account, over a 8 hour solar day. That means at most a single square meter of solar panel could generate 80 liters of water per day. It's alot, but considering solar losses, glass loss, and thermal loss, more practical limits would probably be like 40 liters. The MOF material also required sensible heat as well, so already a huge portion of incoming solar energy is gone to heating the environment and raising temperature.
In all, you'd have to cover a huge amount of acres before this would dent the atmosphere in terms of humidity. The 1000 liters a day can really only happen when you have a large solar collection area, plus absorbtion surface area to back it up.
There truly couldn’t be much of a downside to these technologies.
What you mean to say is "We don't know what the downside will be untill these technologies are implemented and used for a long time and then studied." Otherwise you sound like the well-intentioned-but-unhinged chemist that accidentally starts the zombie apocalypse at the beginning of the movie.
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At mass scale, could taking enough moisture out of the air affect local weather patterns?
Technically yes! To put it in perspective, there's about 2.5kg of water in the atmosphere per m^2 of earth surface area. If you put enough panels across the earth, you could probably do a decent job at taking some of the water out of the air.
We have to look at another factor affecting the water in the air. As we take water out of the air, it's not really a finite resource. Most water in the air generally comes from the sun evaporating the oceans. If we take the water out of the air, the sun will put the water back. There's always a balance of humidity and quantity evaporated. When the humidity is lower, the sun would have an easier time evaporating more water due to the osmosis of the water from the source (ocean) going into the air. Osmosis is a kind of log graph, so even if the humidity is lower, the exponential tail means the solar evaporation and humidity pretty much balances out at the end of the day.
It's similar thing to taking water from a river. If we take all the water from a river, can we dry up downstream? Yes! But considering the height of the atmosphere, it's like standing at the edge of the river trying with a bucket and trying to scoop everything up. Unless these water-from-air harvesters can reach all the way to the clouds, we probably won't dry anything up.
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Lisan al-Gaib!
We need to harness Desert Power!
This has been debunked before. To get 1000liter of water out of the air, the air needs to hold that much water.
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Dewcatchers, dewcatchers everywhere...
Atoco harnesses the power of AI to bridge the gap between scientific discovery and real-world implementation, transforming innovative research into scalable solutions. By integrating machine learning and AI with reticular chemistry, we dramatically reduce the time needed to develop, optimize and scale our novel nano-engineered reticular materials for carbon capture and atmospheric water harvesting.
Bruh.
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Yet again, nobody seems to be giving a thought what this means to organisms that are living in the desert. This water is necessary for life and we’re taking it.
As someone who has thought about it, could you provide the data that you used to come to the conclusion that the amount of water being extracted from the air has any appreciable effect on local life?
From my thinking...
Death Valley covers 7800km^2.. Atmospheric moisture is typically contained in the first 10km of air. So there is somewhere around 2.5 quadrillion cubic feet of air containing 114 billion gallons of water.
The average Atmospheric Water Vapour Residence Time is around 8 days The median is 5 days and Death Valley's topography is a valley which would trap more moisture, but we'll use the average instead.
This represents a moisture turnover rate of about 625,000 Liters/second (or 1.45x10^10 gallons/day).
So, one of these devices would consume .000185% of the moisture that enters Death Valley every day.
https://scitechdaily.com/america-is-sinking-28-major-cities-are-slowly-going-under/
Given enough people and time, we have a track record of messing stuff up.
ground water is a completely different beast. This device harvests moisture from the air.
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If you plan on drinking the water, or cooking with the water, it's going right back into the air after you pee or sweat and the water evaporates. Literally no damage done.
You cannot make the water actually disappear unless you use it in some kind of chemical reaction, and even then it may end up returning to water eventually.
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You can't really consume water especially if you take it out of the air. Worst case you temporarily barrow it till it evaporates again it's not like the water is suddenly gonna be pumped out to the ocean or something.
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Oh no, the same scam again, when will people realize that putting dehumidifiers in the desert, where there is little to none humidity in the air does not produce significant quantities of water.
You can claim that your solution produces thousands of liters of water, but in practice its obvious that you cannot extract more water than what's already im the air, once you extract it, there is nothing left, it may work at first, but is not going to work continuously forever.
This is another example of a promised technology scam, pay me for the development and once it doesn't work, disappear with the money. People keep falling for it for some reason.
That water was in its way to somewhere, though. What is that other area gonna look like now that this device intercepts the water?
Sounds like that other area needs to pull up on those bootstraps and make a water machine for its needs then.
This comment is brought to you by the sigma water machine, buy yours today and lock your grindset on hydration!
(Hopefully obvious but /s)
same could be said about every shower you take and every toilet you flush
🎶And every bond you break, every step you take
I'll be watching you!!🎵
Eventually all that dry air will end up above the ocean and absorb more water to balance the system. I don't think it's really an issue, we weren't getting rain clouds from the Sahara anyway.
Dooooom
Someone is going to drink it then sweat it back into the air. I doubt its going to get bottled and shipped somewhere else.
This could be interesting for a mars settlement.
One problem maybe kinda hypothetically down. Ten thousand more to go.
If people keep reinventing the fucking dehumidifier I'm going to start beating these dipshits bloody. Or maybe I should just collect the old beater ones I see at estate and yard sales to make YouTube videos making fun of them. Regardless this is barely worth praise for an amateur engineering project let alone a nobel prize.
More of the same huh? Heres how it goes in 6 steps:
1 Draft marketing plan 2 go public w/some shares for sale 3 Announce prototype and launch marketing strategy (ie plaster Nobel laureates name all over the product and drop adds on social media) 4 drive market value up 5 sell shares and get rich 6 you've sold out and gotten rich, company dissolves because it was all a hype machine. (Not a real solution machine, or it'd have sold those real solution machines instead of purchasing ad space.)
Replace w crypto currency if u wish. Same lies.
How many times do we have to fall for this garbage. Well I guess if your doing it to scam dumb rich people be my guest, but this shit is dumb.
Don't let Sam Altman know about this, his data centers about to have some upgrades /s
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this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2026
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