Hey Gardenerds, it's Christy Wilhelmi and today this video is part of what I'm calling
the Acknowledgment Series.
It's new for 2017 and whenever I hear about something really cool, or outside the box,
of if I meet somebody who is doing some really good work in the world and making the world
a better place, I want to talk to them.
So today I will be talking with David Hertz of SkySource.
He is doing something amazing.
He's making water out of air.
So we're going to take a moment to speak with him and acknowledge him for what he's doing
in the world.
Let's go.
Okay, hi David.
Thank you so much for meeting with me and with my YouTube subscribers.
Let's start with who you are and what you do.
Can you tell our YouTube subscribers a little bit about yourself?
Sure, happy to.
My name is David Hertz, I'm an architect in Venice Beach.
I've been practicing for over 3 decades on sustainable design, moving towards a regenerative,
restorative building.
That's a building that gives back more than it takes.
So what does that look like in terms of the building structure or the materials you're
using?
Well, mainly the energy that being produced, so for instance, solar photo-voltaic can be
employed to give back more energy than the building consumes.
I love that so it's zero...what's that called, net zero?
It's more than zero net energy.
Net zero is great because you're carbon neutral, but net positive is even better.
So the idea..
You're generating electricity?
Yea, the idea, and we have the technology to do it, but the idea is that we've done
enough damage with our buildings, consuming over 40% of all US annual resources.
So we need to do more, so our buildings can actually be more than net zero, they can be
net positive.
We can actually grow more food, for instance, on the buildings or have more oxygen producing
plants because we have more surface area that on, say, vacant land, because we have all
the walls.
So it's possible, but what we haven't been able to do, especially in California, is solve
our water issue.
Right.
Because we don't have water, that's natural to this area, and it has to be imported at
great energy cost over long distances, and we can't...there are limits to conservation
and there are limits to how much we can collect when it occasionally rains.
So is that what brought you to SkySource?
That's exactly what brought me to SkySource.
I heard about this technology of taking water out of the atmosphere, and was shocked that
the ocean evaporates into the troposphere and renews itself on a weekly basis, and has
more potential water than all the rivers on the planet.
But it's hydrologically cleansed.
I love this stuff, this is so cool.
So what did you do?
So I put this machine behind me that makes 150 gallons per day by basically condensing
the ocean air.
And it turns it from water vapor, when we have things like 80% relative humidity, that
means 80% of the water relative to the air, or the temperature is... the water vapor is
actually water that can be harnessed out of the air.
So I'm a couple blocks from the beach.
So the idea was let's use solar energy, which I produce on the roof, to drive this SkyWater
machine that will make 150 gallons of water and let's give it away for free to the community,
especially a community in need that is under-served with the ability to have water because we're
right off the Venice Boardwalk, this alley is heavily trespassed by a lot of homeless
people.
A lot of transients and everybody from skaters and locals that just would like access to
clean water.
We also provide this water not only from this bottle filling station, which is open 24 hours
a day, and just allows water to be pumped into a container which we also provide, but
we provide using the hose and pump, we work with a non-profit called Safe Place for Youth.
We employ two formerly homeless kids aged out of the foster care program.
They come several times a week with a truck with a water tank and they take about 100
gallons of water every trip and they water 82 urban community farm boxes that we've worked
with Community Healing Gardens around Venice in the Oakwood section.
Right, there are these...if you drive through Venice Beach you'll find these raised beds,
they're like 3x6 raised beds.
They're about 18" tall, and they're on the corners of the streets.
And people are gardening in them and you're saying that they're getting watered from this
water here.
Right, so what would happen is often times people would come by and they'd say, "hey!"
roll down their window and say, you know, "don't you realize..these gardens are fantastic,
but we're in a drought."
And people weren't adopting the boxes because they didn't want to pay the water fines.
So now they say, "hey, guess what.
These boxes are watered using solar energy, made from air, made down the street in Venice.
We're formerly homeless kids and we're watering these with water made from air."
That's so fantastic.
So if some people don't have solar panels on their rooves or electricity available to
them, what can they do to hook this up in their homes or garden or something like that?
Sure, the atmospheric water generators can just be plugged in for the small ones, or
wired in to 220 for the larger ones.
So you don't need alternative energy to run them, if you have power.
But it's particularly nice when you can say that I made this water without using any energy
to make it.
You know the energy water nexus, I mean we use 19% of California's energy budget for
the distribution of water.
People don't make the equation that there's a lot of energy embodied in water.
And the same is true, although a lot less, when you're making it with the machine.
But there's nothing like alternative energy to make you're own water.
Right, and so you mentioned these garden boxes that are happening around Venice.
Is there another place that you're utilizing this system?
We're currently working, we have a project on an aquaponics farm in Big Sur where we
make 600 gallons a day.
We have properties in Malibu, people in Malibu, people in Santa Barbara that are, where the
groundwater aquifers are being drawn down and they're actually paying over $5,000 a
month just in water fines solely to keep the oak trees and trees on their property from
dying.
Because it's also about preservation of our aquifers.
Because if our aquifers are drained down, as they are being depleted so rapidly, then
we're losing our landscapes.
You know, we've already lost over 1 million trees in California alone, so preservation
of the aquifers is critical and if in areas especially along the coastal communities where
there is reasonable temperatures and high humidity, and when you actually look world
wide and you look at water scarcity and you look at high humidity and high temperatures
they are actually closely aligned.
So we are working with our non-profit the Go Water initiative to bring water to Haiti
in Africa.
We're working with Community Healing Gardens on a project in Watts, right now we're trying
to raise money for a SkyWater machine for a community garden on the school there.
And how big, how much water does that device produce?
That device produces 300 gallons per day.
That is so amazing.
300 gallons per day from the air.
I think that's pretty cool.
So can you show us the device?
Sure, happy to.
Tell me how this thing works.
So this Skywater is a model 150.
It makes potentially 150 gallons per day and it uses a patented process.
It's an American patent and it's called adiabatic distillation.
It's a fancy word basically for mimicking the hydrological cycle inside a vessel.
So what happens is warm air gets filtered through a filter, sucked through a filter
and gets drawn across a vessel.
Inside the vessel and around the vessel are cooling tubes.
And so much like when you have a simple cold glass of ice water, you know, in a warm room
you get condensation that forms, that's all that we're doing on a mechanical level.
So all of that chamber creates and environment and inside that environment essentially it
rains and the water is collected into this tank.
Okay, and so do you guys come out and drink from this in the office?
Oh yea, we have a machine inside as well, it's a small machine, it makes 14 gallons
a day for our office of about 10-12 people.
And then this is, we also can drink out of this.
We just simply pump it this way, right out of the tank and that's just pumping water
that's made from air using solar energy to drive the machine.
Okay, I have to use my own...I brought my Gardenerd mug.
Okay, great.
So, we have to try this.
Please try this, have a sip of fresh air.
Fresh air.
Yea, this is so great.
So it's basically in this tank there's water that we've collected and we're just pumping
it out.
Okay, okay, that's delicious water.
Made from the air.
It's that the coolest thing ever?
Thank you, David, so much for talking with me and I really want to acknowledge you for
the work you're doing because this is something, obviously as a Californian aware of the drought,
this is something we really need to be fixing and you're actively doing that, so thank you
so much.
You're welcome.
We're happy to do it and we're really excited about the future that follows, like distributed
energy model, we're distributing water where it's point of use.
Yes.
Instead of long distances.
Right, so if people want to know more about this where should they look?
Skysource.org.
Skycource.org Okay, anything else you want to add before
we finish?
That's it.
Thanks.
Alright everybody, thanks for watching, and if you liked this video like, subscribe and
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line.
Thank you David.
Cheers.