(gentle piano music)
(water lapping)
- [Ben] Water. An essential ingredient of life.
The thing that covers
the majority of the surface of our planet,
and also a thing
that is the source of tremendous pain
and suffering throughout the world.
In the US,
more than 30 million Americans live in areas
without access to clean water,
according to the EPA.
That's more people than live in Texas
or about triple
the amount of people in Sweden.
So it's a massive problem,
both at home and abroad.
And that's why back in 2019,
when I discovered one company
based in Arizona
doing something about it,
I got really excited about the potential.
SOURCE is a company
based in the Sonoran desert of Arizona.
And it makes these hydropanels
that extract the hydrogen
and oxygen from the air
using a built-in solar panel.
And then they feed that directly into a tap
to produce what they call
perfect drinking water.
(gentle piano music)
And last year I installed two of these
on my roof in my home in San Diego
to see if they really worked
or the hype was just that hype.
So let's dive in today
and see exactly how these panels
have performed on my roof
and what I've learned
throughout this entire time.
All total the panels on my roof
produced over 2,500 liters of water,
which is about 5,000 bottles of water
or a fresh case of water
every single day.
If we break down the math on that,
we find that
the initial cost of the panels
plus install come to $6,000.
The annual maintenance is $100
and the warranty is for 15 years
giving us a grand total of $7,500
across 15 years.
Across that 15 year time period,
the panels will produce
around 38,000 liters of water
which comes out to about 20 cents per liter
or about half the cost
of bottled water from Costco.
Okay so I'm on this side of the roof right now
and I just wanna walk over
so you can get a sense of what that's like.
You'd probably get
a little bit of wind noise here.
But right now,
essentially you just got, you know,
the road behind me,
nothing else really going on.
And as I get closer to them,
you'll start to pick up the fans
that are whirring right now
because they're running.
Sun is shining, as you can tell,
and you get a sense of kind of how loud
these can be.
Now, if you're in a rural area
or somewhere else
you can put these far away from your house,
totally fine, who cares?
But as you can see,
my neighbor's house is literally
about 10 feet away.
And with both of these things
running at full blast,
it can be pretty annoying.
So imagine you're trying to sit outside
and have a nice relaxing day or whatever,
and you've got these things going, not ideal.
Plus when you actually turn the water on,
the water pumps inside of them and run,
it makes this sound.
(hydropanel engine revving)
And so on our garage here for a while,
I think they might've changed something.
They came out, did some maintenance once,
but the whole garage would shake.
And it would just be this crazy sound.
That actually is not nearly as bad
as just the fans running
if you're just sitting outside.
But it certainly was pretty jarring
the first time we heard it
and it's something that I hope
that they could improve.
(hydropanel fan whirring)
And while I mentioned
that we generated more than we could drink,
that didn't mean
that we didn't ever run out of water.
On several occasions,
we would have to switch back
to our under sink water filter
to let the panels fill back up.
Now they did come out one time in November
to fix a fault in the system
that they noticed
without me doing anything.
And that happened to be
when we were having some issues
with the water.
So that could have been
one of the causes as well.
Another thing that we discovered
was that this water can get pretty warm
in the summer months.
Basically because the water line itself
just runs on our roof line
in this PVC pipe.
The sun just bakes it.
And then when it comes out of tap,
it can get really warm.
It's still drinkable, but not ideal.
You'll definitely wanna put it
in ice cubes or something like that.
The simple solution here
is to have a refrigerator
with a water dispenser
and use that for your tap
instead of something in the sink
like I have,
otherwise you'll have to look at
installing some sort of water chiller
or a machine on your counter
to cool the water,
which adds to the cost
and kind of takes up a lot of room
and defeats the purpose
of having this beautifully integrated system.
It's kind of ugly, this extra thing,
just sitting there.
Another question I saw a lot
in the last video
was about the water quality itself.
So here's a water quality test I did
as an example
to show the different levels.
This test is between
our water from the SOURCE Hydropanels
and our regular tap water.
I wanted to see
exactly how far apart these are.
And if you look here,
we have a close to zero pH level
for the SOURCE water,
zero alkalinity, zero chlorine
and practically zero hardness.
This water really is kind of perfect
in that sense.
Now with the tap water,
we have high levels of pH,
extreme alkalinity
and close to zero chlorine
and then medium to high hardness.
I also tested the nitrate levels,
both of which were zero
for the SOURCE water panel.
The copper tests showed zero
and the lead test
came back negative as well.
So overall, the SOURCE Hydropanels
are far better quality than our tap water,
but that doesn't mean
that you couldn't get
a reverse osmosis system
that wouldn't be good enough
for your family to live off.
So is this right for you?
Well, if you live in a suburban neighborhood
like I do with a decent water supply
and homes relatively packed close together,
I don't think it's a good fit.
At least not until
they can make it far quieter
and possibly with a smaller footprint
on the roof.
But just because
this might not be right for me
given my situation,
doesn't mean that it's not right for anyone.
In fact, the people that can benefit
the most from this tech
are some of the people
that are in the most dire need of all
throughout the week.
(gentle upbeat music)
Right now in 2021,
there are over 2.5 billion people
on this planet
in need of clean drinking water.
And by 2050 MIT estimates
that half of the world's population
will be in what they call
a water stress environment.
That's over 4 billion people,
or more than 10 times
the population of the United States currently.
And every year, over 3.5 million people
die from water related diseases.
As of this recording,
that would mean almost 1 million people
dead in 2021 alone
because of their lack of access
to clean drinking water.
That's not the whole story either.
Bottled water is a massive industry
and solutions like SOURCE
can significantly reduce
the amount of plastic waste
and CO2 needed
to get water in people's hands.
In fact, over 100 million water bottles
are used every single day
and only one in five,
if that, are recycled.
This leads to almost 1500 water bottles
thrown away in a landfill
or in the ocean every single second,
like right now and right now
and right now.
And remember the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Well, it's not getting any smaller.
And at this rate,
we could have more plastic in the ocean
than fish by 2050.
So plastic waste is a serious problem.
And these panels
being completely self-contained,
working anywhere with humidity above 10%,
means that almost anywhere in the world,
you can have clean drinking water
and it is completely renewable.
Plus it's a fraction of the cost
of setting up water treatment plants
and all the infrastructure you would do
in a traditional build-out.
This is a product
that can really help the world.
And that is why I really am excited
about trying to spread this message
and even get more eyeballs
on this product.
Because as you can see
in some of the examples here,
they're really doing great things
in a lot of communities
like this one in Columbia
or like this community here in Australia.
So if you can, share this video,
like this video,
tell someone about this,
because this can be
at least part of the solution
to one of the world's
biggest challenges right now.
And if you missed the original install video,
I'm gonna put it over here for you
if you wanna go back and watch that.
Otherwise make sure
to get on our email list
because YouTube tends to not share
all these videos out there,
you can do so it's totally free
we just send you anytime we do a new video.
Link in the description
or just go to bensullin.com/join.
That's it for this one guys.
Let me know what you think
in the comments down below.
And as always, don't forget,
when you Free the Data,
your mind will follow.
I'll see you back here in the next one.