David Hertz Makes Water from Air - Acknowledgment Series with Gardenerd

Hey Gardenerds, it's Christy Wilhelmi and
today this video is part of what I'm calling the Acknowledgment Series. It's new for 2017 and whenever I hear about
something really cool, or outside the box, of if I meet somebody who is doing some really
good work in the world and making the world a better place, I want to talk to them. So today I will be talking with David Hertz
of SkySource. He is doing something amazing.

He's making water out of air. So we're going to take a moment to speak with
him and acknowledge him for what he's doing in the world. Let's go. Okay, hi David.

Thank you so much for meeting with me and
with my YouTube subscribers. Let's start with who you are and what you
do. Can you tell our YouTube subscribers a little
bit about yourself? Sure, happy to. My name is David Hertz, I'm an architect in
Venice Beach.

I've been practicing for over 3 decades on
sustainable design, moving towards a regenerative, restorative building. That's a building that gives back more than
it takes. So what does that look like in terms of the
building structure or the materials you're using? Well, mainly the energy that being produced,
so for instance, solar photo-voltaic can be employed to give back more energy than the
building consumes. I love that so it's zero...What's that called,
net zero? It's more than zero net energy.

Net zero is great because you're carbon neutral,
but net positive is even better. So the idea.. You're generating electricity? Yea, the idea, and we have the technology
to do it, but the idea is that we've done enough damage with our buildings, consuming
over 40% of all US annual resources. So we need to do more, so our buildings can
actually be more than net zero, they can be net positive.

We can actually grow more food, for instance,
on the buildings or have more oxygen producing plants because we have more surface area that
on, say, vacant land, because we have all the walls. So it's possible, but what we haven't been
able to do, especially in California, is solve our water issue. Right. Because we don't have water, that's natural
to this area, and it has to be imported at great energy cost over long distances, and
we can't...There are limits to conservation and there are limits to how much we can collect
when it occasionally rains.

So is that what brought you to SkySource? That's exactly what brought me to SkySource. I heard about this technology of taking water
out of the atmosphere, and was shocked that the ocean evaporates into the troposphere
and renews itself on a weekly basis, and has more potential water than all the rivers on
the planet. But it's hydrologically cleansed. I love this stuff, this is so cool.

So what did you do? So I put this machine behind me that makes
150 gallons per day by basically condensing the ocean air. And it turns it from water vapor, when we
have things like 80% relative humidity, that means 80% of the water relative to the air,
or the temperature is... The water vapor is actually water that can be harnessed out of
the air. So I'm a couple blocks from the beach.

So the idea was let's use solar energy, which
I produce on the roof, to drive this SkyWater machine that will make 150 gallons of water
and let's give it away for free to the community, especially a community in need that is under-served
with the ability to have water because we're right off the Venice Boardwalk, this alley
is heavily trespassed by a lot of homeless people. A lot of transients and everybody from skaters
and locals that just would like access to clean water. We also provide this water not only from this
bottle filling station, which is open 24 hours a day, and just allows water to be pumped
into a container which we also provide, but we provide using the hose and pump, we work
with a non-profit called Safe Place for Youth. We employ two formerly homeless kids aged
out of the foster care program.

They come several times a week with a truck
with a water tank and they take about 100 gallons of water every trip and they water
82 urban community farm boxes that we've worked with Community Healing Gardens around Venice
in the Oakwood section. Right, there are these...If you drive through
Venice Beach you'll find these raised beds, they're like 3x6 raised beds. They're about 18" tall, and they're on the
corners of the streets. And people are gardening in them and you're
saying that they're getting watered from this water here.

Right, so what would happen is often times
people would come by and they'd say, "hey!" Roll down their window and say, you know,
"don't you realize..These gardens are fantastic, but we're in a drought." And people weren't adopting the boxes because
they didn't want to pay the water fines. So now they say, "hey, guess what. These boxes are watered using solar energy,
made from air, made down the street in Venice. We're formerly homeless kids and we're watering
these with water made from air." That's so fantastic.

So if some people don't have solar panels
on their rooves or electricity available to them, what can they do to hook this up in
their homes or garden or something like that? Sure, the atmospheric water generators can
just be plugged in for the small ones, or wired in to 220 for the larger ones. So you don't need alternative energy to run
them, if you have power. But it's particularly nice when you can say
that I made this water without using any energy to make it. You know the energy water nexus, I mean we
use 19% of California's energy budget for the distribution of water.

People don't make the equation that there's
a lot of energy embodied in water. And the same is true, although a lot less,
when you're making it with the machine. But there's nothing like alternative energy
to make you're own water. Right, and so you mentioned these garden boxes
that are happening around Venice.

Is there another place that you're utilizing
this system? We're currently working, we have a project
on an aquaponics farm in Big Sur where we make 600 gallons a day. We have properties in Malibu, people in Malibu,
people in Santa Barbara that are, where the groundwater aquifers are being drawn down
and they're actually paying over $5,000 a month just in water fines solely to keep the
oak trees and trees on their property from dying. Because it's also about preservation of our
aquifers. Because if our aquifers are drained down,
as they are being depleted so rapidly, then we're losing our landscapes.

You know, we've already lost over 1 million
trees in California alone, so preservation of the aquifers is critical and if in areas
especially along the coastal communities where there is reasonable temperatures and high
humidity, and when you actually look world wide and you look at water scarcity and you
look at high humidity and high temperatures they are actually closely aligned. So we are working with our non-profit the
Go Water initiative to bring water to Haiti in Africa. We're working with Community Healing Gardens
on a project in Watts, right now we're trying to raise money for a SkyWater machine for
a community garden on the school there. And how big, how much water does that device
produce? That device produces 300 gallons per day.

That is so amazing. 300 Gallons per day from the air. I think that's pretty cool. So can you show us the device? Sure, happy to.

Tell me how this thing works. So this Skywater is a model 150. It makes potentially 150 gallons per day and
it uses a patented process. It's an American patent and it's called adiabatic
distillation.

It's a fancy word basically for mimicking
the hydrological cycle inside a vessel. So what happens is warm air gets filtered
through a filter, sucked through a filter and gets drawn across a vessel. Inside the vessel and around the vessel are
cooling tubes. And so much like when you have a simple cold
glass of ice water, you know, in a warm room you get condensation that forms, that's all
that we're doing on a mechanical level.

So all of that chamber creates and environment
and inside that environment essentially it rains and the water is collected into this
tank. Okay, and so do you guys come out and drink
from this in the office? Oh yea, we have a machine inside as well,
it's a small machine, it makes 14 gallons a day for our office of about 10-12 people. And then this is, we also can drink out of
this. We just simply pump it this way, right out
of the tank and that's just pumping water that's made from air using solar energy to
drive the machine.

Okay, I have to use my own...I brought my
Gardenerd mug. Okay, great. So, we have to try this. Please try this, have a sip of fresh air.

Fresh air. Yea, this is so great. So it's basically in this tank there's water
that we've collected and we're just pumping it out. Okay, okay, that's delicious water.

Made from the air. It's that the coolest thing ever? Thank you, David, so much for talking with
me and I really want to acknowledge you for the work you're doing because this is something,
obviously as a Californian aware of the drought, this is something we really need to be fixing
and you're actively doing that, so thank you so much. You're welcome. We're happy to do it and we're really excited
about the future that follows, like distributed energy model, we're distributing water where
it's point of use.

Yes. Instead of long distances. Right, so if people want to know more about
this where should they look? Skysource.Org. Skycource.Org
Okay, anything else you want to add before we finish? That's it.

Thanks. Alright everybody, thanks for watching, and
if you liked this video like, subscribe and share it with your friends. And be sure to turn on notifications so you
can find out when our next video comes on line. Thank you David.

Cheers..