A Billboard That Condenses Water From Humidity

The same people who made the Clean Air billboard previously made a billboard that would get the high percentage of humidity and filter it down and turn it into fresh clean drinking water. This brilliant idea helps thousands get water and just with the simple idea of a billboard.

At the edge of the Atacama Desert, one of the driest places on earth, Lima, Peru, receives almost no rainfall. About 700,000 people have no access to clean water for drinking or bathing. Another 600,000 of the city's 7.5 million residents rely on cisterns for their water, which must be filled by pumps or by hand and cleaned regularly. But Lima's Pacific Coast location experiences humidity of more than 90 percent on summer days, from December to February. So engineers from Peru's University of Engineering and Technology (UTEC) have devised a way to turn that humid air into usable water. Last December, they erected a billboard in the Bujama District of Lima that by early March had produced 9450 liters (about 2500 gallons) of water. The idea came about because UTEC was facing a slump in enrollment as the new semester approached; the engineering department wanted a way to attract more engineering students to the university. They went to Peruvian ad agency Mayo Publicidad, and the partnership of engineers and marketers crafted an advertisement that would provide a very visible demonstration of the university's engineering projects. The water-collecting billboard was born. Electricity from the city's power lines runs the five condensers inside the billboard. Like the condenser in your home air conditioner, the ones in the UTEC billboard are cooler than the air outside. When air contacts the cooled surfaces of the condensers, the air also cools, and the water vapor in the air condenses into liquid water. After reverse-osmosis purification, the water flows down into a 20-liter storage tank at the base of the billboard. The billboard generates about 96 liters of water each day, and a simple faucet gives local residents access to the water. UTEC has not yet announced whether the water will be available for free, but the billboard reportedly cost only about $1200 to install.