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Gadget Lab

Airdrop Pulls Water From Air to Irrigate Plants

With Airdrop, you'll be able to extract water from the air until the Imperial Forces destroy your moisture farm

Ed Linacre’s Airdrop is a simple device that literally sucks water out of thin air. Airdrop — not to be confused with Apple’s excruciating new file-transfer service of the same name — could allow moisture farms like those run by Luke Skywalker’s Uncle Owen.

Airdrop consists of a mast-like tube with a wind-powered turbine that sucks air down into a coiled metal pipe. The air descends under the earth and cools until it hits 100% humidity and the water starts to drip out. Linacre installed one in his mother’s back yard in Australia and it pulled out a liter of water in a day.

The units also have storage tanks, from where they pump out the water into underground irrigation systems.

The units are small, can be self installed and are easy to repair while still in the ground. Linacre sees farmers installing fleets of them in fields, where they could sit and water the plants with no human help. The pumps are even solar-powered, a great idea in deserts.

The Airdrop has just won a James Dyson award. Hopefully this will accelerate its progress into the driest parts of the world. And if you are a moisture farmer, and you end up using these, I have a protocol droid you might be interested in. You might think you have no need for a protocol droid, but this droid’s first job was programing binary load lifters very similar to your Airdrop irrigators in most respects.

Airdrop Irrigation [James Dyson Awards via Kat Hannaford]