The case for learning how to extract water.

​In 2018 and 2019, my hometown of Goondiwindi in Queensland, Australia, experienced some of the driest weather for over one hundred years. It got to the point where people believed that they were only months away from running out of water. Many towns in the region had already run dry and required water to be trucked into their hometowns to survive. Stanthorpe was one such place. At times it got so bad that it rained mud. Yep, this is true. As a result of this severe water shortage, watering plants become secondary to everything else. I’m not saying that you couldn’t water your plants, you could still water them, but it was hand watering only. Automated sprinkler systems were not authorised. The ever lingering fear of fines hung in the air. They were being issued to anyone caught breaking the rules. So it may come as no surprise to say that I was starting to look for ways to alleviate the water crisis for myself. I even went as far as developing a solar-powered system that extracted moisture from the atmosphere. The plan worked well, but there was a problem. There was little to no water in the atmosphere to harvest. In fact, from what I have recorded, the atmosphere was at 16% humidity compared to coastal regions that regularly have at least 80% humidity. The amount of energy it took to extract the moisture was enormous! But that is a story for another time, perhaps.
I also researched how rain gauges worked, and what I discovered was very interesting. If one millimetre of rain falls on one square metre of rooftop, one litre of water can be collected through the gutter systems. I observed during the next rainstorm that many of the houses in the area were not catching the rain that fell onto their rooftops. Instead, it just ran out onto the ground. This revealed one cold hard fact. People had clearly become complacent about the actual value of water. It has become too easy for people to just go and turn on a tap and have water at their disposal. Apparently, as my observations clearly suggest, comfort leads to complacency.
After moving to the coast, with all this newly acquired knowledge in mind, it came as a surprise that more work had not been done to extract drinking water from the ocean. After all, everyone was running out of water, not just the inland communities. Upon arriving at the coast, I was quick to discover that there was water everywhere. It was in the atmosphere and in the sea. All one had to do was learn how to extract it.
From past experiences with brewing beer and making moonshine, I knew that extracting water from the ocean could be achieved through evaporation and condensation. And so it began. Before there was even an idea of the solar still, there was the air still desalination unit. Watch the video below to see how I achieved this!