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Ask HN: How Can I convert free electricity into water
We recently moved into a new home in Southern California that has a large lawn and an over provisioned (I think) solar system. This means our water bills are terrifyingly large and our electricity bills are 0.
It occurred to me that there might be a way to extract water from the air using something like an industrial sized dehumidifier and store it for later use in the garden.
Does anyone know of such a thing or are there other options we should be looking at like grey water collection or even drilling a well?
- yuppie_scum 4y agoRun dehumidifiers and then filter and boil the resulting water
- samstave 4y agoI, too, choose this guys dead technology! - (SERIOSULY this is a good idea if elec is free...)
- callumprentice 4y agoWe don’t need to drink the resulting water - I think we’d just it for watering the garden so we could skip the filter/boil steps.
- toast0 4y agoIf it's just to water the lawn, I don't know that you need to boil it? How well a dehumidifier will work is going to depend on your local humidity of course, which varies a lot in socal. Try to get some shade for the dehumidifier to work in, too. A well might work, depending on where your water table is, but you probably need a drilling permit, and you may need other approvals too, water in California is a complex issue. I'm anti-bitcoin, but bitcoin/etc turns electricity and gpus/asics into money, and money pays for water, so see if that makes more sense than a dehumidifier (although variations in price mean you might want to switch between things depending on price and workfactors, etc)
- callumprentice 4y agoYeah just for the lawn/garden although it might be interesting to extend it to household and even drinking water if I find a good solution. Fascinating, left field idea about generating money to pay for the water too.
- bigiain 4y agoLawns are pretty ecologically unsustainable. I’d be looking for low water use alternatives to lawn, rather than trying to work out ways to temporarily extend the life of your grass. Did you see this? https://news.yahoo.com/grassy-lawns-banned-las-vegas-194950269.html https://news.yahoo.com/grassy-lawns-banned-las-vegas-1949502...
- dfsdfsdf111 4y agosomething like this: https://mykarmastream.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/cactus-garden-2.jpg https://mykarmastream.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/cactus-... ....
- callumprentice 4y agoYep. We’ve turned down the sprinklers so much that the grass is turning brown. We may well end up having to replace it with something more drought tolerant.
- dfsdfsdf111 4y ago
- bombcar 4y agoModern astroturf is surprisingly well done, if you don’t want to do a full desert-style landscaping.
- callumprentice 4y agoYes and actually a little bit of the front yard (no idea why) has the artificial stuff and it looks much better than I imagined. I haven’t looked at costs but I expect it’d be expensive to replace everything. I should at least get a quote - thanks for the reminder.
- MatthiasPortzel 4y agoDehumidifiers work in areas with humidity, normally not California.
- callumprentice 4y agoI agree but it’s been surprisingly humid since we got here.
- CaliforniaKarl 4y agoSoCal has noticeable swings in humidity during the year; if you live in range of the marine layer, also during the day.
- callumprentice 4y agoWe’re about a 15 minute walk from the ocean. Does the marine layer extend that far inland ?
- miles 4y agoAtmospheric water generator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_water_generator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_water_generator This water harvester can turn desert air into drinkable water https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6T3ICXWqjc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6T3ICXWqjc Extracting drinkable water from the air https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoXj-j0VSTA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoXj-j0VSTA Watergen: "Creating Drinking Water from Air" https://us.watergen.com https://us.watergen.com
- callumprentice 4y agoThank you. Great links.
- samstave 4y agoMagnets. Just kidding. - The thing with extracting water, esp when youre in so-cal... is that any evening-dew-harvesting system is going to need to be massive. And likely your terra-forma (topology) is not conducive to passive dew harvestings via nets and such due to moisture-point-heavy airflow not passing through whatever net you have... Use you're free electricity to build and drill a super deep-aquifer level well.... (Source: my dad owned one of the water companies in california... electricity for pumping/drilling/blah blah... is expensive.)
- callumprentice 4y agoGot it. Thank you - drilling a well sounds like a non-starter.
- jschveibinz 4y agoI recently read of a technique that uses electricity to harvest water from the air here on HN. Here is a link to HN search: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=true&query=Water%20harv&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru... And here is a link to a related article: http://www.electrostatics.org/images/ESA_2015_F5_Reznikov.pdf http://www.electrostatics.org/images/ESA_2015_F5_Reznikov.pd... Post if you decide to try an experiment.
- callumprentice 4y agoExcellent. Thank you and I will post back (Show HN?).
- bombcar 4y agoThe main thing “free electricity” would let you do is install a large underground rainwater storage tank that you could pump from. Be sure to anchor the tank even if buried so it doesn’t pop out of the ground when empty.
- callumprentice 4y agoIt almost never rains here sadly.
- DoreenMichele 4y agoLook up Earthships and info about how much water you need. My recollection is you can supply a household's water needs for as little as 10 inches of rain per year and most parts of California get at least that much. San Diego gets that much and Fresno gets about 11. Only some parts of the High Desert get less, as little as 6 inches. But info on Earthships (or perhaps Earth Ships) should be a good place to start educating yourself. Grey water systems are generally part of the set up for such.
- callumprentice 4y agoThank you. Great info. I’ve a feeling not worrying about the electricity side of things and figuring out how to really make use of grey water will be the solution we arrive at but we’ll see.
- beardyw 4y agoNot sure how you cut your lawn, but letting it grow longer is going to help a lot. If its like a putting green it's way too short. I think the longer grass does moisture harvesting itself. Please don't use artificial grass. Creatures live in grass, not plastic. We let clover grow and the bees love it, though be careful not to go barefoot that time of year.
- callumprentice 4y agoWe leave it pretty long because it’s apparently very new and we were told that’s what you have to do. The soil is apparently awful though - more sand than soil - so I believe that’s one reason any water we do put on it runs away quickly. Artificial grass would be a last resort but may be required if the original proposition doesn’t work out. We are lucky enough to have lots of other flowers, shrubs and trees too and there is almost always some bees flying about. It’s magical and our daughter loves it.