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There is no pipe running to this spot. No well. No rain has fallen in four days. And yet there it is — water, beading down a fine mesh I propped up in the yard before bed, dripping into a trough below. Clean water, pulled out of the open air overnight while I slept, from a setup I built for about twelve dollars at one trip to the hardware store.
In this video I show you exactly how to build it: a piece of fine-weave shade-cloth mesh stretched drum-tight on a simple PVC frame, tilted at the right angle, faced into the wind, with a gutter trough below to catch what runs down. No motor. No electricity. No moving parts. You set it up before sunset, walk away, and come back at first light to see what the night gave you.
I am Amish, and I will be honest with you the whole way through. This is not my people's invention. It belongs to old peoples all over the world — the fog catchers of the Canary Islands, the dew structures of the desert, the modern fog nets of Chile and Morocco. I tell you that plainly. But it lives by the oldest rule my grandfather ever taught me — waste nothing, not even the
https://eliasyoder.com
There is no pipe running to this spot. No well. No rain has fallen in four days. And yet there it is — water, beading down a fine mesh I propped up in the yard before bed, dripping into a trough below. Clean water, pulled out of the open air overnight while I slept, from a setup I built for about twelve dollars at one trip to the hardware store.
In this video I show you exactly how to build it: a piece of fine-weave shade-cloth mesh stretched drum-tight on a simple PVC frame, tilted at the right angle, faced into the wind, with a gutter trough below to catch what runs down. No motor. No electricity. No moving parts. You set it up before sunset, walk away, and come back at first light to see what the night gave you.
I am Amish, and I will be honest with you the whole way through. This is not my people's invention. It belongs to old peoples all over the world — the fog catchers of the Canary Islands, the dew structures of the desert, the modern fog nets of Chile and Morocco. I tell you that plainly. But it lives by the oldest rule my grandfather ever taught me — waste nothing, not even the
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00:00There is no pipe running to this spot, no well, no rain. It has not rained in four days.
00:07And yet look here, at the bottom of this screen I have leaned up in the yard. Water. Beads of
00:13it,
00:14running down the mesh and dripping, slow and steady, into the trough below. Clean water,
00:20pulled right out of the open air overnight while I slept. And the thing that is catching it cost
00:25me about $12 to build out of parts from one trip to the hardware store. My name is Elias Yoda.
00:33I am
00:33Amish. I farm in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and I have spoken to you before about catching the
00:39rain that falls free from the sky. Today I want to show you something even older and stranger,
00:45how to catch the water that is in the very air around you, even when no rain is falling at
00:51all.
00:51Now, I am going to be honest with you right at the start, the way I always am, because this
00:57is a
00:57thing that gets badly oversold on the internet, and I will not be part of that. This is real,
01:03it is ancient, and it is wonderful. But how much water you get depends enormously on where you live
01:10and what the air is doing. And I am going to tell you plainly the difference between the modest amount
01:15most folks will catch and the large amount only some folks in the right places will catch. I would
01:22rather you build this knowing the truth and be pleased than build it expecting a river and be
01:27disappointed. This is not my people's invention. It belongs to the whole world and to a great many
01:34old peoples. But it lives by the rule my grandfather lived by. Waste nothing, not even the water hanging
01:41invisible in the air. Stay with me. Let me start with the simple fact that makes this possible,
01:47because you already know it. You have seen it your whole life and just never thought to use it.
01:52The air around you, everywhere, all the time, is carrying water. Not rain, invisible water,
01:59vapor, floating in the air. You cannot see it, but it is there. And you have watched it come out
02:06of
02:06the air a thousand times. The cold glass of water on a summer day that goes wet and beaded on
02:11the
02:12outside. That water did not leak through the glass. It came out of the air, because the air touched
02:18something cold. The dew on the grass every single morning, soaking your boots before the sun climbs,
02:24nobody poured that on. It came out of the air overnight. A spider's web heavy with droplets at dawn.
02:31The same thing every time. Here is the rule behind it. There is a temperature they call the dew point.
02:37When the air touches a surface that is colder than that point, the water vapor in the air cannot stay
02:43vapor anymore. It has nowhere to go but out. It turns to liquid. It condenses, beads up, and drips.
02:51That is all dew is. That is all the wet glass is. So what you are going to build is
02:57simply a big surface for
02:58that to happen on. A large area of fine mesh that cools down in the night air, so that the
03:04water in
03:04the air handing past it has somewhere to land and let go. You tilt it, so that as the droplets
03:10form,
03:10they run downhill by gravity into a trough at the bottom. No motor. No electricity. No moving parts.
03:18You set it up before bed, and it works while you sleep, off nothing but the night air and the
03:23cool.
03:23Here is the parts list, and I want to be straight with you. This truly is all of it. You
03:29need a piece
03:30of fine mesh about 6 feet by 6 feet. The shade cloth they sell at any garden center or hardware
03:35store
03:36works, and it costs around $5. Now here is the important part. The tighter the weave, the better.
03:43You want something closer to a window screen than to a loose net. The mesh is doing all the real
03:48work.
03:49It is the surface the water forms on, so do not skimp on getting a fine, tight weave.
03:55You need 4 lengths of PVC pipe, the inch-wide kind, to make a frame to stretch the mesh on,
04:01a couple of dollars less if you have scrap. You need zip ties, which you likely have in a drawer
04:06already. You need a length of plastic gutter for the trough at the bottom to catch the water,
04:11$3 or $4, and a few bricks or rocks to prop it at the right angle, which you surely have
04:17lying about.
04:17That is $8 to $14 all told. No special tools beyond something to cut the PVC, and the hardware store
04:26will often cut it for you for nothing if you ask kindly. Now let me show you how to put
04:32it together,
04:32because there are a few small things that make all the difference between catching water and catching
04:39nothing. First, the frame. Join your 4 PVC lengths into a rectangle, roughly 4 feet tall,
04:47and 3 feet wide. You are not building furniture. It just needs to hold its shape and stand up to
04:54a little wind
04:55without folding. Zip tie the corners if you do not want to fuss with fittings. It will hold fine.
05:02Then stretch your mesh across that frame, and here is the key. Pull it tight. Tight as a drum skin.
05:10You zip tie it down every 6 inches all the way around, pulling out every sag.
05:17Why so tight? Because a sagging mesh lets the water pool in the low spots instead of running down,
05:25and pooled water just sits there and evaporates away when the sun comes up, and you collect nothing.
05:32Tight mesh sheds every drop down to the trough. So pull it drum tight.
05:39Now, the single most common mistake, the one nearly everyone makes the first time.
05:46They lay the thing flat on the ground, like a table. Do not do that. Flat means the water pools
05:54on top,
05:55and burns off in the morning sun, and you get almost nothing. You must tilt it. Lean it at an
06:03angle,
06:03somewhere between 15 and 30 degrees off straight up, like a screen leaned against a wall at a shallow lean.
06:12Tilted, every droplet that forms rolls down by itself, reaches the bottom edge, and drips off into the trough.
06:21Set your gutter trough right under that low edge to catch the drips. Prop the whole thing up on your
06:29bricks.
06:30Now, placement, which matters more than folks think, so listen close to these three.
06:36First, face it into the wind, not sideways to the breeze, not with its back to it, but straight into
06:44it.
06:44You want the air moving through the mesh, not sliding around it, because it is the air passing through
06:52and touching all those cool fibers that gives up its water.
06:57Go out at dusk and feel which way the breeze is coming from, and point the front of your frame
07:03right at it.
07:05Second, get it up off the ground a little. Even a foot up makes a real difference,
07:11because the air right down at ground level tends to be drier and a touch warmer,
07:16and you want the cooler, damper air that sits a little higher.
07:21Third, keep it out of where the morning sun hits first.
07:25You want the dew to gather all through the night and still be sitting in your trough when you come
07:31out at dawn,
07:32not burned off by the first sunbeam before you are even awake.
07:37A shaded spot on the west side of something that the morning sun reaches last is ideal.
07:44Set it up before sunset. Come back at first light. That is the whole routine.
07:51While you sleep, the temperature drops, the mesh goes cold, the air passing through crosses that dew point,
07:59and the water comes out and runs down into your trough.
08:04Something for nothing by morning.
08:07Now here is the honest part, the part I promised you, and the part the breathless videos skip,
08:14because it is the difference between being pleased and being fooled.
08:19There are really two different things going on here, and how much water you get depends entirely on which one
08:26you have where you live.
08:28The first is plain dew, what forms on an ordinary clear, cool night, the same dew that wets your grass.
08:37A mesh like this, on an average night with no fog, will give you a modest amount.
08:44Realistically, somewhere from a cupful to maybe a quart or two from a screen this size.
08:50Enough to be real, enough to be a help, enough to keep a person going in a pinch,
08:55but not enough to supply a whole household.
08:59On my first night, in middling conditions, I caught a bit over half a quart.
09:04That is honest, and that is what most of you, in most places, on most nights, will get.
09:11It is a genuine, free, useful trickle.
09:15It is not a faucet.
09:18The second thing is fog, and this is where the big numbers come from.
09:22If you live where real fog rolls in, along a coast, in a river valley, up in the mountains, where
09:29the clouds come down and sit, that is a different matter entirely.
09:34Fog is not just damp air.
09:37It is air already full of tiny water droplets, and when that fog blows through your mesh, the mesh combs
09:44the water right out of it,
09:46and the yield can be many times greater, gallons, not cups, from a screen this size on a good foggy
09:53night.
09:54The famous water catchers of the world, the ones in the dry coastal mountains of Chile, in Morocco, in the
10:01Canary Islands,
10:02they are catching fog, not mere dew, and that is why they can water whole villages.
10:09So here is the plain truth, and I want it to be the thing you remember.
10:14If you live in foggy country, this can be a serious source of water, and you should scale it up
10:20and take it seriously.
10:21If you live where it is just ordinary humid or dry, this is a modest, free supplement, a fine thing
10:29to know, a real help in a dry spell or a hard time,
10:34a wonderful thing to teach your children, but not your whole water supply.
10:39Anyone who tells you a little screen in a dry backyard will water a family of four is selling you
10:46a dream.
10:47Know which one you have, build for it, and you will not be disappointed.
10:53Now, let me speak about drinking it, because this matters and I will not gloss over it.
10:59Water from the air starts out fairly clean, cleaner in some ways than water from the ground,
11:04because it is not run through soil or pipes, so it skips a lot of what fouls surface water.
11:11But it is not pure just because it fell out of the air.
11:15It can pick up dust off the mesh, or, if you are near a road or a town or any
11:21industry, it can carry traces of whatever is in that air.
11:25So, you do not just drink it straight from the trough and trust it. You clean it first. Always.
11:32The simple old filter is easy and costs about nothing.
11:36Take a plastic bottle, cut the bottom off, and turn it upside down so the neck points down.
11:42Inside, layer it from the neck up. First, a wad of cotton cloth, then a layer of activated charcoal,
11:51the kind from a pet store, the same charcoal I have spoken of before.
11:55Then a layer of clean, fine sand, then another wad of cotton on top.
12:01Pour your collected water in the top and let it drip slow out the neck into a clean jar.
12:07That catches the dust and the charcoal pulls out most of what you cannot see.
12:13And then, to be truly safe, especially if you will give it to children or you are anywhere near town,
12:20you finish it.
12:21The surest way is to boil it a good few minutes. Boiling kills what a filter cannot.
12:28Filter it, then boil it, and you have water as clean as any from the tap, likely cleaner.
12:34Do not skip that step out of laziness. Free water is a blessing, but only if it does not make
12:40your family sick.
12:42Honest is better than careless, every time.
12:46Now I want to take a moment because this is the part that matters, and it is older than you
12:51think.
12:52Men have been doing this for a very long time.
12:54Long before there was a pipe to a house, people in dry lands built things to wring water out of
13:01the air and the fog.
13:03There are old stone structures up in the high places of South America that were built, the learned folk now
13:09believe,
13:10not to hold water but to make it, to gather the mountain fog.
13:14There are fog nets that have watered islands for generations.
13:19There are ancient works in the desert that puzzled people for ages until they realized those were built to catch
13:26the dew.
13:27The knowledge is old, and it is spread all over the world among people who had no choice but to
13:33be clever about water.
13:34And then, somewhere in the last hundred years, as the pipe came to every house and the tap simply worked,
13:42we stopped.
13:43We did not need it, so we forgot it.
13:46The old knowing did not die.
13:48It just got set on a high shelf and left to gather dust because the tap was easier and someone
13:54else was handling it.
13:55And here is the quiet truth about why you never heard of it.
13:59It is not that it was hidden by villains.
14:03It is simpler and almost worse than that.
14:06There is no money in it.
14:10A man who leans a $12 screen in his yard and catches his own water owes nobody anything and buys
14:18nobody's product ever again.
14:21You cannot sell a monthly bill for the dew.
14:24You cannot put a brand on the night air.
14:27So nobody advertises it, nobody teaches it, and a whole people forgot that the air itself is full of water
14:37free for the catching.
14:38The companies will gladly sell you a machine that does this with a motor and a fan for $3,000.
14:45But they will never tell you a spider's web does the same thing for free.
14:52My people never lost the habit because we never fully gave ourselves over to the pipe and the bill in
15:00the first place.
15:01A family that can catch its own water from the rain and even from the air is a family that
15:08is harder to put in a corner.
15:11That is the whole of it.
15:14The water is up there in the air right now, over your head, more of it than in all the
15:20rivers on earth.
15:22Almost nobody is catching it.
15:25You can be one of the few who does.
15:29So here is what I want you to do.
15:31This weekend, make one trip to the hardware store.
15:36A piece of fine, tight, shade cloth mesh.
15:40Four lengths of inch PVC.
15:43A bit of plastic gutter.
15:46You have the zip ties and the bricks.
15:49Twelve dollars, give or take.
15:51Build the frame, stretch the mesh drum tight, tilt it 15 to 30 degrees, point it into the evening wind,
16:00set the trough beneath the low edge, and prop it up off the ground in a spot the morning sun
16:06reaches last.
16:08Set it out before sunset and go to bed.
16:12Come out at first light and see what the night gave you.
16:16And remember the honest truth as you do it.
16:20A cup or a quart on an ordinary night, real water but a modest help, and gallons only if you
16:27live where the fog comes.
16:29Build it for the water you actually have and filter and boil before you drink.
16:36Do that, and you will have caught water out of thin air with your own hands for twelve dollars, the
16:43way clever people have done for a thousand years.
16:47Tell me in the comments below, do you live where the fog rolls in, or where the air runs dry?
16:54And if you build one of these, come back and tell me what you caught on the first night, and
16:59in what kind of weather, because the more of you who report your conditions and your results, the more all
17:05of us learn what works where.
17:07I read every single one, and that sharing is the whole reason I do this.
17:14Next time, since we have been speaking of water, I am going to show you the old way my family
17:19stores the water we catch so it stays sweet and clean for months without going stale or growing anything.
17:26The cool, the dark, the covered crock and cistern, the way it was kept before there was a tap.
17:34It is the natural next step after today.
17:38Until then.
17:40Catch what the air gives you, waste nothing, and remember.
17:44The people who built this country with their hands knew things we are only just starting to remember.
17:50I can't tell you, it is anto-numper.
17:51If you don't have to know the fact that there is a center of the sea, this is a center
17:51of nations, and there are many different environments.
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