This may be true, but she certainly wasn’t referring to that type of place. I saw the property, and it was indeed just a basement.
No, but basements on the beach are. I’m pretty sure that at high tide, the water level would be higher than his floor level.
Who’s? I must be missing the part where we started talking about beach houses.
I assumed that your prior post (#18) was a response to my post (#17), where I said “I have an uncle who has a beachfront house in LA, and yet actually has a basement.”
Oh sorry, I skimmed everything again and still missed the beach part. That should have been in reply to Joey P’s last post.
I wonder why A/C units’ condensation outflows aren’t routinely set up to capture water - even if not for potable water, that could certainly be used for gardening and other such uses.
Toilets certainly could be flushed with such water though I guess if mold / fungus is a concern, you wouldn’t necessarily want that stuff getting aerosolized due to the mechanics of the flush. Plus you’d need to bring it to the bathroom in a bucket or something unless you set up a completely separate plumbing system - you don’t want the sink / shower pulling water from the same pipes as the A/C outflow.
As I recall it, Legionnaire’s Disease was spread by aerosols from industrial A/C units. At the hospital where I worked, they had to do a lot of work making sure that there were no ‘dead’ pipes with still water in them as that was a breeding ground for it.
What seems to be missing from this conversation is the fact that dehumidifiers are expensive to run.
A dehumidifier is basically a small air conditioner that is built is such a way that it’s cool air and hot air end up in the same space. So that gallon of drinking water that you hope get from it is going to be as expensive as the cost to cool a room or two of your house.
Use the dehumidifier inside and it will put an extra heat burden on your existing AC as well as fight it for condensation.
Put it outside and you are essentially paying to run an AC unit outside without getting any of the cooling benefits from it.
You could, but as you note you’d have to run plumbing from the air conditioner. It might make more sense in a commercial building with a large AC system. But remember that city water costs about a penny a gallon, so anything like this or a greywater system for irrigation is hard to justify economically.
It’s so little water, what, a few gallons over of a day if it’s humid. It’s not safe water and people will drink it. Plus, what happens when it overflows and wrecks the floor? And hauling buckets, no one wants to do that. When I set up a 40G fish tank I changed the water with buckets exactly one time before I went out and got a hose that I could connect to my faucet.
Now, they do make condensation pumps that lift the water. Meant specifically for moving water from an AC to the drain. There’s no reason you couldn’t have one of those send the water up and out to a rain barrel. But, IMO, it’d be so expensive and so much work and maintenance, it wouldn’t be worth it.
Let’s say you got 180 gallons over the course of the summer, that would save you, what, like $5? And for what, so you could put some moldy water in your garden or get a free flush each day? It would take years to pay for itself.
Honestly, condensation water is better off just going down the drain. Hauling dirty water up from your basement is asking for problems.
The only way I can see it as feasible is if your AC is in your attic and the condensation line runs outside your house. Then I could see directing it into a rain barrel since it’s just a matter of moving the hose and doesn’t require any extra work.
California humidity is not nearly as low as you think, especially along the coast, it depends on location.
Peruvian billboard produces water. Requires electricity but very low capital costs (< $6000 IIRC.) (Peru is a very dry country but has high humidity along the coast.) 96 liters a day.
French water producing windmill. High capital costs $660,000+, 1000 liters a day.
In both cases it’s drinkable water.
In both cases that water is drinkable because it’s filtered and/or purified before it’s handed out to the general population.
I’d also be willing to bet there’s some maintenance done (not just on the filters) on the condensation coils to keep them somewhat clean and take some of the load off the filters. Keeping airborne dust off of them (part of maintaining coils anyways) and spraying them down with bleach or some other sanitizing solution probably (if I had to guess) doubles the life of the filters.
I saw how a town in Peru put up a water collector that does NOT require electrictity. They are up on a hill and often get a fog. The collector harvests drops of water out of the fog. Fog is just cloud, but the idea is that not many clouds make rain…
yes the fog wets surfaces, but the collector just collects more and puts in the pipe… to the storage tank.
I recently had some work done on my AC and the guy said my unit could produce almost 50 gallons of condensate per day.
Here’s a calculator that you can play around with to estimate the amount of condensate produced for different conditions.
http://www.buildinggreen.com/calc/calc_condensate.cfm
I put in outdoor=100F/70%RH, indoor=78F/40%RH, with a 5 ton unit and 20% outdoor air which yields an estimate of about 40 gallons per day. Estimates for arid conditions are of course much lower.
Anyhow, for a few seasons my AC interior drain was clogged so the condensate was overflowing into the drip pan and then out a pipe from the roof soffit. (Back then I didn’t know any better and thought that was normal operation.) The amount of water coming out the drain pipe was a pretty steady trickle so the 50 gallon figure the AC guy mentioned and the 40 gallon estimate from the calculator seem to be in the ball park for my summer conditions.
Average water usage for a family is around 400 gallons, but 30% of that is outdoor use. Let’s say you can cut it down to 200 gallons. So you’d need to produce about 22,000 liters of water per month.
These home dehumidifiers are rated for 1.85 liters per kwh. At this efficiency, you need 12,000 kWh of electricity per month. That’d cost you about $1500 a month.
Supplying potable water to troops in any environment is a challenge so the military has a vested interest in figuring out this type of technology. Look to them for some interesting developments.
An Israeli company claims they can create water from air for as little as $0.08 per gallon. They use a super high efficiency air conditioner mounted on the back of a truck.
I remember reading several years ago that the US Army was looking at recovering water from exhaust gas. Ahh, here we go:
According to this research, one gallon of burnt diesel fuel should yield about one gallon of recovered water. Looks like the proof of concept system they developed recovered about 1/2 gallon of water per gallon of diesel burned.
It hasn’t been fielded yet, I think the size of the system was a problem since most military vehicles don’t have a lot of spare room in them, but research is ongoing.
Eight cents a gallon is a lot of money. Any idea what it currently costs the US military to supply water to the troops in the Middle East?
I think $0.08/gallon for potable water at remote sites with no other way but to truck or fly safe drinking water in is pretty cheap.
No idea what the military pays for water. Sam’s Club offers a pallet of Nestle Water (72 cases, 24 bottles, 16.9 fl oz each) for $498 with US shipping included. If I am doing the math right, that is about $2.18/gallon. You could maybe buy that water wholesale for about $1.00 per gallon?
Friend of mine refills her 5 gallon container at $0.15 per gallon from the store machine.
But it isn’t necessarily about the cost as much as the availability and the logistics of moving the water from the supply point to the unit itself. Water is heavy, weighing in at just over 8lbs per gallon and it takes about 7 gallons of water per soldier daily to support just the troops in the field. So to support 150 troops (a typical company of infantry) takes about 1000gal/8400lbs of water per day. Your supply line has to be secure enough to essentially deliver a truckload of water a day to every deployed unit.
Pulling water out of the atmosphere means more room on the trucks, trailers or aircraft for things that you can’t do that with, especially beans and bullets.
Using that Israeli air conditioning system for generating water trades the requirement to ship water to the troops for a requirement to ship larger amounts of fuel (because they’ll need heftier generators to keep the AC running). I’m assuming that these remote outposts aren’t on the electrical grid, but I could be wrong.
Don’t know how the math all works out. The company making them, Water-Gen claims its base unit produces 450 liters/day (120 gallons/day) at 77F and 55%RH and requires 310Wh/liter.
Wiki says there are 37.95kWH/gal of diesel.
If that means 37,950Wh in a gallon of diesel than you would get 32gallons of water per gallon of diesel.
Probably significantly less, I have no idea how efficient a generator is nor does Water-Gen give examples of water recovery in arid or desert conditions.