A new "ground-breaking" prototype system that turns sea water into drinking water using just the power of the Sun has been successfully tested in India, its makers claim.
The UK-based firm Desolenator uses a patented technology to transform salt water and other dirty waters, from inland sources, into pure distilled water.
Capable of producing up to 15 litres a day, the system requires no power supply, other than the Sun, and has no moving parts or filters, making it incredibly easy to maintain.
"The unit uses no consumables and a one-off payment will provide water for households for up to 20 years, providing a vital source of water independence to those who need it most," the company said in a statement.
While the team have assembled a fully working prototype, the company has launched an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign to to take it from prototype to production.
"We have already developed the Desolenator in the UK and tested it in India through 5 prototype iterations. It works! And our water tastes great! according to the company's Indiegogo page.
"We want to start user testing in South India, and then production of the Desolenator. We want to have a final product ready to ship by October 2015!" the company wrote on the page.
"Climate change and population growth are setting the stage for a global water crisis. A massive 97 per cent of the world's water is salt water and our plan to tap into this valuable and available resource to disrupt the global water crisis in an unprecedented way," William Janssen, CEO, said.
The process is called desalination and today while 0.7 per cent of the world's water comes from desalination, existing technology is expensive, inefficient and disproportionally drains 0.5 per cent of the world's global energy supply, according to the company.
"Desolenator is different from existing desalination and home water technologies - it harnesses solar power in an elegant new way, maximising the amount of solar radiation that hits the technologies surface area through a combination of thermal, electrical and heat exchange, creating pure clean drinking water through the power of the sun," said Janssen.
