Zero Mass Water -BUSTED!

this is zero mass water it's a water startup operating out of an old car dealership in Scottsdale Arizona is this the next level of drinking water guys I'm kind of thirsty come check this out my money so we're here with zero mass water that the company that invented solar panels apparently creates drinking water from thin air it's actually water vapor or moisture in the air how cool would it be if you could take that moisture and turn it into clean drinking water well I found a company here in Phoenix that claims that they can do exactly that what if you could produce clean drinking water right out of thin air and without using electricity that's what one Arizona based startup is trying to do using a combination of solar energy material science and data 0ms water the next level presented by Lauren good in conjunction with Intel so you know this is gonna be really well researched and I got so many requests to debunk this crap because you know it's gonna give water took places that have no water because of the fact that we can say okay yep there's Syrian refugee issues in northern Lebanon let's go there yep Maria hit Puerto Rico yep let's go there hey there's issues in Flint let's go there hey by the way you're buying what ought of water in Berkeley let's displace that same in Oakland same in Scottsdale so reducing this free water from the air junk science has become part of the junk news cycle but scientifically illiterate journalists pimping out clickbait like this one from the BBC who even late last year in 2017 were promoting the waters here even after it had been thoroughly debunked which is somehow changed is design from the one that I add Leedy bunked water Sara 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 direct air into a condensation chamber clean safe pure water can be extracted from the reservoir through a simple hose and pump because the sights of the underground chamber are always cooler than the air water seer is always collecting water day and night even without wind it was gonna need no external power it was gonna make gallons of water per day and it was only gonna cost a hundred and thirty dollars how it's gonna cost the best part of a thousand dollars somehow need 200 watts of power to do it and still claims it's gonna make gallons of water per day and people heat that you'll believe anything cuz all I've done is bury a regular dehumidifier in their garden but I'll cover the cataclysmic failure of the water see it another day of how they managed to convince people to give them a third of a million dollars just a barrier dehumidifier in their back garden yeah a dehumidifier water from air has always been possible like this the only reason that we don't get our water from dehumidifiers is because it's a ludicrously expensive way of getting water to the point where no matter where you live on earth it's almost always going to be cheaper and quicker to just get a tanker truck and drive it there rather than relying on the free water from the air don't believe me let's take a look at some numbers optimistically an installation costs four thousand dollars and five hundred dollars to install the kids there is still the cost to consider each panel costs $2,000 plus a $500 installation fee so $4,500 total for a two panel array and if you check out that website you'll see that's the smallest number they'll sell you an average each panel is supposed to produce five litres of water per day but it is safe to assume that if you're in a less humid climate or more dry climate that your water output could be less yes so some confusion here are the one unit makes five liters per day or whether two units make five liters per day and according to their website it looks like two units the one that cost four and a half thousand dollars makes about five liters of water per day but whatever for this example I'm going to be generous and say that just one of their units makes five liters of water per day so to fill say ten ton tanker truck would take about two thousand days five and a half years which is good because that's getting on for the lifetime of this solar panels with their website claiming that the expected lifetime this unit is about ten years so what's the cost of ten cubic meters of residential water well in America if you go through the calculations it chalks in at about fifty sixty dollars that sort of thing or if you won't have the easier conversion in England a cubic meter of water costs about three pounds about five dollars so ten cubic meters of water cost about the same sort of fifty sixty dollars that sort of thing and yep it's that easy a cubic meter of water weighs almost exactly a ton 10 cubic meters 10 tons and what's the cost of shipping that water well a medium truck can hold about 10 tons and gets bound 10 miles per gallon that sort of thing meaning if you wanted to ship it a thousand miles two and a half thousand kilometres you would need about a hundred gallons of fuel costing about three hundred dollars so it's you're cool you can buy the water and ship it halfway across America for about one-tenth the cost or you can install these paddle systems which in the best case scenario produces five liters of water per day and has with basically ideal conditions for these panels you know with a lot of sunlight and the right humidity in fact help here's a fun fact for you these panels would on average produce more water if you just stuck a bucket under them the average land rainfall around the world is about point seven meters per year and if look at these panels they're about 1 meter by 3 meters meaning they've got a footprint of about 3 square meters so the average rainfall on these panels per year is going to be about 2 cubic meters or 2 tons their orbital water production is about 5 liters of water per day which is about 1.8 tons per year that is the best case scenario for zero mass water it is about the same as the average water yield if it was just used as a piece of roof to catch water in a bucket $4,500 for the two panels here you can use it on a residential home they can use it on schools and community centers so let's compare best with best best case scenario for zero mass water 1.8 tonnes per year best-case scenario for using it as a rain catcher mmm tennis meters of water per year meaning you would get about 30 tons of water per year or we can simply use the average numbers for using it as a water capture versus more realistic numbers for this zero mass water which is behind now a half or a tenth because let's be real if the humidity is high then the areas can kept lots of rain anyway and these panels are kind of pointless and if the humidity is low then there's not much water to pull out the air and these panels are kind of pointless look all these things are a basically desiccant dehumidifiers which have been around forever all it done is add a solar panel to it however no one seems to have worked out there that the reason why it's so hard to get water from the air he's because of thermo-dynamics something the awesome science reporting of Lauren could picked up on immediately oh no hang sorry I got confused not immediately the other thing up there something she didn't mention at all but of course they were happy to highlight all the drawbacks of this thing let's say there's an emergency situation like with the recent hurricane in Puerto Rico how quickly can you get one of these set up like the thing that takes the longest is installing the plumbing so the three of us could install two of these in probably an hour and so it actually turns out that the thing that takes the longest putting is in it's moving that line down to the sink or to the refrigerator that's right kids you're paying $500 for having that plumbing cable installed each panel costs $2,000 plus a $500 installation fee so the three of us could install two of these in probably an hour all I gotta say when you take a look at their installation numbers the spec sheets on these things get kind of a different feel each panel they say weighs 275 pounds I was like a hundred and thirty kilos these things weigh an absolute ton and I've gotta say at this point if you take a look at their numbers everything seems kind of off it looking at a commercial desk and dehumidifier or for Amazon that produces about the same amount of water as these panels claim per day about five liters or so and that runs on about 400 watts so to run that for a day you would need 400 watts for 24 hours and ideal dehumidifier conditions well how much juice are they gonna pull off their solar panels well if we take a look at their spec sheets they say these things have 48 inches across that's just over a meter meaning these panels are probably about 48 inches by 24 inches that sort of thing one by two form factor well a 40 by 28 inch solar panel off Amazon pulls in about a hundred watts so it looks like their solar panel is maybe producing a hundred or so what while the Sun is up if they're lucky because these things don't track this up so that's for maybe 12 hours or so honestly it looks like their numbers are way on the optimistic side even if you're gonna say the panels on the side harvest some useful heat you're probably only looking at the equivalent of four hundred or so watts optimistically while the Sun is up so you probably be looking at a couple of liters absolute tops on this thing for their installation in Arizona I'd be surprised if they get a tenth which is probably why they're so tight-lipped about this little thing and only stress what they'll produce in the best case Inara in fact I got to give the report or a little credit here for slipping in a little skepticism in significantly mentioning that while I would given water to drink and were told that it came off the roof they never actually saw it plumbed into the roof so the panels that produce this water on the roof so we're taking the water vapor out of the air concentrated in the panels and then we're dispensing it to the top while I was able to see the zero mass panels and taste the water I didn't have much of his ability into how the water actually runs from the reservoir to a faucet probably a good thing - who knows how long that water could have sat on the roof in a non sterile system yeah just the sort of thing you want for a drinking water supply and what was that earlier in the video weren't you saying that this was a little plumbed in so you can actually drink the water in the building so the panels that produce this water on the roof so we're taking a water vapor out of the air concentrated in the panels and then we're dispensing it to the town well bottles doing under your water collectors then but they've thought ahead and they've got a world-wide Control Center so they can literally watch the water condense I was however able to see the company's Network Operations Center we call it the NOC for short every panel that we have ever deployed is communicating with the server we have here seriously that's one of the most pointless ly massively over designed control centers ever yeah no wonder those units cost $2000 because they need Wi-Fi and all sorts of action detectors so they can relay their information back to this control center every panel that we have ever deployed is communicating with the server we have here so far zero that says hundreds of panels have been set up in eight countries around the world so far zero math says hundreds of panels have been set up in eight countries around the world and it's it's a profound thing to say and I recognize it sounds profound but this technology entitles us to be aspirational actually let's just sit around like a lemon while this person - rattles off these completely unrealistic aspirations because of the fact that we can say okay yep they're Syrian refugee issues in northern Lebanon let's go there yep Maria hit Puerto Rico yep let's go there hey there's issues in Flint let's go there hey by the way you're buying what bottled water in Berkeley let's displace that same in Oakland same in Scottsdale hey I got a better idea dude my water catcher does ten times what yours does for 100 the cost but I know no one's gonna buy mine because it doesn't have solar panels on it cuz you know who cares about what's operationally possible when you've got aspirations hey forget about what's operationally possible what about what's thermodynamically possible okay so anyway like I was saying the fundamental reason why this will never be viable is because of thermo-dynamics to change the phase of water from liquid to gas requires an obscene amount of energy and the fundamental reason for this he's a mind-blowing ly simple water is held together by these really quite strong hydrogen bonds and if you want to turn it from a liquid to a gas you have to supply enough energy to break all of those hydrogen bonds how much energy is that about two million joules per kilogram kettles are high energy appliances you really have to Google the energy into those four minutes just to boil off a tiny fraction of the water this is you putting the energy into the system to break the hydrogen bonds and that takes a crazy amount of energy for water two million joules per kilogram of water that's about a liters worth is one liter of water and the little perspective if I were to get a kilogram of silver one gram of silver and put two million joules into it so it takes about two hundred joules of energy to heat up one kilogram of silver by one degree which means that for two million joules you could heat this silver up this one kilogram of silver by about ten thousand degrees Celsius that's hotter than the temperature of the surface of this Sun the point is that actually boiling water takes a colossal amount of energy and the singers for condensing water you have to get rid of a crazy amount of energy to do it and cooling things down takes energy indeed the only place this sort of thing happens regularly on a large scale is in the atmosphere whose the energy flux in the atmosphere it's just on a completely different level oh and boy where there's some hard core shells for this stuff I mean just listen to what the promoter for zero mass water had to say to the verge for zero mass the company says the goal is to get to the point where the idea of water from thin air is just a part of people's everyday conversations if you're at a cocktail party you say well I've got solar my roof yes well your cocktail party and that I think we're more or less established who the prospective customer of this thing is it's not the impoverished kids that they cluster around this thing so they can sell it to folks I've Hagen brag about their solar water at their cocktail parties anyway Oh was I oh yeah that's right how badly some people was shilling for this thing if you're at a cocktail party say well I've got solar my root people think Oh electricity in a small number of years people saying oh you have so angry forgive me talk about electricity or water now just listen to this completely random question from the future house historically going at two options the first option was generate electricity with solar electric or photovoltaic the second option was solar thermal dry generating hot water domestic hot water for showers and dishwashers but now you guys are inducing a third technology to generate clean safe drinking water so what type of homeowner should consider this type of technology mr. burns your campaign seems to have the momentum of a runaway freight train why are you so popular a tough question but a fail the question then doesn't seem to be whether it's too good to be true it's whether harvesting water from the air is the most sustainable most cost-effective solution for clean water which means it's too good to be true and the thermodynamics of why it's too good to be true have been known about the decades and that's why zero mass water is and if you thought this was an awesome source video give it a thumbs up and subscribe and if you really like this stuff you can support the work of this channel directly from pigs run an elite links below [Music]

Channel: Thunderf00t

Views: 846,577

Rating: 4.8968811 out of 5

Keywords: zero, mass, water, pseudoscience, scam, busted, thunderf00t, fun, funny, junk, science, dumb, stupid, free, physics, chemistry, thermodynamics

Id: vc7WqVMCABg

Length: 18min 0sec (1080 seconds)

Published: Fri May 25 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/4now5now6now]

Uh didn't invent this in Africa already so people do not have carry water for miles?