How eco-friendly is it extracting water from the air?
According to Ray de Vries who promotes this method, there are considerable health,
environmental and practical advantages in going this way.
Can you just explain what this is and how it works? Okay. Before I do that, what I'm going
do is I'm going to dispense some water.
This is from the air, which I'm going to go through now
So it comes out of the machine and then over here, I have some tap water
Right that's tap water. We've just seen that water
And I'm going to switch this on while we're talking about that and what it's going to show us is the total dissolved solids
In your tap water as compared to your water from air, okay. So let's chat about the machine.
Okay. This machine makes water from the air. In the air all around us is humidity.
A little bit less somewhere else to where we are today.
But it extracts that water and it's pure, no chlorine, no chemicals, and this is how it works. Okay.
Here's a fan, here's a coolant and here's an air filter. Right. Okay, it sucks the air through the air filter.
It cools it down and then it drops into an ultraviolet tank at the back....which is over here.
And that goes through a charcoal filter as well, there's an ultraviolet light in there, so we don't use any chlorine.
There's no chemicals and what happens is that after it's gone through ultraviolet it goes to pre carbon,
post carbon filter and this osmosis and then the we add good minerals.
It's pumped up into a holding tank over here and press the button and you've got water.
This little machine makes 32 liters of water for 24 hours.
Now, it's running off electricity so how much energy is it actually drawing out?
It's a 450 watt so it's about half a steam iron. And doesn't matter where you are -
outside or inside or where the machine is placed to how much water that you actually get.
The yield is different, yes, so if you're in a high humidity area, or you've got a lot of greenery around you,
the humidity is higher, it'll make more water, so it needs 35% humidity plus to make water.
Now, it's getting water from the air so what happens in the case of acid rain?
That's a good question. That's what all these filters are for. So there's air filters and there's water filters
and all the ultraviolet for pathogens and then into the top tank - so it doesn't affect us or not the end result anyway.
I can see that it's actually been bottled into plastic bottles. So we know plastic is porous
and people are trying to move away from plastic. So is it still safe enough to bottle this into those plastic bottles?
That's a good question as well. So, we have in this beautiful Five Burnham B&B here, they bottle their own water.
That plastic over there if you leave that plastic for a length of time with water,
you're quite right, it forms a chemical compound. The beautiful thing about this, is that this water now was in
the air yesterday, this water in this bottle was in the air the day before, they only bottle for what their requirements are;
and also on the plastic, unfortunately, plastic is not great for the earth at all.
The only reason that we use plastic - we would rather use glass is that schools don't allow glass, hotel swimming pools
don't allow glass, conference centers don't allow glass etc....but 240 of these bottles makes on school room chair.
So is there a recycle program? We've got a major problem in South Africa we are already in 3% deficit of water,
and we are going to have a 15% deficit of water by 2030 so it’s a major problem; and there’s going to be unrest,
we need to do service delivery. So those of us who are in conferences, who are in hotels,
who are in restaurants, pubs whatever the case might be, everyone that drinks from these machines
are doing something for the water sources of our country.
Do you do you measure the pH levels in this water coming out here?
Yes, we do. Our PH here is an average of between 7.5 and 7.8 which is alkaline and as you know water needs to be alkaline.
A lot of the water that out there is not alkaline it's acid......so we measure that
and we also measure the TDS which is Total Dissolved Solids, solids that exist in the water,
and that's what the experiment that's going on behind us at the moment is going to show us.
When do we go back there because it's looking pretty disastrous?
So what has happened? What has happened here, is that this one here is the tap water, this one here is the water
from the air and you'll notice the difference in colors. Any solid that's in the water comes out yellow,
our solids have been added in - the good solids. These solids over here, you will not be able to smell them on TV....it's not a very nice smell.
This is the awful reality of South Africa today, that's our tap water and that is just muck and gunk, that's one glass of water.
Can I smell it? Awful! Smells just like a marsh!
That is actually just very, very scary to know that that is what we're drinking! And that's going into our system.
Absolutely! It's very very scary, and we're not being told enough about this but that stuff over there in
one glass of water means that you become the filter.......that sits in you!
That's just blown my mind. Okay, just coming back to this is this the future?
Absolutely! You know this was around 300 years before Christ. They used it in the deserts.
They used to actually put a whole lot of leaves together, and then the humidity would slide down and they would
have drinking water in the morning. There's nine times more water in the air than in all the oceans of the world.
So it's here. Why don't we use it? Absolutely! I have to taste it.
Okay so when we press that it takes a little time because an ultraviolet light switches on.
So this is happening immediately....this is coming out of the air immediately? Yes.
Okay, so it's fresh, fresh. That was in the air six hours ago.
I love my water so....I can taste a difference in this, it's actually really smooth and it's soft
and I feel that you could probably drink a lot of this very very easily, so you could probably drink more water.
Absolutely! In fact the alternative is that.
Yeah, I don't even want to look at that. Cheers!