Typically, when it comes to drinking water from a cooler, you have two types. Your normal jug-fed solution (ie, 5-gallon) or an option that is fed from a water line coming from the wall (like modern fridges).
However, a company called “Watergen” has sought to provide you with a third choice that requires minimal maintenance by you and no connections to make outside of plugging it into a power outlet. You don’t have to swap jugs or run a water line to it. It actually collects water from thin air.
OF course, this might sound like something out of a science fiction novel. How on Earth can a water cooler pull something like that off? The process is actually simple. It takes in air from the back, and it separates the water from that air and ejects the air back out of the front at the bottom. It stores the air inside of a reservoir inside (just like any cooler would) and this reservoir can hold up to 7 gallons of water.
Then you might ask how long it could possibly take to fill such a reservoir (we sure did). Well, the answer is a day. Watergen said they can collect up to 8 gallons of water per day via the motor inside. Now that’s quite impressive! Not only can it produce up to 8 gallons a day (and store up to 7 gallons at any given time), it also filters the water so that you are drinking truly purified water (and re-mineralized). This is enough for any home and most office environments. Watergen also claims it can even produce water in dryer climates (low humidity).
There are filters inside that work to clean the water and bring it down to around 15-20 ppm (parts per million), which is close to or around the ppm of an average small bottle of drinking water from a store. As good or better than some reverse osmosis systems. Way lower than most if not all cities when it comes to tap water. We have sampled the resulting water ourselves during CES 2020, and it tastes as natural as your typical bottled machine.
Sounds too good to be true? It isn’t when it comes to a system that actually works. Cost, on the other hand, is another story. This won’t be a solution for just anyone. The machine (cooler) itself will run you around $2,500. The filters do require replacing, and that’s around $200 a year. So you will have to do the math when it comes to the home. An average 5-gallon jug fed cooler will run you around $80-$199. Refilling those jugs are around $1.50 each. Factor in things like gas and effort taken to get them refilled and the time spent manually swapping them out. For most homes, jugs are just fine. However, for office environments that consume a lot of water every day, this could be quite beneficial.
Now, imagine you work in a remote area where water isn’t so readily available. Where there isn’t a water store nearby to get your jugs easily refilled at. Maybe it’s a remote camp where you are volunteering or studying new ways of helping to prevent deforestation. Maybe it’s a location that was recently devastated from a natural disaster or situation similar to what Flint Michigan experience. You may have a generator or a solar solution for power, but what about water? This would be an excellent solution for this.
This is actually where this comes from since they have huge versions of these machines for villages and other situations where water is hard to come by. So as expensive as it may sound at first, it actually has a huge niche that can benefit from it. Covering so many locations around the world, and then as simple as a high traffic office environment. It’s actually a fantastic idea.
To learn more, you can visit us.watergen.com, or check out the following interview we had with them at CES 2020.
