This $749 device turns seawater into drinking water

If your city’s water supply gets shut off in a disaster, extra bottled water in your cupboard won’t last long. A startup founded by former SpaceX engineers proposes…

If your city’s water supply gets shut off in a disaster, extra bottled water in your cupboard won’t last long. A startup founded by former SpaceX engineers proposes a different option today: a portable desalination device that can quickly purify almost any natural source of water nearby, including seawater.

The $749 apparatus, called Access, is roughly the size of a large toolbox and is aimed at anyone who needs access to water off the grid, from campers and sailors to people who don’t have reliable access to clean drinking water. Traditional desalination often involves massive infrastructure, like a desalination plant in San Diego that sprawls over 6 acres. While smaller, portable desalination technology is already on the market, it’s also expensive.

“Developing nations have essentially been priced out of this technology,” says Jonathan Criss, CEO and cofounder of the startup, Vital Lyfe. Marine “watermakers,” for example, typically cost thousands of dollars. Existing systems can also be difficult to maintain, particularly when it comes to replacing filters. Vital Lyfe’s founders set out to make desalination cheaper and simpler. They started with reverse osmosis, a common method that uses pressure to push water through a membrane that filters out salt and other impurities.

Then, working from first principles, they reconsidered each component of the system, eliminating unnecessary parts to reduce costs and make repairs easier. They also designed the system for mass manufacturing. “We always say that we design the manufacturing line before the product,” says Criss. The factory, not far from SpaceX’s plant in the L.A. area, is designed for high-rate production.

“In theory, based off of what we’ve designed this factory for, you can build more desal devices over the course of a month here than currently exist globally,” he says. A hose connects one end of the device to a water source, and a push of a button turns it on. A high-pressure pump, powered by a battery, pushes the water through a membrane inside.