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Personal Water Purifiers There is a very large market for water deionization and purification at a small scale at the homesite or commercial site. Small "under the sink" units have large and growing market share. A number of consumers want to sterilize and/or deionize water at their point of use. People with heart conditions avoid water softeners because they need to absolutely avoid sodium. People who object to fluoridation want to take fluorides out at their point of use. All such consumer desires provide a ready potential for small scale, home or personal water purifiers. There are a number of dimensions of the personal water purification market that are important from the Reticle perspective. For example, backpackers, outdoor enthusiasts, skiers, etc. presently are relegated to carry large quantities of water that they draw from a known, safe water source to their point of use. Such individuals cannot be sure that water in an area of use is not contaminated with troublesome biological agents, organics, metals, or ions, and they want to remove them at the (mobile) point of use rather than lugging the water in from a known clean source. They want portable purifiers that work reliably in the field. To date, small activated carbon filters are available to partially "purify" water at the source. Such devices ultimately saturate and must be replaced at significant cost and inconvenience to the consumer, and such devices may not be particularly effective with regard to biological agents or heavy metals. Small, highly portable, lightweight, regeneratable, battery powered Reticle Carbon CDI cells are ideal for use in this application. Indeed, in terms of size, such units are no larger than typical laboratory scale units in terms of volume, weight, bulk, and throughput (shoebox or smaller in size). We have shown in laboratory tests that a 1.2 V potential is sufficient to clean surprisingly large amounts of water by residential and small commercial standards in a small unit. Small conductivity probes are available to indicate to the user when the electrodes are "full" and must be regenerated. Simple electronics are integrated into the units to ground or reverse the electrodes when the sensors indicate the electrodes are fully adsorbed charged while wastewater is being flushed through the units to cleanse them. This will ensure the unit is able to handle the personal drinking needs of an individual or small group such as a backpacking group. Units could be made to fit in recreational vehicles, and they would be powered from the battery storage onboard the vehicle. In addition, we could conceive of placing an organic mineralization process on the front end to ensure biological sterilization and some disease prevention. Small units that would be usable for an individual would derive substantial benefit for the enthusiast. The units could be priced at premium levels, for this is a rather price insensitive market. (Have you priced golf clubs lately?) In addition, it is probably true that few units will have to be repurchased in the future because they are so simple and reliable. However, there may be an aftermarket for clean Reticle Carbon material refills for the unit. There will be a large premium on cleanliness in such units, and if they sit around during a winter season people might want to buy new carbon every spring for example. Outdoor markets might be relatively small (perhaps in the $10 million range), but would be a relatively easy market to break into with a revolutionary new approach to personal water purification. Success in that market could leverage success in larger distributed water purification markets. The larger distributed purification units are the home, "under the sink" units. While many urban water systems in the United States are really quite pure and quite free of minerals, organics, and biological agents, many rural, wellwater fed venues are not. For examples, most farms and ranches are fed by wellwater or surface water, and the qualities of such waters can be quite poor. Realistically, such wellwaters have a "bell curve" of ion content, many ions of which are pernicious and dangerous to human health. Many rural households have no choice but to drink the unhealthy wellwater (or in some cases surface water) to which they have access, yet they want to improve the quality of their water and of their health. Just as importantly, many agricultural venues are providing this low quality water to their livestock. While the precise health and productivity consequences of providing substandard water to livestock might or might not be known, most assuredly if pure water were inexpensive as it might be with Reticle technology and if the economics of a larger scale purification system were as attractive as Reticle, one would expect farmers to embrace a larger, continuous system for their livestock. Saving visits from the veterinarian has high economic value to farmers and ranchers. |
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