OCEO: A Smart Water Purifier That Costs Almost Nothing!

The quality of drinking water is something that no one can afford to compromise on. Water borne diseases like diarrhoea, hepatitis, typhoid and cholera, or illnesses due to contaminants like arsenic and lead, cause widespread health issues in India. Reports suggest that over 10,000 lives were lost to these diseases between 2013 and 2017 across the country. To monitor water quality and reduce contamination, smart sensor based technologies and filters are being used, but these often lead to high capital costs for consumers. To address this challenge, the Bengaluru based startup, OCEO Water, founded by Mahendra Dantewadiya, Rajeev Krishna, Vikram Gulecha and Hasmukh Gulecha, has developed a technology that detects, purifies, measures and monitors drinking water – all at zero upfront cost and with virtually no maintenance costs. Users pay just Re.1 per litre of water consumed!

- Paromik Chakraborty

The OCEO team came up with an IoT-enabled water Purification-as-a-Service solution looking at the heavy upfront and operational costs, maintenance hassles and the urgent need to improve existing water purifier solutions in the market.

Vikram Gulecha says, “Access to safe drinking water is a basic human right – not a privilege. The cost of existing solutions, however, is very high. Moreover, water quality in India varies every 200 km. Some regions may have higher arsenic content in water, some may have chloride, some may contain iron, and so on. The aim of OCEO is to be able to purify water as per the specific problem of that particular area, as each contaminant requires a different approach to purification.”

The technical team at OCEO started research on the technology two-and-a half years back, planning a mix of filtration systems, sensor based monitoring, cloud based analytics along with conventional water dispensing, and arrived at the innovative smart water purification system. At the moment, OCEO is being used by many families in Bengaluru.

How it works

OCEO is an IoT-enabled smart water purifier installed at the user’s location. The backbone of the technology lies in the blend of digital tools, Internet linked sensors, online analytics and reports displayed on the devices. Water coming in from any source (tap, pump, tanker, etc) is first purified in the filter through six broad filtration stages. The six steps include polypropylene filtration, activated carbon filtration, ultra-filtration (UF), reverse osmosis, filtration through silver impregnated carbon filters and, finally, water mineralisation.