Swedish Inventor Demonstrates Solar-Powered Water Purifier
The device, called the Solvatten, (Swedish for ’sun water’), looks much the same as a standard jerrycan and can be filled with up to ten liters of water, opened out, and left in the sun. A simple indicator shows either a red or green face to let users know when the water is safe to drink (typically after 3-4 hours), thus avoiding the risk of contracting water-borne diseases.
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According to inventor Petra Wadstrom, “My inspiration to work with Solvatten is the fact that people are living with dirty water around the world and children are suffering from bad water, which is easily preventable, but people are living with a lot of solar energy and not using it.”
The device has already been tested in Kenya and Nepal [video], and the feedback so far has been very positive. Speaking about the trials, Wadstrom said, “It’s very easy to understand the method, and it’s user friendly so you don’t need to have technological skills to understand how to use it.”
According to Bhushan Tuludhar, executive director of the UN Habitat and the Environment and Public Health Organisation (ENPHO) in Nepal, the Solvatten is one of several water-purifying methods being tested for their effectiveness in supplying the world’s poor with regular access to clean water. He forecasts that access to central water facilities that provide safe water to everybody are “a distant dream,” and that what is needed are “point-of-use water treatment facilities, point-of-use water treatment technologies that are suitable to local conditions.”
Image Credit - Solvatten
It seems to me a great and useful device which might help millions of people living in developing countries, mostly the poorest rural areas (and even in the first world). I’am a Mexican researcher focused to water issues in the U.S.-Mexico border region where there are a significant need for developing this kind of devices and also for making them accesible to people in need. Particularly, in the Mexicali Valley region, a boundary agricultural area, there are a large rural population of 200,000 people and they might be significantly benefitiated with “Solvatten”. In addition, a team of U.S. and Mexican social researchers implemented a study in central and southern Mexico and our findings show a urgent need to provide people with safe drinking water. So, I’d like to know more about your amazing invention such as costs, forms of accesing to it and mechanisms to promot it in my areas of interest. You can check my info at Google (just write my full name: Alfonso Andres Cortez Lara)
If I’m not mistaken, you can buy a hand-operated water pump with ceramic or other filter that filters out most or all pathogens - they sell several types at our local camping supply stores. Maybe a solar water purifier is cheaper to make or operate, but wouldn’t these camping-type filters work just as well?
Then you’d have COLD water to drink when the process was done. With the solar system you have to wait quite a while for it to cool. I guess we could combine this with a low-tech solar refrigerator…
Keep trying folks! A new agriculture based, environmentally friendly, Eco smart world driven by high tech is being born! less lucrative armament studies and more survivalist simplicity based technologies are great! In a world of equal opportunities supported by technologies such as these, expensive and negative efforts on missiles and bombs will diminish, supporting more peace on earth!