Drinking water from fog

[stefano]

Very clever idea. There's a photo of the setup at the link, they don't allow downloading or hotlinking. My bold.

SOUTH AFRICA: Drinking the fog

JOHANNESBURG, 13 April 2010 (IRIN) - Gcinikaya Mpumza, mayor of a small municipality perched high in the Drakensberg Mountains of South Africa, was saddled with a huge problem: more than half the residents did not have access to water. It was a question of money.

"We are a rural municipality with insufficient revenue, and providing water with conventional systems [piping it] in most of the areas cost a lot of money," he told IRIN.

Then he chanced upon an article about harvesting water from fog by Prof Jana Olivier, a climatologist at the School of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences at the University of South Africa.

Olivier has spent 20 years on research into harvesting water from fog, which originated in South Africa in 1901 and is now used in many mountainous regions across the world, she said.

The process is simple: fine mesh netting is stretched between two posts perpendicular to the direction of the wind, so as to trap and coalesce the water droplets in the fog. The water then runs down into a trough or gutter at the bottom of the panel and is collected and stored.

Mpumza contacted Olivier. In March 2010, with a budget of R300,000 (about US$41,000) the municipality launched a project in partnership with the university and the 180 residents of Cabazane village now have access to 40,000 litres of clean water harvested from fog and stored in tanks, rather than having to walk two kilometres to the nearest stream.