- Sustainability Problem: Excessive Household Water Use in Water Scarcity Regions
- Water used in showers can be up to 17% of household water use. More water is dispensed by the shower than is needed to get clean and the water is then removed as waste through the sewage system. The status quo leads to a) depletion of water in water scarce regions, 2) expensive water and heating costs (to heat the water) for the property owner and 3) waste water can contribute to overloaded sewage systems.
- Solution: OrbSys Showers
- OrbSys showers recycle the water used during each shower, at the end of the shower, the water from that session is discarded as regular wastewater.
- By recycling water in the shower, only 25% of water used during a typical shower will be consumed.
- Further, the cost to heat the water will be lower because the recycled water retains its heat and we don’t need to heat the 75% of the typical wastewater that is saved by the new system.
- Stakeholders
- Regional governments in water scarce regions
- Homeowners (although they will become more important stakeholders when the price comes down and the pricing model makes sense for less frequently used showers. Currently price is probably around $5000.)
- Institutional customers that have a high volume of shower use: Spas, hotels, pools, schools, gyms, prisons, colleges, etc
- First Three Steps
- Market the benefits and business case (annual water and energy costs savings) to institutional users
- Invest in R&D to figure out how to lower per unit cost/price to enter the residential homeowner market.
- Align product with various govt grant programs for energy saving devices and provide this info to consumers (so that they can purchase the product subsidized if possible).
http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelkanellos/2015/10/12/the-tesla-of-showers/#765cd2545270
makeasmartcity 
I think this is a really smart, but simple technology that could lead to significant cost savings and reductions in water consumption. It will be an especially impactful technology if more water intensive users, such as hotels could be involved in implementing it at a large scale. However, more R&D will need to be carried out to lower the cost to make the technology more affordable to a larger market.
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Showering as long as you want? That sounds amazing. Though the technology does have a steep upfront cost. It would be interesting see on how long the return investment would be for an average family size household. Moreover, I agree with the author, that this would be highly resourceful for areas that are struck by drought.
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Thank you for sharing! This is a great technology. It has saved more than 1.2 million liters of water already. People don’t even realized how much water and energy we use to shower — I am certainly guilty. A normal 10-minute shower uses 20 gallons of water, versus using this technology which would use only 1.5 gallons in the same amount of time.
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