Passive Emergency Desalinator

[Richhh]

Ah, so you admit that you cant pass a HIMA 10E7 reduction for B. diminuta.... were spitting hairs here but that remains the FDA definition for ALL bacteria. Sure EPA specs. are OK for log reduction; but, YOU stated *ALL* organisms. ;-)

Still your product seems to a simple solution for emergency water. Hope you sell enough so that the price comes down ... . :-)

[frogman27]

I have a question... How much water is produced compared to the dextrose solution added to the bag? i.e. if you add 1 cup of dextrose solution how much water do you get?

Do you add 1 cup of goo and get 2 cups of water? Why not just store the water?

I can see this being beneficial in a situation where drinkable water is extremely scarce or dirty, but if the result of getting one of these is that instead of having to carry water I have to carry bags of goo to make water, I don't see the advantage.

With the hand pump desalinators once it's packed you have what you need and unless it's used there is no real maintenance. Just periodic inspection. You might have to change a membrane every couple years, but still no big deal. You can even run the recovered water directly into someones mouth if you don't have a cup.

I could see taking this camping or hiking where it could be used as a short term replacement for food and water for survival, or where contaminated water is a concern, but I don't think this makes sense for a liferaft.

[rfeineis]

Hello Frogman,

The SeaPack emergency desaliantion system produces .5 liters of drink from each of the five four oz. syrup charges that comes with the system. In total, the SeaPack produces 2.5 liters of drink from the 20 oz of syrup that comes with the system. Additional bottles of GOO as you like to call them can be purchased.

The reason that people purchase this system for their life rafts (over 500 in the past six months) is due to the fact that the SeaPack weighs far less and consumes far less volume than the drink that it produces. Not too many people are able to store 2.5 to 7.5 liters of drink in their life raft case or in their ditch bag.

Handheld systems are nice, but the fact of the matter is that they are expensive. Each RO system costs 8 to 9 times as much as a SeaPack. Our study conducted in 2006 showed that less than 5% of boaters would spend the $800 required for an RO hand pump system.

If you are a Seal (frogman) then perhaps you can appreciate the fact that our systems allow you to collect water at a resource and quickly leave the watering hole. The system then automatically filters the water into drink so you can keep on the move and looking for bad guys. The US military loves these systems: Expedition Water Filtration System It produces 25 times the weight in drink as what the systems weighs. Perfect for your ruck...

Check out the site and see for yourself. SeaPack

Rick

PS. We have a new system that creates infant formula from filthy water. Pretty cool for keeping AIDS from transfering from mother to child from breast milk. These systems weigh nothing compared to shipping formula in trucks or planes.

[David M]

Originally Posted by Pblais

Further details seems to indicate this might not be all that great. The unit generates 1/2 liter per 5 hours as it's claimed rate. Each person would need their own. You have to install these grape flavored sugar packs to make the process work. It's not clear from the web site how much water you could actually make before the unit would fail or if the replacement of the sugar pack also takes away the accumulated salt.

They do go on at length about filtering harmful bacteria. While it's a good thing the fact is dissolved salts are about as small a particle as you get before you are at the sub atomic level. Anything alive really is 100% gone through osmotic filtering. They make a bigger deal of it because it sounds better.

I'm not jumping up and down to get one even if I could drive over there and check it out.

The smallest bacteria gets down to about 0.2-0.3 micron. The hydrogen and oxygen atoms are much much smaller than that. They don't say the size of the pores of the membrane. But it would need to be somewhere between the size of a sodium ion, a chlorine ion and size of hydrogen and oxygen atom in order to act as a salt filter. The sub-atomic level is much smaller than any of the above mentioned.