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Jesus Christ, the Bible tells us, turned water into wine. And while Ray de Vries isn’t claiming to be the son of God, the Durban sports marketer is turning air into water at the princely sum of 65 cents a litre.
De Vries’ new enterprise, named Water from Air, converts the humidity in the air into clean water using a condensation and filtration process.
A stand-alone unit – the size of an average office water cooler – produces 20 litres a day while a trailer-based larger unit produces 1 000 litres over the same period.
Both use the same technology, which has been around for about a decade, to produce alkaline water that is passed through a series of sand, charcoal and ultraviolet filters, which make it safe to drink without adding any chemicals.
While the 1 000-litre unit has been used mainly for rehydrating participants at big sporting events, including the recent Umhlanga parkrun, De Vries is in talks with government and nongovernmental organisations involved in disaster management and drought relief to use them instead of water tankers.
Totally portable – De Vries tows the unit built in the company’s Umhlanga factory behind his SUV when he takes it to events – the 1 000-litre unit comes with removable tanks, allowing a ton of water to be offloaded at a site where it can be refilled later.
It is also Eskom-proof, as its hybrid power sourcing allows it to use gas, a petrol/diesel generator and solar power.
Water is dispensed either through a tap on the side of the trailer or a hose.
The innovative idea started with De Vries trying to figure out how to get large amounts of drinking water to events like the Dusi canoe marathon.
“It really was a case of water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink. We were using water tankers for hydrating the paddlers, but these were cumbersome because of their size and the tough terrain. We also had no control over water quality or where the tankers had been used previously – and this got me thinking.”
After doing research for a couple of years, he bailed out of the public relations world and focused on the water-from-air project, using technology that existed but had not been used on a mass scale.
“We first worked on the 20-litre units but researched how best to produce the 1 000-litre unit for use in disaster situations where they rely on tankers. What happens where there is no water to tank into an area? This is part of the solution to that problem,” says De Vries.
The first 20-litre units were initially rented to doctors and dentists, but started being snapped up by guesthouses and restaurants on the lower north coast and other areas during the last festive season when water supply to several holiday towns – including Ballito – dried up.
“You’d be amazed at the customers we get – from dentists to tattoo artists. Every litre we produce is one litre less being removed from the water supply,” he says.
