Hydropanels!

[Chotu]

These are actually available now. $2000. They make water out of air.


https://www.thecooldown.com/green-te...nking-potable/

[Muaddib1116]

Sort of neat, I guess. But they don't seem too viable for a boat. They look pretty large and their output is probably lower than whatever the equivalent surface area of solar would create via a watermaker.

[SailingHarmonie]

This is nothing but greenwash click bait. Wildly less efficient per square foot than RO. And insanely expensive.

You have to love it when they won't tell you how much it actually costs without you doing a bunch of math:

A standard SOURCE array is 2 Hydropanels, at an estimated project cost between $5,500 and $6,500* (including shipping, installation, and tax).
Standard installation varies by your home requirements and your location. With a 15-year life, your SOURCE will provide you with a case of delicious water per day, or 12 standard bottles, for less than $0.15 per bottle

Why do it this way? Because math is hard, and most people will just think, "Wow! Cool!" instead of actually understanding it.When ever you see numerical handwaving like this you should IMMEDIATELY suspect you are being scammed.

Let's call the installed cost $6000 for two panels. They make a "case" of water per day. Excuse me???? Why not tell me in GALLONS or LITERS???? A case??? How much water is in a "case", exactly? Why obfuscate this number???? Because they don't want you to know that you are paying $6000 for a system that makes 6 lites of water a DAY, and only on sunny days! From 64 square feet of panels! Or maybe it's 12 liters??? How big is a "standard" water bottle???

My RO system makes 50 liters of water from 600 Watt-hours of power. My two solar panels (which are WAY smaller than 64 sq feet) make 3000 W-hrs per solar day. That system can make 250 liters per day, instead of 6 for about the same amount of money, and my system has about 1/3 the panel area.

Even for land based systems, this is dumb. Take that same 64 sq ft and use it to catch rain, and you catch 60 liters of water for every cm of rain. In arid Phoenix the average rainfall is 31.2 cm, so you can collect an average of 5 liters of water every day for a LOT damn sight less than $6000!!!!

Color me extremely unimpressed... But hey, if you believe, they are looking for investors!

[Ryban]

I don't think it makes sense on a boat. It probably is green-washing.

Those things said, these are pulling water out of the air. If you live in a desert and have no other source of drinking water, it might meet some niche applications.

But if you live by the ocean, it's probably more efficient to use solar power to run an RO system.

[rslifkin]

It's a cool concept, but as already mentioned, both between cost and space required, these would only be practical if no better source of water (in adequate quantity) is available.