Hot water usage in hotels represent substantial costs and an unsuspected ecological impact. A guest spends twice as much time under the shower at a hotel compared to home, and hotels’ water and energy bills represent on average near 30% of their expenses.
Hydrao, a French start-up, has thus created connected and innovative water saving solutions to face resource efficiency issues in hotels.Hydrao: preserving water and energy thanks to the digital revolution
Hydrao provides a set of connected and eco-friendly technological solutions to deal with water and energy efficiency issues in buildings.
Under the shower, HYDRAO saves water and educates while staying fun ! Indeed, Hydrao water-saving shower heads have the very peculiar specificity of changing colour upon the volume of water used in real time (green from 0 to 10 litres, blue from 10 to 20 litres, and so on until red!). This intuitive real-time feedback provided by small colourful LEDs which enlighten thanks to a micro-turbine (no battery), creates a “nudge” effect which positively incentivises users to reduce their shower time by 15% on average in hotels.
Furthermore, HYDRAO shower heads are designed with a low flow (6.6 litres per minute while the standard is about twice much) while maintaining the usual comfort, as their WaterSense label attests it. The pressure is maintained, it’s neither too strong nor too weak, with three types of jet: normal, soft, and massage.
The HYDRAO range consists of a hand shower (Aloé), a rain shower (Yucca) and a head shower for wall bars (Cereus).
Hydrao has also designed and developed wireless water network surveillance and monitoring meters, which, as shower heads, contain no battery thanks to a micro-turbine. They can be installed on any hot or cold water circuit. and monitor water volume, temperature and pressure in real-time, with a high data transmission rate (every 60 seconds), in order to get a global understanding of the water consumption in a building and to detect abnormal variations.
Hydrao: Water Savings as a Service
All HYDRAO products are connected devices, and communicate water data either in Bluetooth (short distance) or LoRa (long distance). If they wish, hotels can access to HYDRAO web platform where they can track and optimise in various ways, remotely, their water consumption. From this digital dashboard, the hotel can also change the color thresholds of the HYDRAO shower heads, to challenge their guests at relevant times such as during the World Water Day on March 22 every year!
This new service was recently and successfully used in Boston over the last few months, by Hostelling International USA which installed HYDRAO solutions in about 700 rooms, as part of their “1 Million Gallon Water Saving” challenge.
The Courtyard Marriott case
The Courtyard by Marriott of Paris Arcueil, a 4-star hotel, equipped its 200 rooms with HYDRAO Aloé hand showers in 2019.
The hotel manager conducted a one-month test to measure the ‘nudge’ impact of HYDRAO Aloé lights, for 1 month. During 2 weeks, he first configured the shower heads with no colors (meaning lights kept off when tap is turned on); and the 2 weeks following, he set up the colors back and added in shower cabins HYDRAO waterproof shower ties to explain the meaning of colors. Results show that HYDRAO nudge effect reduced the average shower time by 15%; while HYDRAO water flow was already 25% lower than for previous shower heads. In total, HYDRAO thus enabled to save 40% on hot water for showers.
Denis Laus, General Manager of the hotel, witnesses: “After using HYDRAO solutions during 2 months, the first impact observed is the significant decrease in water consumption. This will allow us to reach a return on investment we had planned. The second impact, which we had not imagined, is the enthusiasm of our customers:hey enjoy HYDRAO innovation and many even asked where they could by it”