In the near future, all of our shower accoutrements will be connected. In fact, everything from your soap to the loofah will talk to your e-Shower head if Hamwells has anything to say about it.
The e-Shower, which launched today onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt London, is basically a standing shower that can massage you and saves water by recirculating it and dousing you in a delicious misty spray of filtered moisture. The enclosure fits on most current shower setups.
The truly unique part of the system is the mixing filter. Water you’ve used to make yourself clean is sucked back up into the shower and is first filtered, mixed with water from the mains, and then shot through with UV light. This allows you to save up to 90 percent of the water you’d normally waste down the drain.
“A traditional 10-minute shower requires 100 liters of warm, clean water,” said CEO Rob Chömpff, who was head of marketing at VNU Exhibitions. “This precious resource is used only once before it flushes down the drain. This collective habit is unsustainable, because worldwide droughts and shortages are on the rise.
“We wanted to make our homes all electric and energy-neutral in order to join the worldwide drive towards sustainability and decarbonization, but we quickly discovered that the infrastructure of a house and hotel was sized upon the demands of the traditional shower,” he added. “Requiring 10 liters of warm water a minute for a sustained period, the traditional shower demands huge investments in solar panels, electric boilers and the like. It was the linchpin blocking the sustainable energy neutral buildings of the future.”
In addition to Rob, the Hamwells team includes CTO Eric van Duin, who taught engineering at Delft University, and CMO Wouter Chömpff who taught marketing at Erasmus University.
Hamwells raised nearly a million euros in funding and are currently raising a seed round. They have signed letters of intent from major hotel chains and are building the showers as we speak. The shower even connects to your phone so you can see your savings.
While they haven’t yet solved the e-conditioner/e-shampoo dispenser problem, we can rest safe in the knowledge that Hamwells is on the road to connecting all of our bathroom activity to the Internet… all of it.
