Its not every day a CEO shows up at your house to help install your new water efficiency device. So a huge shout out and kudos to Ryan Kim, CEO Phyn, who did exactly this, rolling up his sleeves to help me find the best location for the Phyn water use monitoring device, explaining how best to install it and get it up and running. Ryan happened to be in Ireland with his family for a vacation and in a show of true dedication popped over to help me out one morning while passing through. We had chatted about this at BlueTech Forum a few months prior and the timing was very serendipitous.
They say what’s measured, gets managed, and its nowhere more true than with household water use. Most of us have very little idea.
I can now say, with some confidence and accuracy, that my 17 year old son, takes a shower each morning like clockwork at about 7.40 am, for an average of about 9-10 minutes and uses 30-35 litres in the process. He appears to benefit from this habitual routine, emerging a much transformed individual, not least of all in mood, and so we deem it to be water-well-spent from which we all benefit!
The device is good at tracking water use and has a built in shut-off valve, that shuts of the water supply if there is an irregular event. This has proved useful on a few occasions, when I left the bath-tub running and forgot about it, and it shut off the valve automatically. Not before I had used up about 400 liters of water mind you!
I am re-learning a lot of what I learned earlier in my career, during industrial wastewater pilots about ‘dirty-data’. There is no perfect data, never.
Some days, there’s no one home, another day, I leave the tub running, or someone does 3 loads of laundry. The App does a good job of tracking daily water use and giving you a visual, across the month, and month-on-month.
There is an additional Beta feature, called Water Use Plus in the App, which I was very excited about, and still use, which attempts to categorise different types of water use, based up on the water finger-print based on both time and volume, which correlates to rate of flow, as each device, will have a unique draw pattern.
Eg. 3.2 liters in 43 seconds, that’s the toilet.
Based on my experience, I must say this Beta test feature, is definitely for the Innovators, not yet Early Adopters. I need to watch it like a hawk to eliminate noise and I have run the dishwasher and washing machine during the night, to eliminate the signal noise from other sources of water use, such as the tap.
That is how I was able to establish the dishwasher used 12 litres, washing machine, 45 litres and my sons showers, 30-35 liters. There is however a lot of messy data and I think the 50L Home Coalition recent pilot in LA, also had a similar experience. Now, its a case of continuing to analyse the data to identify where the opportunities for savings are. The big aha so far, is we dont seem to use that much water, maybe 80-90 l/p/d.
