Some years ago the “Waterseer” hit the interwebs. It purported to be a design for a mechanism that would suck in air and pipe it to an underground cistern, the cool walls of which would condense the water out and send the now-dry air back up and out. The ideas was that it would be a “free water from the air” device for poor people in the crappier parts of the world. It was based on *terrible* science, to the point where it just wouldn’t work. Thunderf00t did a few videos thoroughly debunking the idea. He also debunked similar things like the “Fontus,” a small dehumidifier that was based on impossibly optimistic efficiencies (well over 100%) to make a device the size of a small drinking bottle with a few square inches of PV cells that would produce a meaningful volume of drinkable water from the air. Since then, Fontus has gone belly-up… but Waterseer continues.
But it doesn’t continue in its original form. As originally proposed, it was a purely mechanical system, using wind power to blow air through the system. Now it requires electricity, and a fair amount of it. It operates more like a dehumidifier now. And as the new Thunderf00t video below shows, it’s actually an off-the-shelf dehumidifier. One you can get from WalMart for $200, but Waterseer put it in a new plastic cylinder, re-branded it, and charges almost $1400 for it. So now, instead of being free water from the air, it now needs to be plugged into an electrical grid, producing water for about 50 times the cost of municipal tap water. The video includes an interview with a satisfied customer who is using the system to water his commercial lettuce garden. According to Thunderf00ts math, the guy will pay $4 just in electricity (never mind amortizing the cost of the machines) for each head of lettuce that he’ll try to sell for about 35 cents.
Like a lot of Thunderf00ts more recent videos, this one is loaded with a hell of a lot of extraneous rehash, redundancy and self-congratulations. So you can safely skip ahead to about the 23 minute mark and get straight to the point.