All dehumidifiers and airconditioners can pull water out of the air when the air is very humid. This water isn't very clean whilst in the air, as there is a lot of airborne pollution and bacteria in there. But with some simple treatment and filtering you could drink it. However the tray where the water collects is super dirty, it's always moist and collects all the nasties in the air and the water. Those places are breeding grounds for all kinds of bacteria and if it doesn't drain properly it's a real health risk. Legionnaires disease was named after some old folk got sick due to a faulty aircon system. So getting water from the air is one thing, cleaning that water is a whole other ballgame.
Keeping devices like this clean is a hassle and usually requires a lot more water than it ever produces, not to mention the cleaner (usually some chlorine based thing) that goes down the drain and pollutes the planet. And if you don't keep it clean, you have a major health risk. Often there are parts that are hard to get to, but get dirty anyways and are a pain to get to and clean properly. Especially since they need max surface area for the thing to work, but that means a lot of surface area to clean. And when that surface area is crammed into a small device, that means poor access.
Then there's the simple fact it costs a LOT of energy to pull the water from the air and then more energy to clean that. It's much easier to simply collect dirty water (for example ground water, surface water or even collected rainwater) and clean that water. This is just as easy to do as with the water pulled from the air, but without expending a lot of energy to collect the water. With a proper setup you can even put in salty sea water and get out clean drinking water. This works so well, most smaller islands get their drinking water from these kinds of setups that simply filter seawater (usually some kind of reverse osmosis setup is used).
The next issue is that these tiny devices are usually very inefficient due to their small surface area, where a large aircon system can pull out a lot of water with relative ease, these smaller devices can't. And if you already have the aircon running, these devices can't really compete and simply produce nothing at all. But let's say you have a pretty humid home and don't run an aircon or dehumidifier. Then the thing uses up a lot of energy, but pulls that water out of the air. But then what? Now the air is dry, so it'll pull less and less water out of the air.
Then there's the cost. As said these things use a lot of energy and you still need to clean the water after. This means the price per liter can be much higher than even bottled water. If the water you get from the centralized system in your area isn't clean enough, consider a setup to clean that, it will still be cheaper than the water this thing gets. Even in places where there isn't any water nearby and a central system isn't available, it's cheaper to ship the water by truck (either in large containers like a 1000L IBC, or with a tanker truck). This costs a lot of money, but is still cheaper than getting it from the air.
These kinds of devices have been around for decades and never work. It's a dumb concept to begin with and often the marketing is even dumber.
Bonus dumb points for marketing these things for arid poor areas for people who don't have any water. Those people don't have the money to buy them, don't have the money to run or maintain them. And they don't even work in arid areas anyways, since there is no moisture in the air to pull out. And just a friendly reminder, the only reason those people don't have water is because they are poor. Because they are poor, they can't buy water, and since this world runs on capitalism: If there is no buyer there is no product.
See, this is exactly why I hate to post about technology like this, but posts of this quality is exactly why we need articles like this posted, because this is amazing. Thank you!
I would be very, very suspicious of claims about this. Grading patterns and fitting them to a specific person is much harder than simply plugging numbers in to a program. You're likely going to need to do significant fitting of the pattern. (Also, without getting too deep into the process, you're going to need to either have a very wide format printer, or a pen plotter, in order to use the patterns. Which certainly isn't the end of the world, but most people don't have a 72" wide roll-to-roll printer at home.)
I'm saying this as someone that did their undergrad work in fashion design, and used to be pretty decent at pattern making before I switched industries.
I've used multiple flat patterning techniques from a range of authors; you can get some really weird results when you plug your own measurements in, versus the 'ideal' measurements. For instance, I always need to significantly pitch the back of jeans patterns for myself (like, 2-3" or more); some ways of creating a jeans sloper end up being so incorrect on me that they don't work at all.
Yes, I'm more of a novice, but have already tried multiple pattern systems as well. An expensive digital one with loads of measurements superficially similar to this. Also Luterloh system with radial coordinates, but that just sizes you from one measurement.
Luterloh gave me an oddly sloped buttseam. I always have to lengthen sleeves, the custom sized does do that for me, but I also still had to adjust other stuff. Different from a commercial pattern but do still have to do some adjusting.
As for the printing, it's the same as every other digital pattern. You either tape a whole bunch of A4 or Letter sized paper, or print in A1 or A0 roll. Freesewing is actually good at this, you can rearrange the pieces to fit whatever paper you will print on before saving as pdf.
I'm not a novice, but I'm badly out of practice. Doing things like properly shaping sleeve caps for set-in sleeve is something you lose pretty quickly once you aren't doing it every day.
Have you actually used their system? Or even been to the website?
The numbers aren't automatically scaled; they tell you what measurements to take and how to take them, then the pattern is automatically adjusted to your actual measurements. You can download large format patterns or get them split up into A4 pages that you can print at home and tape together.
It doesn't matter how much of an expert you are if you have done nothing more than read the headline before racing into the comments to shit on it.
[...]then the pattern is automatically adjusted to your actual measurements.
This is called grading. Except that it doesn't actually work quite like that; you can't just dump new numbers into an existing sloper (or block, depending on which term you were taught) and expect to be able to make it fit correctly without extensive edjustment. Grading works pretty okay when you're talking about smaller sizes (for women, that would be commercial sizes 00-4 or so, roughly size 6-12 for true sizing), but does not work well when you're just plugging in numbers past that very limited range.
Even still, each battery pack and the 6,000lb car put more strain on the mines, factories, and roads. Those resources could be used for stuff like ebikes where you only need a fraction of the power to get the bike to move forward.
EVs have their place, but eventually we are going to have to reckon with a post-car reality. Building trans, trams, BRTs (fast bus lines) and bike lanes will make cities faster to get around, without having to own a vehicle to get groceries a mile down the road. Making sidewalks comfortable and wider will also make stuff feel less shitty.
We'll probably get to a point where you can rent a vehicle if you really need it for remote areas, but day to day, you can pocket that insurance/maintenance/fuel/depreciation money and use it on something else.
EVs are heavy. While they vary by make and model, the sedans like Lucids around Vancouver BC and WA weigh 5,200lbs without any cargo, bike racks, ski racks, or people in it.
Electric trucks (not pickups) are also getting more popular, and will also need to be factored into things like updated crash barriers, bridges, offramps and older city roads built on top of thin concrete structures from the 1900s. It's going to cost cities a lot of money if we don't emphasize a reduction in cars and trucks going forward. We should be pushing rail and bikes harder.
I have to say cool idea, but realistically if you are not using a apple or other locked down device you device will function without internet, and somebody will be able to create mesh nets or sneaker nets, and those will replace the internet (or are actually already in use right now) and those are so redundant, that as long as there isn't a solar storm that hard that it literally short circuits all technology, even in some in that case not good enough faradray cages, we will be able to recover pretty fast after the initial panic
One of the side effects that I think might happen is that we could have local internet be more important than it was before since they would have to build the mesh networks within a community and with various standards which I think would be a good thing in the long run.
Solarpunk technology
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