We are a passionate team of technologists working hard to create products with impact. This is the first of hopefully many projects and we couldn't do it without the support of the community. Thanks for checking out our campaign and for supporting us!
@alexandrejais what if I have a different faucet system, how do you accurately track different water outputs? The sound alone isn't enough IMHO since water pressure and output volume vary a lot - wouldn't it be better to have small rings installed at the water exit? probs wuda been more efficient? also do I need one in every room? Just wondering, because I'm all about saving water waste
@orliesaurus good questions. the answers are pretty fun. We made a deliberate decision not to create a water measurement solution. Droppler is about improving awareness of your water use habits at the tap, rather than precisely measuring water used throughout your entire home. Droppler enables behavior change by reminding you of your daily use as you consume water.
We use a very similar approach to speech recognition to detect water and it turns out that detecting water with sound is about as hard as detecting different dialects: totally do-able and it’s all about the amount of data you train with. We also have a calibration system in the app. If your faucet happens to be in the small percentage that we can’t detect right off the bat, you use the app to teach Droppler how to listen to your particular water fixture.
Another design consideration we had was ease of use. Many of the current water conservation solutions were overly complicated, and difficult to install. We wanted to build something that made installation as easy as possible, so you could begin saving water right away.
We are shipping the final version of Droppler in June, but we have working units right now that we’re field testing. We’d love to give you early access and get your feedback while we are fine-tuning the data. If interested order one on Indiegogo, and refer to this thread in your comments and we’ll send you one of our training units a few weeks after the campaign closes and you can see for yourself.
@alexandrejais I'll start by saying that this is literally the nicest and most informative reply I have ever received on ProductHunt. I would totally order one on Indiegogo but I am not sure I would be able to consume less water than what I already do.
1) I hacked the bathroom flusher to consume less water than standard
2) I time showers to last 3 to 4 minutes max
3) I have a dishwasher but I wash all plates by hand like old fashioned grandma used to do
Plus I barely live at home during the day, except weekends maybe
This would be great in a family environment to teach kids and raise awareness of the issue.
but I ll back you on Indiegogo cause you're cool
how do you know what "budget" you need to set for a day. if you are asking me i have no idea. it would be a lot more helpful if you could straight up give me a better analysis and recommendation about how to use better the water, knowing most of the wasted water i have is not use in the home but outside (garden)
@ourielohayon Droppler is geared towards changing your behavior at the point of use instead of tracking whole-household usage like a water meter does. We aim to help you reduce your usage at faucets and showers. Average measurements in the US show that those sources contribute to 40% of your indoor water use. The product is based on behavioral psychology research at the Sustainability Lab in UBC that showed we automatically reduce water consumption by more than 30% if we can visualize how much we are using at that moment. That’s the goal with Droppler.
About the budget: when you set up Droppler, it asks you where you are placing it and what type of usage you want to measure. We use guidelines for California to determine the recommended usage at each source. You can use the recommendation, or tweak it higher or lower based on your own goals. The full bar of light represents the budget for a single day.
Would love to offer you early access like @orliesaurus to get your feedback as we fine-tune Droppler for delivery. If you’d like an early unit to experience it for yourself send us a message and refer to this thread. We’ll send you a test unit a few weeks after the Indiegogo campaign closes.
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