A crowdfunding campaign has been launched to move a new small-scale desalination product from prototype into production.
The device, called Desolenator, is designed to provide sustainable, pure drinking water to people living in communities without a clean water source. It harnesses solar power to transform salt water and other dirty water into pure distilled water. Each Desolenator is capable of producing up to 15 liters per day, requiring no power supply other than the sun.
According to the British-based company behind the technology, the Desolenator has no moving parts, filters or consumables, making it easy to maintain. Each machine costs around $650, but the cost per liter is very low because that one-off payment will provide water for households for up to 20 years.
The technology took second place at the recent Climate-KIC's CleanLaunchpad awards in Valencia, Spain.
William Janssen, CEO of Desolenator, said that although 0.7% of the world's water currently comes from desalination, existing technology is expensive, inefficient and disproportionally drains 0.5% of the world's global energy supply.
"Desolenator is different from existing desalination and home water technologies — it harnesses solar power in an elegant new way, maximizing the amount of solar radiation that hits the technology's surface area through a combination of thermal, electrical and heat exchange, creating pure clean drinking water through the power of the sun," Janssen added.
