Before it’s first shipment date, the company behind the first ‘self filling water bottle’ Fontus reached the Top 4 of Austrian start ups 2016.
The Austrian national TV channel ORF2 announced that the government will invest €185m to support the top 1,000 companies in the long list.
Fontus Airo is a dehumidifier, accumulating water from droplets from humid air and condenses it into a remineralisation chamber. It has a fan that is powered by a solar mat. The Ryde model is designed specially for cyclists as their air stream created when riding to press humid air into the system.
Fontus claimed that their innovation will work most effectively in hot seasons that cover a number of areas with economic water scarcity.
Although this product has no desalination feature, we feel it is important to cover other water innovations that amass global audiences for both positive and negative reasons. The Fontus crowd funding campaign raised $345,000+ (1152% of their target) and is expected to start shipping in April 2017.
The campaign created controversy on Reddit as users argued the bottle to be a scam and that it violates a law of thermodynamics.
We will be paying close attention to the reactions from the 1,439 backers in April.
In the video below, Dave of the Electronics Engineers Video Blog applies the Latent Heat Equation to what Fontus claims their product will do. The best case output of the technology is 150 minutes to produce 1 litre of water in the perfect conditions of 40°C and 90% humidity.
Dave echoes our opinion that a number of water projects that capture public attention (and funding) are style over substance, and that his is typical output of a design school students whose concept can be debunked by a back-of-the-envelope calculation.