The picture I sent my husband:

Water condensers are *incredibly* energy inefficient because they’re basically just dehumidifiers with a filtration system attached.

A 75 watt dehumidifier produces around 1L of water per 24 hours in ideal (80%) humidity conditions.

Under emergency conditions, it’s recommend to have 4L of water on hand per person per day. This is the bare minimum.

For a 4 person household, that’s 16 x 75 watt dehumidifiers (or 1 x 1,200 watt dehumidifier), which would need to run for 24 hours and would consume 28,000 watt hours of electricity.

The average 4 person American household consumes around 30,000 watt hours of electricity per day. This system would effectively double your home’s electric bill, just to provide the bare minimum amount of water needed to survive.

To offset this with solar panels, which are 15% efficient, at best, and provide 150 watts per square meter, and receive around 3-5 hours of direct sunlight per day (depending on cloud cover and where you live)…. You’d need somewhere between 40 to 64 square meters of panels. Per house. Just for water generation.

Which only works when it’s humid.

And sunny.

This invention is cool, but it can’t beat the laws of physics.

Before giving your money—most people on here don’t have a lot and work very hard to get the little they have—the thing to do with charitable endeavors with which you are unfamiliar is to check them in a quick search. There are sites that provide data on charities, specifically, just like there are sites that provide data on businesses, and you can start to sniff out something that smells off.

Charity Navigator has nothing on the org, which is fine. They may still be too small to get rated.

However, I managed to get a quick peek at the Guidestar profile (they require folks register with them to get data—for free but still—but first-time searches can work out), and the news is not reassuring.

Not refiling the tax exemption paperwork can happen in a small org just starting out, but three years in a row is a warning. Either it’s too poorly organized to manage basic business or it’s not in the up-and-up.

Or, it’s not actually a charity.

I want this not to be a scam. I want people to have potable water. I’d like it to be low-cost and sustainable because the people without potable water tend not to have much money and other solutions are not forthcoming from those in power. It’d also be really effing cool if a Black man was able to solve a problem that arises so often in cities with large Black populations. There’s be something poetic about that.

But the claims made seem, at the most generous, dubious to someone familiar with the technology, the basic tax forms have not been filed, and recent videos are not from recognizable third-party sources who would report with any sort of critical eye. This doesn’t pass the charity smell test.

There are so many people out there trying to scam the desperate and people who want to help the desperate.