Waterseer -BUSTED!

water SIA uses the environment around it to extract water from the atmosphere the water seer device is planted about six or more feet into the ground the metal sides of the underground chamber are cooled by the surrounding soil wind spins a helical turbine fan blades that direct air into a condensation chamber as the warmer air cools in the chamber the water vapour condenses onto the sides clean safe pure water can be extracted from the reservoir through a simple hose and pump because the sides of the underground chamber are always cooler than the air water seer is always collecting water day and night under optimal conditions a single water seer may collect as much as thirty seven liters of clean fresh water every day several can generate enough water for an entire community our goal is to make water seer available worldwide to the areas where they are most needed the waters here it's an amazing device it's going to give free access to water to the one in five people around the planet who don't have access to clean free water one in three people more than 2.3 billion don't have clean safe drinking water one in five people around the world more than 1.2 billion live in areas of water scarcity every day more than 18,000 people die from a lack of safe drinking water I mean this amazing device could save 18,000 lives per day poor women and children walk for hours every day to collect the water that they need to live it's so philanthropic me to look at those poor people struggling to get their water out of puddles after walking for hours along remote trails they fill their containers with 40 pounds of water and carry it back to their village along the same dangerous track often with young children in tow I mean this video isn't the slightest bit manipulative I mean won't somebody think of the children sometimes they make the same trip several times a day just to get enough water for their family to drink cook bathe and clean what if there was an inexpensive solution that would allow people to collect clean safe water where they live directly from the air around them yes just look at that mother and her poor malnourished third-world child mournfully pouring that water in the air if only there were a way he could get it out maybe some sort of computer-generated mushroom and water seer works 24 hours a day forever without labor electricity or damage to the environment I mean it's a miracle and all I need of you for this amazing device is $77,000 and so far they've raised over a hundred and eighty thousand and their IndieGoGo campaign sets the tone from the very first line of every 90 seconds a child dies due to lack of clean water oddly enough they do stick with the computer-generated mushrooms then say for instance I note and they are prototypes from say for instance their design competition ah I wonder why they didn't use those on their IndieGoGo page but while these designs are indeed comical that's not actually the problem here the problem is the very concept on which this machine is devised is complete and utter [ __ ] but how could I say such terrible things about a company that just wants to think of the children and give them clean free water after walking for hours along remote trails they fill their containers with 40 pounds of water and carry it back to their village along the same dangerous track often with young children in tow I mean they've got the National Peace Corps Association involved with this well firstly and maybe most importantly before I get on to explaining why this device is garbage scientifically people like most animals die pretty quickly if they have no water at all the bottom line is people like animals tend to gravitate pretty quickly to water irrespective of the dangers basically it's not water availability that kills me people it's lack of water treatment a device like this even if it worked which it absolutely will not is solving a non-issue if they were really interested in the world clean water there'd be in the business of water treatment so this device on a good day would have to pump something like a tanker truck full of air harvested of the hair ground level where there's lots of dust to get a single glass of water so where's that water coming from well let's take a cube of air say for instance a cubic meter and for perspective that's what a cubic meter of air looks like cubic meter of water would weigh about one ton a cubic meter of air on the other hand only weighs about one kilogram it's more or less the mass of a bag of sugar well easy air can carry water it's called humidity so zero percent humidity means that there is ZERO water in the air and 100% humidity is when it's completely saturated when you can't get any more water into the air so how much water can air actually hold well it turns out it's temperature sensitive so on a hot day say for instance 30 degrees Celsius or about 90 Fahrenheit as I add water to this one cubic meter of air that evaporates into the volume and the humidity Rises till I've added about 30 grams 30 milliliters about the volume of a chocolate bar into this one cubic meter and then you have 100% humidity but if it's call as say for instance 10 degrees Celsius that's only 10 degrees above freezing well here you only get about a third of that water into the air before you reach 100% humidity so if I take a cubic meter of air at 30 degrees Celsius and 100% humidity and call it down to 10 degrees Celsius I get 100% humidity again but 20 milliliters of water condenses out of the air and if I take that air and heat it up again to 30 degrees Celsius again I still have 10 grams of water dissolved in the air it's just now that I'm at 30 degrees it's only 30 relative humidity fascinating hey you say but so what well this is the first reason why this device is fundamentally flawed you see they said thing I'm taking your air and call it down in the ground to condense that water so let's take some examples now ground temperature varies on its depth but being generous it's only going to be about 10 degrees Celsius but about two meters in depth and that's being generous so if it's 90 degrees Fahrenheit outside that's 30 soldiers and 100 percent humidity one cubic meter of air contains about 30 grams of water so if I call that down to 10 degrees Celsius you condense out about 20 milliliters water and push out the remaining air at 10 degrees sources and 100% humidity that is you would get a harvest of about 20 grams of water per cubic meter of air ramp so let's now say that it's 10 degrees outside and 100% humidity well clearly no air cooling can take place at here is just pumped out at 10 degrees Celsius and 100% humidity you get zero water out of the air well roughly how much of the year would you expect this to be the case what you'll recall is you get a couple of meters down into the earth the temperature more and more reflects the average temperature of the earth at that point so for about half the year it's going to be cooler than the surface temperatures which means that the waters here might work but for the other six months of the year the air temperature is going to be cooler than the earth temperature two meters down which prohibits the water seer from working because the sides of the underground chamber are always cooler than the air water seer is always collecting water day and night which ballpark numbers means the water seer will produce no water whatsoever for about six months of the year and for the record people typically die of thirst after only about a week without water okay so for half the year it can't work but they'll work in the desert right you know in drought tricking Daria's in arid areas right you know like they claim in the video for each water seer bought in the US we will provide one to someone who needs access to clean safe water in developing countries and in drought stricken and arid regions where clean water is scarce well let's take a typical desert area in America right now all be a typical desert area and now maybe something like New Mexico goddamn right well when it's hot in July it's about 30 degrees Celsius now 90 Fahrenheit and the humidity's about 20% which means that if you call that down to 10 degrees Celsius the humidity goes up to about 60% and no water whatsoever will be condensed that is no matter how many water seas you have whether it's 110 a hundred or a thousand you will never get a single drop of water several can generate enough water for an entire community in fact this chart is beautiful because basically water seer can only work when the dew point is at the ground temperature at about two meters down which is about 10 degrees Celsius so water seer might might actually be able to convince some water on one or two days per year in a arid desert type area clean safe water in developing countries and in drought stricken and arid regions where clean water is scarce well okay I hear you say so it won't work in arid climates but what if they were say for instance a hundred percent humidity at 94 hike 30 Celsius you know like say for instance in Florida before a hurricane or a thunderstorm or something now for this example you're gonna have to ignore the fact the places that typically have high humidity typically get high rainfall and the device would have no use whatsoever but just the sake of argument how well would this device work in such condition well under these ideal circumstances you know of 30 Celsius and 100% humidity you would call it a doubter 10 Celsius and you would get 20 milliliters of water or so out of a cubic meter of air which means you would need somewhere between two to three of these giant tanker trucks is the volume of air you would have to put through this device to get one liter of water however they claim under ideal circumstances they're going to get 40 liters of water per day so they must pump about 2,000 cubic meters of air through this pipe per day you will take that's the volume of about 120 ton tank trucks and they've got to do that through this device 24 hours a day so we can calculate a rough flow rate for what's going to be going through these pipes and it's going to be about 100 or so cubic meters per hour or point O 3 cubic meters per second about 30 liters per second well we can see the rough dimensions of the device and we can see the pipe going down it's about 14 centimeters in diameter so the airflow going downs not too bad it's about one and a half meters per second about walking speed but then air has to come out of a pipe that is generously 1/3 of the site which means that the exhaust blowing up through this thing is coming out at about 15 meters per second it's about 30 miles per hour or 50 kilometers per hour and it's got to be blowing that hard 24 hours a day seven days a week and kind of tough seeing is this device when there is no wind the device will be 100% inefficient because the sides of the underground chamber are always cooler than the air water seer is always collecting water day and night even without wind so yeah the volume of air this device has to push through about a blue inches diameter tube seems highly questionable but the real killer this device is the tiny issue of thermodynamics the simple heat exchange now to boil water to turn it from liquid into steam takes an obscene amount of energy I mean you know this when you put water on a stove it reaches boiling point in a relatively short period of time but then takes a very long time to actually boil that water dry that is to turn that water from a liquid into a gas so if you want to reverse that process to convince the water you have to absorb an obscene amount of energy I mean these are just the simple numbers if you take one kilogram of ice yeah it's about a 1 liter pop bottle so to turn that kilogram of ice a 0 degrees C into a kilogram of water at zero degrees C takes about 350 kilojoules of energy I mean just to put that into perspective if you would put that same energy into water at 0 degrees Celsius that would be enough energy to heat it up to about 80 degrees Celsius how to take 1 kilogram of water at a hundred degrees Celsius and turn it into steam at 100 degrees Celsius takes about 2,000 kilojoules of energy or to reverse that process if you want to take one kilogram of steam a 100 degree Celsius and turn it back into water at 100 degrees Celsius you have to take out about 2,000 kilojoules of energy from the system that massive amount of energy is because when water is in the gas phase it has no hydrogen bonds and when it's in the liquid form it has lots of them that's the energy that you've got to get rid of it's simple thermodynamics you cannot dodge it it's conservation of energy stuff that has the energy you've got to get rid of when you're basically turning the gas into a liquid it doesn't really make that much difference if you do this boiling point or at room temperature you break the hydrogen bonds you've got to put energy into the system you want to condense the water you've got to take that energy out of the system it's that simple ok so 2,000 kilojoules for one kilogram of water and they want to do 40 kilograms per day under optimal conditions a single water seer may collect as much as 37 liters of clean fresh water every day so they've got to get rid of 80,000 kilojoules of energy and there is nowhere else for that energy to go but to the surrounding soil nowhere else for it to go so how much will 80,000 kilojoules heat up the surrounding soil well we said in our example the surface temperature is going to be about 30 degrees but on the ground and in the ground at about two meters depth we're going to be very generous and say that it's 10 degrees Celsius so how much soil can you heat up from 10 degrees to 30 degrees with 80,000 kilojoules of energy well it turns out a kilogram of soil is basically a liter to heat up one kilo of soil by one degree Celsius takes about one kilojoule so the heat that 1 kilogram up by 20 degrees takes about 20 kilojoules of energy so 80,000 kilojoules of energy would heat up about 4,000 kilograms of soil it will take about 4,000 liters of soil about 4 cubic meters so what would that look like on our waters here well we know that it's buried about 6 feet or 2 meters down so that bulb is about point 6 meters in diameter so you can work out its volume at about a hundred liters which is about right for their perspective you know harmful is going to be about 40 liters that that's on the right ballpark so to convince the 40 liters of water they want here they will have to heat up about 4000 liters of soil to 30 degrees Celsius basically after one day of optimal conditions the device will heat it up so much of the surrounding soil that it will be at the surface temperature and that's only only the energy you have to get rid of to turn the water from a gas into a liquid it's ignoring the fact that you have to cool down 2,000 cubic meters of air that's about 2 tons of air from 30 degrees to 10 degrees or maybe a more intuitive argument if you blow hot summer air over a square meter of winter soil how long will it be before that soil is at the air temperature or the way of proving that this device is utter [ __ ] so it's going to condense 40 litres of water so it has to dump 80,000 kilojoules of energy into the soil we can express that as a rate a days 24 hours man and each hour is 3600 seconds so a day conveniently is about 85,000 seconds what is joules per second so 80,000 kilojoules in 80,000 seconds is a rate of about 1 kilowatt that's the minimum energy you have to get rid of so we know the size of the bulb so we can calculate its surface area it's about one square meter so the heat flux on the pump is about one kilowatt per square meter well let's compare that to what we get on the surface turns out about one kilowatt per square meter is the energy that you get from the Sun when it's directly overhead at the equator if this device were working as specified the heating rate of that bulb is comparable to it being directly under the Sun 24/7 at the equator yeah it's not going to stay at 10 degrees Celsius for long and once it gets up to 30 degrees Celsius even with 100 percent humidity the device will stop working entirely even with these perfectly optimal conditions hmm but maybe I need to wrap this up in some more emotive language you know like links one thing about the one child who dies of thirst every second and give me some money so if you live in a hot dry area where the humidity is below a Perth has you percent anyone who relies on the waters here will not get a single drop of water and will die of thirst ah alternatively if it's a hot humid area one which we'll assume for the moment magically has low rain for some unexplained reason it might work for almost a day and then everyone who has trusted the water see to keep them alive will die of thirst look on May just maybe in a perfect area for the waters here where the humidity is high and the temperature is high and the ground is a magical perfect conductor but all of a sudden there's no wind everyone who depends on the waters here to provide them with drinking water will die of thirst and these are the most trivial thermodynamic calculations stuff that you can do in about 10 minutes with numbers from wiki that have been known for hundreds of years however you check out the guy behind the IndieGoGo campaign you get some distinctly mixed messages apparently the guy's been an immigrant a soldier an officer a dad a CTO at CEO oh and a CEO an entrepreneur investor and a patriot even has his own lab it's called V seal at viikii labs whatever a research lab it's gotta be I'm either here you ask it must be because they've got the waters here listed on their project page along with other ideas like that power max which which seem to exist anywhere else on the entire web the odd thing is Donald's previous companies like this one from 2002 to 2004 of which he was the CEO and CEO was called s3 technologies where s3 stands for speed simplicity and success Otley that seemed to use exactly the same address as a VC labs only now after s3 vanished he became the chief executive officer of t3 Tiger Tech which stands for trusted talented and tireless odd thing is ty tech again seems to share exactly the same eat rice as a VC labs now taiga tech does apparently have some real government contracts for education training services and professional services and they seem to make a lot of [ __ ] promotional videos like this one for themselves inside the Keystone are the three ideas that our t3 we are tireless in our motivation we are talented in our analysis we are trusted in our pursuit of truth poor women and children walk for hours every day to collect the water that they need to live we our t3 Tiger Tech t3 Tiger Tech trusted talented tireless hi it's Vince with ShamWow you'll be saying WOW every time you use this towel yeah they seem to be this other company with it we'll come out with this sort of thing that every Khan tribute er can download a high-resolution digital JPEG for this poster with water seer the gift of water safety and empowerment and hope and freedom and health yes you'd be pretty good at promoting stuff no quite social they understand the thermodynamics about getting water out of there but hey maybe that's okay because they had engineers at the University of California Berkeley to help them specifically the suit taja Center where entrepreneurship and technology collide the SU taja Center at UC Berkeley is where students study and practice technologically centric entrepreneurship and innovation well let's see how they chief scientist and founding director describes the waters here project and so we have students that are both working with the satara Center as well as the Jacobs Institute for design we're testing the boundaries of what you can actually achieve and in a practical sense of being able to take water out of this this type of atmosphere make me think what seriously University of California Berkeley is in on that yup and this is where it gets kind of depressing this guy is their chief scientist and founding director and he hasn't even looked at the simple thermodynamics seriously he is the interim faculty director of another Burghley Institute the Jacobs Institute worrying about the design of a mean that you can trivially show is a non-starter thermodynamically happen the Jacobson's which would have been really hands-on involved with helping the students think through both the conceptual questions about the design as well as concrete fabrication but hey this is the University of California at Berkeley currently rated as number 13 in the world I mean they've gotta have some real quality students there who will actually think this through and work out that the whole thing is thermodynamically a complete non-starter you know getting water from the air is the purest form of water that you can get the project is in itself a very profound impactful solution to many people around the world who don't have clean access for one hmm for me to lecture engineering students but usually the sequence of events goes like this before you start worrying how to make a machine you have to work out if the machine is even possible at all being able to know how to take this idea and make it into reality the idea process was the most challenging well that's an interesting opinion there from a guy wearing a University of Berkeley engineering top uh I would have thought that beating the thermodynamics would have been the toughest challenge you know the conservation of energy stuff this is obviously a big concept and in order to actually do it we need a really clever design idea dude all the design ideas in the world will not get around the fact that for every liter of water you condense you'll have to get rid of about two thousand kilojoules of energy artists and designers and engineers on the same team so initially when we set out for a solution we initially wanted to mimic the hydrophobicity design of a lily pad hmm artists and designers and engineers and maybe next time you should get someone on the team who understands conservation of energy making clean water possible in these parts of the world will have a simply life-changing and revolutionary effect on what it means almost everybody in that part of the world and therefore in the whole world yes and with such world-changing aspirations maybe that's why the first price in their design competition was $12,000 seriously I still can't get over the fact that they had a competition in an engineering school which you can show with just some simple back-of-the-envelope calculations that the whole idea is [ __ ] anyway things may be a little more but funny than that is the revolutionary designs that the engineers at Berkeley came up with yes they even made our water sheer for a lily pad thing which they claim makes 3 to 4 liters of water per day water SIA uses the environment around it to extract water from the atmosphere here's how it works a metal central support pole is planted into the ground several metres deep the lower temperature of the ground cools the pole below the temperature of the surrounding air water vapor condenses onto the broad surfaces of the plates and flows down the channel to a collection vessel a single water seer may collect as much as 3 litres or more of clean fresh water every day water seer works forever without labor electricity or damage to the environment several can generate enough water for an entire community for each water seer bought in the u.s. we will provide one to someone who needs access to clean safe water in developing countries and in drought stricken and arid regions where clean water is scarce which is way more [ __ ] than the claims they made about this thing it really goes well I I mean I don't want to impugn your engineering ability but are you sure you're not just measuring rainfall we're so it turns out the Berkeley guys when the only wants to buy into this simple ideas will solve all of the world's water shortage problems I mean I found this in the news report months before the IndieGoGo bow electric wind turbine that drags the air down this pipe Avianca has created water 1/3 of a gallon during one day out of thin air Wow this water comes out of nowhere why can't we just reuse it those your areas can turn to bright green lawns Abdi onco sees it as a solution for poor countries he has entered it in us deez changemaker challenge in innovation competition and believe it or not I mean you just tear your nails out of this sort of thing the guy won a prize for an idea that is fundamentally flawed and it's trivial to show that it's fundamentally flawed personally I would love nothing more than a slap fight of these two locked in this battle of intellectual property rights Oh is something that is thermodynamically a non-starter in the meanwhile it's going to be interesting to see the response from Berkeley Tiger Tech Vicky labs and the National Peace Corps so you have this question you list the National Peace Corps Association as a partner what role have they played the National Peace Corps Association has been involved in the development the waters here since the initial testing in April of 2016 at UC Berkeley they have agreed to coordinate field testing of waters here in targeted emerging economies in the coming year National Peace Corps Association and viikii labs have a formal agreement to promote national Peace Corps Association member entrepreneurs and to facilitate the development of National Peace Corps Association member innovations whatever that may mean yeah it's going to be interesting to know what the National Peace Corps Association and University of California Berkeley's opinion is on how they raised over a hundred and eighty thousand dollars with a sappy manipulative video like this after walking for hours along remote trails they fill their containers with 40 pounds of water and carry it back to their village along the same dangerous track often with young children in tow to create a device that cannot work as claimed [Music] [Music]

Channel: Thunderf00t

Views: 1,009,465

Rating: 4.8919878 out of 5

Keywords: Waterseer, water, seer, indiegogo, scam, busted, bust, air, free, crowdfunding, University, of, California, Berkeley, San, Diego, dumb, fail, Phil, Mason, Thunderf00t, cringe, science, drought, physics, engineering, steam, gas, atmosphere, drink, thirst, clean, pseudoscience, soil, earth, cooling, cool, condense, freedom, africa, solution, technology, tech, Sutardja, Jacobs, institute

Id: LVsqIjAeeXw

Length: 31min 30sec (1890 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 24 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/CynicalElephant]

This could easily be edited down to 10 minutes.

[u/DownvoterAccount]

It's like the moisture collectors in Star Wars.

Especially how they're both science fiction.

[u/danwin]

The project describes itself as being at the "Concept Stage".

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/waterseer-water-women

But it claims to have a prototype:

With UC Berkeley and the National Peace Corps Association, we worked to develop a device that yields up to 37 liters of pure water a day! WaterSeer field tests showed a ten-fold improvement over all other water collection designs. A WaterSeer Orchard will provide enough clean water for an entire community!

Something's not adding up.

[u/username_lookup_fail]

Great video, but I wish he had ended with how large a device like this would need to be to work as claimed in ideal conditions. You'd have to go much deeper and have a huge heat exchanger. Plus high humidity, high air temperature, but also somehow have a mean earth temperature at the location that has enough of a difference from the air temperature. You'd also need much larger pipes and you'd want the top to be a lot higher off the ground.

I'm sad this got funded, but at least it isn't another free energy device. Although a free water device is almost as bad.

[u/Geo-Nerd]

A much better (IMO) video, with more hard science and math, and none of the insufferable smugness!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3Sjs3GQlzs

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