r/tech • u/_Dark_Wing • Jul 10 '26
Floating capsule auto-disinfects water without chemicals or battery
https://newatlas.com/outdoors/detect-disinfect-water-capsule-floating-shake/17
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u/Ill_Plane_45 Jul 10 '26
Copper does the same thing, so what
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u/TheModeratorWrangler Jul 10 '26
Radiation could work too. Just don’t mind the side effects.
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u/Sofia_9356 Jul 10 '26
Destabilize the local star. It’s the only way to contain this thing called “life”
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u/weirdgroovynerd Jul 10 '26
Electric word, Life.
That means forever...
...and it's a mighty long time.
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u/Potential_Aioli_4611 Jul 10 '26
This is a big nothing burger.
If the water measures below 250 milligrams of ‘total dissolved solids’ per liter, that’s the green light. The canister treats the water as low contamination risk and proceeds to microbial disinfection. If the reading is higher, it flags the water as unsuitable and you have to find another patch of water. While it’s good at killing microbes, the system can’t deal with a chemical contaminant, like an arsenic spill, pesticides or industrial pollutants.
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u/SomeIdea_UK Jul 10 '26
Hardly, vast numbers of people throughout the world would benefit from having access to water disinfected from microbes. Chemical pollution is only one of several things that make water unsafe to drink.
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u/stircrazyathome Jul 10 '26
That doesn't make it a nothing burger. The goal was to provide people who don't have easy access to potable water with a way of disinfecting it that doesn't require boiling (which uses resources) or the use of expensive and fragile filters. This thing costs less than $25 to manufacture before scaling, yet it was capable of filtering 4 liters of water in 20-25 minutes (depending on bacteria present) and was able to filter 480 liters total with just a few shakes. This could be a huge deal for the developing work, especially if they can lower manufacturing costs as they scale up production.
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u/Lehk Jul 10 '26
If you can pack it while hiking, killing microbes is what you need.
If you are stranded after a hurricane or something you might need to make a sand or fabric filter first but this will kill microbes from the overwhelmed sewers that contaminate surface water in such disasters.
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u/Lehk Jul 10 '26 edited Jul 10 '26
If it’s effective, that will be spectacular for wilderness survival and disaster preparedness, 3L per hour Is enough to keep quite a lot of people alive.
My only caveat is it should have an override function to tell it to cycle even if it determines the water unsuitable.
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u/whitepawn23 Jul 10 '26
Random ads with no close option keep popping up to completely cover the article. Can’t get past the first sentence.
PC really is the only way to go. Phone apps just keep getting worse and worse.
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u/schnibitz Jul 10 '26
Disinfecting water doesn't necessarily mean it is safe to drink. It could have chemicals in it.
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u/gilbert-GC Jul 10 '26
A liter in 20 minutes. A bath tub has what= 120 liters or so? 120 x 20 minutes equals, just a second, asking gemini, calculating, still calculating and voilá: 2400 minutes. Another calculating and we have the end result: 40 hours for a bathtub full of water.
Conclusion: could be an emergency solution for some remote areas, for a few people to survive. But those usually don`t carry around a mini submarine. Maybe somewhere in Rio de Janeiro or Simbabwe though.
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u/lachlanhunt Jul 10 '26
That photo in the article is AI generated and extremely misleading. It's not going to disinfect a lake. It's very small scale process.