How Can I convert free electricity into water

Question

We recently moved into a new home in Southern California that has a large lawn and an over provisioned (I think) solar system. This means our water bills are terrifyingly large and our electricity bills are 0.It occurred to me that there might be a way to extract water from the air using something like an industrial sized dehumidifier and store it for later use in the garden.Does anyone know of such a thing or are there other options we should be looking at like grey water collection or even drilling a well?

miles · Accepted Answer

Atmospheric water generator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_water_generator
This water harvester can turn desert air into drinkable water https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6T3ICXWqjc
Extracting drinkable water from the air https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoXj-j0VSTA
Watergen: "Creating Drinking Water from Air" https://us.watergen.com

samstave · Answer

Magnets.Just kidding.-The thing with extracting water, esp when youre in so-cal... is that any evening-dew-harvesting system is going to need to be massive. And likely your terra-forma (topology) is not conducive to passive dew harvestings via nets and such due to moisture-point-heavy airflow not passing through whatever net you have...Use you're free electricity to build and drill a super deep-aquifer level well.... (Source: my dad owned one of the water companies in california... electricity for pumping/drilling/blah blah... is expensive.)

jschveibinz · Answer

I recently read of a technique that uses electricity to harvest water from the air here on HN.
Here is a link to HN search:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...
And here is a link to a related article:
http://www.electrostatics.org/images/ESA_2015_F5_Reznikov.pd...
Post if you decide to try an experiment.

beardyw · Answer

Not sure how you cut your lawn, but letting it grow longer is going to help a lot. If its like a putting green it's way too short. I think the longer grass does moisture harvesting itself.Please don't use artificial grass. Creatures live in grass, not plastic. We let clover grow and the bees love it, though be careful not to go barefoot that time of year.

bigiain · Answer

Lawns are pretty ecologically unsustainable. I’d be looking for low water use alternatives to lawn, rather than trying to work out ways to temporarily extend the life of your grass.
Did you see this?
https://news.yahoo.com/grassy-lawns-banned-las-vegas-1949502...

bombcar · Answer

The main thing &ldquo;free electricity&rdquo; would let you do is install a large underground rainwater storage tank that you could pump from.Be sure to anchor the tank even if buried so it doesn&rsquo;t pop out of the ground when empty.

yuppie_scum · Answer

Run dehumidifiers and then filter and boil the resulting water

MatthiasPortzel · Answer

Dehumidifiers work in areas with humidity, normally not California.

How Can I convert free electricity into water

Lawns are pretty ecologically unsustainable. I’d be looking for low water use alternatives to lawn, rather than trying to work out ways to temporarily extend the life of your grass.Did you see this?https://news.yahoo.com/grassy-lawns-banned-las-vegas-1949502...

The main thing “free electricity” would let you do is install a large underground rainwater storage tank that you could pump from.Be sure to anchor the tank even if buried so it doesn’t pop out of the ground when empty.

Run dehumidifiers and then filter and boil the resulting water

Dehumidifiers work in areas with humidity, normally not California.

Lawns are pretty ecologically unsustainable. I’d be looking for low water use alternatives to lawn, rather than trying to work out ways to temporarily extend the life of your grass.
Did you see this?
https://news.yahoo.com/grassy-lawns-banned-las-vegas-1949502...

The main thing “free electricity” would let you do is install a large underground rainwater storage tank that you could pump from.
Be sure to anchor the tank even if buried so it doesn’t pop out of the ground when empty.