For the IIT-Madras incubated startup EarthFokus, saving water is not just a motto, it actually helps people to do so by making water-saving nozzles. The startup designs and manufactures water savers that save more than 95% water from your existing tap. Its patent-pending atomisation technology to convert normal flow to fine mist creates one layer of water over the surface that’s more than enough to wash hands.
Arun Subramanian, founder & CEO, EarthFokus, says the startup was an accidental venture, when his mentor during his engineering study days, asked him for a water saver to be attached to her tap. “She told me she wanted to save maximum water and instead of buying one, she asked me to make one,” he said. Though the product was a basic one initially, Subramanian worked on it for another two months and came up with a water saver product. His professor told him that the product could be commercialised and thus Earthfokus was floated.
Washing your hands is perhaps the most crucial thing you can do to stay safe during the current times. That doesn’t mean we can waste water every time we wash our hands. An average handwash can waste up to 1 litre of water and average number of washes per person in a day has increased from four times to 15 times a day since the pandemic started.
In the beginning, sales were not that great. In early 2019, the startup had given a demo to one of the biggest IT companies. “We went over there, they had given us some feed back and we made some corrections to make the product foolproof. Exactly one month ahead of the water scarcity that hit Chennai in 2019, the company installed the product in all its offices in the city and the savings were huge,” he says.
By the end of 2019, the company got incubated at IIT-Madras. It has today connected with some of the big corporates for its products. “For B2B, our biggest marketing is by word-of-mouth. R&D is core for our company and we make quality products. For instance, our products are made out of metal, not of plastics,” he said. The bootstrapped startup thus could make some sales headway in 2019, thanks to the drought-like situation in and around Chennai.
Earthfokus has a range of water savers that can be attached to existing taps for different purposes. Ecomist water saver converts normal flow to a gentle mist. It reduces the water output from 8-12 LPM (litres per minute) to 0.4 LPM. It decreases the discharge by atomising water and converting it to mist, thus saving 95% water from your tap.
Ecoshower tap water savers convert normal flow to angled shower output. Shower type of water savers reduces the flow from 10-2 LPM (litres per minute) to 1.5-2 LPM. An angled shower saves up to 85% water compared to an ordinary aerator and covers more area as well. Quamist is a dual-mode water-saving attachment for taps and faucets. Quamist water saver can be attached to your existing tap within a minute. The water saver reduces the water output by 95% by converting the normal flow to fine mist.