colorado clyde said:
At the risk of
If you do the math that come out to 1.2 gallons of water/ton in 24 hours.
Some household dehumidifiers have a hard time pulling that much water out of the air in the same time period.
How is your reading comprehension?
First off!
I was making an analogy to better visualize how hygroscopic BP is.
Gallons of water/ton = gallons of water per ton of black powder.
Imagine two rooms; one filled with a ton of BP.
The other room has your run of the mill Wal-Mart dehumidifier in it.
We will assume that Britmoothys test was done on a humid day.
The black powder should absorb about as much moisture respectively, as what the dehumidifier will actually produce.
I have spent many years using a small household dehumidifier and have never seen one capable of producing 8+ gallons of water a day.
Let me know when you figure out the rest of your math mistakes :rotf:
My reading comprehension is fine, as you will see, and I will show you the mistake of
your math: you've assumed that the relationship of the weight of the water removed from the air and the total weight of the desiccant (in this case, the black powder), is linear. You did a direct proportion of 0.5:100 = x:2000, with x equating to 10 lbs of water. Then, you simply converted 10 lbs into gallons using 8.345404 lbs/gal, to come up with your result of 1.2 gals of water removed from the air using 2000 lbs of black powder. My reading comprehension is pretty solid.
Strictly for the sake of argument, let's agree that the relationship is, in fact, linear and that your extrapolation is valid.
The black powder should absorb about as much moisture respectively, as what the dehumidifier will actually produce.
I completely agree with this statement, however, you cannot simply compare your derived amount of extracted water (1.2 gal/day) to that of your many years' experience with dehumidifiers. Sorry, friend, we need something a bit more empirical than that, such as a known extraction rating for such units. You are saying as if it were
always the case, that a ton of BP in a room on a high-humidity day WILL IN FACT extract 1.2 gallons of water over the course of 24 hours, while maintaining that a standard dehumidifier of unknown capacity rating may struggle to remove that much water from the air over the same time frame, strictly by your experience.
Please understand here, that this is extremely simplified for the sake of argument concerning your original premise, that the BP is a better remover of water in air than a commercial dehumidifier.
Again, for the sake of argument, let's assume that your 1.2gal per ton of BP per day result is 100% valid, no questions asked. In your room with 1 ton of BP, we also MUST assume that the surrounding air in the room is so humid that it contains at least 1.2 gallons of water vapor. BUT, we also have to agree that the room with the Wal-Mart dehumidifier also has at least 1.2 gallons of water in the air, fair enough?
So by your assertion, BP has a capacity of 1.2 gallons of water removal per day, which equates to 9.6 pints of water removal per day. And the lowest-capacity Wal-Mart unit is rated at 25 pints per day. Hmm... And, since you're a fan of linearity in complex environments, let's assume linearity of water removal rates: 0.4 pints per hour (9.6 pints per 24 hours) for the 2000 lbs of black powder desiccant, and 1.042 pints per hour (25 pints per 24 hours) for the Wal-Mart unit. That means that while it takes the 24 hour period for the BP desiccant to remove 9.6 pints of water, it takes the Wal-Mart unit 9:12:58 (h:mm:ss) to remove the same amount of water. That doesn't sound like "struggling" to me. Obviously, the higher-capacity units will do this even faster.
I have spent many years using a small household dehumidifier and have never seen one capable of producing 8+ gallons of water a day.
You mean the 70 pint/day model? Check your model's capacity. If you're unit is installed in an area of
consistent high relative humidity (consistent being the key word here) you would be dumping the capacity of the unit every day.
The pesky reality with those doggone dehumidifiers is that they actually do what they are designed to do. With the highest rated units, you never empty 8.75 gallons of water after the end of a 24 hour period (starting from empty) SIMPLY because there is not that much water vapor in the room. If you did, the water that you're unit is removing from the room is being replaced at the same or higher rate, indicating a huge high-humidity air inlet. After all, what good is a dehumidifier if it doesn't reduce the relative humidity in the room?
Now you do realize that the main factor here (among many others) is the fact that the surface area of the desiccant that is exposed to the humid atmosphere would have more impact upon its efficacy than its its weight, so the direct-proportion linear weight removed:total weight relationship that you used to derive your water removal rate is questionable, at best. Only a ton of black powder exposed to sauna-like relative humidity levels would prove your hypothesized value out. As they say, one test is worth a thousand opinions. That being said, I would bet my best flintlock rifle that the capacity of 1 ton of BP would come back MUCH LESS than 9.6 pints per day.
I know that this is way
ff , but thanks for playing!
:haha: