The iDUS Controls Team win’s the 2010 VIATEC Environmental Excellence Award

For Immediate Release

So what happens when you combine the talents of an ex-rock and roll infrastructure designer, an ex-high performance tennis coach, and an electronics genius?

When these three old friends from Claremont Senior High reconnected after leading separate lives for 28 years, magic apparently. Their two year old venture just won the coveted 2010 VIATeC Environmental Excellence Award, as well as being a finalist in the Emerging Technology Company and Innovative Excellence categories. iDUS Controls Ltd. has developed and is now selling Conservepump™ Home and Garden SmartBoxes which enable simple cost-effective water reuse at homes. And this dynamic design and development team has a few tricks up its sleeve yet. Adaptation technology is their specialty; specific means directed to helping people reduce their environmental impacts. It has to be simple to use, affordable, involve lots of people, and provide real environmental benefits that solve real problems. And this application is their total focus now.

Energy has alternatives, but clean drinking water doesn’t, and we are starting to run out. Reinoud (Ron) Hartman had a vision of creating the opportunity for world-wide water conservation arising from the work he had been doing designing small communities and land development projects. Water reuse was going to drive the next wave of water conservation, and he new that it had to happen home-by-home. But he didn’t have the business expertise to create the type of company that was needed, plus a whole purpose-specific control system had to be developed. Re-enter ex-girlfriend Lori Barlow with her recent Royal Roads Entrepreneurial Management degree (walking the other way around Beaver Lake – they’re married now!) and Terry St. Hilaire (chance meeting at a Dairy Queen in Nanaimo), Ron’s childhood friend and ‘project accomplice’. They collaborated on important summer holiday projects during the mid-seventies like: “gliders – if we build one how far can it fly?” and “I wonder if we can dislodge that enormous boulder at the top of the Prospect Lake cliff – and how big will the splash be?” By age 12 Terry was fooling around with the ‘new solid-state electronics’, and with his over the top IQ never stopped being fascinated by the possibilities.

So what started as merely an idea began to take on a life of its own. And the possibilities were very exciting: create water reuse technology that’s affordable for all, easy as a clothes dryer, provides real environmental benefit, creates jobs in every community, and affects meaningful change by solving a real problem! Two years of anguish and exhilaration later after apparently endless business, technological, regulatory, and behavioural hurdles were overcome, the result is the ConservepumpTM product line. SmartBoxes are actually small water pump-stations very similar in function to the ones that water and sewer system utilities use, but designed and configured specifically for use in homes. Combined with simple tanks and pipes, the systems they drive allow the reuse of bath/shower water for toilet flushing, and the creation of a ‘rainwater first’ super-smart irrigation system for beds and gardens that mimics natural watering cycles. The heart of the technology is an electronic controller iDUS developed, along with the algorithms and firmware needed to make the systems effective and easy to use. The controller is packaged in a designer case along with conventional pumps and valves which together become a SmartBox.

The key notion was one of de-centralization. Ron says “Re-empowered people, instead of just technology, are the best means to conserve water. Most people currently waste water because it appears to come from nowhere and disappear into nowhere. Having water collection and reuse happen in the home engages the user to understand what they are doing and empowers them to conserve – up to 50% of the water they typically use and more! And the economics and logistics of SmartBox-driven unit reuse compared with large centralized systems is just way easier to implement. Lots of people are getting involved like designers, plumbers, irrigators, contractors, entrepreneurs, and levels of government. They’re all driven by homeowners who want to see change.”

Water reuse is a seven billion dollar North American market, and this technology appears to represent a break-through that can change how this market will behave. While communal systems dictate long planning cycles and enormous capital outlay, this technology could allow immediate large scale impacts to be felt simply by enabling people to do what they all want to do. The real power of the idea seems to be that water users, regulators, entrepreneurs, manufacturers, their suppliers and workers everywhere could all start to participate in a financially beneficial organic process that would be pretty simple to implement. And with today’s communication possibilities, the word can travel pretty quickly...

It really feels like the opportunity iDUS has created could be a turning point for meaningful environmental change. Putting real benefit directly into the hands of real people who want and need change to happen has got to be the best way to redirect collective energy to enhance a new culture of sustainability.

For more info see www.hldbc.ca and www.conservepump.com or contact the iDUS team at info@idus.ca