Israeli Startup Prevents Clients From Flushing Money Down the Drain – Literally!

Start up company DrizzleX monitors water flow in homes and apartment buildings to find where H20 is being wasted, thus lowering utility bills.

By Yakir Benzion, United With Israel

American olim (immigrants) come to Israel and bring a variety of new perspectives and ideas. Esther Altura, a mathematician and software engineer who was also a property manager before making Aliyah, has made her own unique contribution.

Israel is located in a dry region, where just about everybody pays attention to their water consumption. Altura saw a substantial difference between how water was managed in her former home town of Los Angeles versus in water-conscious Israel. In LA, she was often annoyed that the apartment buildings there had a water meter just for the building, not for each apartment. The wasting of water and the bills were both huge.

In Israel, however, every apartment is metered, and that sparked the idea for an innovative solution to find out who is using how much water. Together with her son Ariel, she founded a startup called DrizzleX, which places small water meters throughout a house or apartment and dynamically monitors water usage.

The individual water meters send their measurements to a cloud data system, and the water usage can then be monitored by the landlord, allowing them to find out where water is literally going down the drain.

DrizzleX also has a smartphone app that allows tenants to check their water consumption. The company will also send an alert if it detects excessive use, so that a tenant who drains the hot water tank while singing an entire opera… well, they’ll have to pay for that.

The result is that in multi-unit buildings in America, both the landlords and the tenants will be able to see how much water they use, cut down over-use, and even find leaks that can be fixed.

The result is lower water consumption, which translates to lower bills for everybody, and that’s great for both the bank account and the environment.

Altura started DrizzleX in 2017, and it already has installations across water-hungry California, Nevada and Arizona, as well as in New York City, where City Hall says “a running toilet can cost a homeowner up to $50 per day.”

StartUs Insights, a worldwide data science company, analyzed 379 water management startups and picked DrizzleX as one of its five top emerging water management companies to watch out for.

“DrizzleX’s solutions enable significant reductions in property expenses and water bills,” thereport said.