Activated carbon adsorbers are used to recover dilute solvent vapors from process streams before they are vented to the atmosphere. Determining the working capacity of an adsorber, or estimating the amount of adsorbent needed for an application, relies upon either crude Miles of thumb or rigorous modeling of the process. As an alternative, an approximate solution to the material and energy balances for steaming a fixed bed adsorber is proposed. The new design method reduces the mathematics of modeling steam regeneration from multivariate calculus to algebra. It also permits evaluating vendors’ claims of superior performance for their adsorbents, optimizing steam consumption for regeneration, and evaluating different regeneration conditions. Predicted working capacities are compared to experimental results.