DESIGN NAME: Gris
PRIMARY FUNCTION: Water Saving System
INSPIRATION: Decrease of water resources is a world wide problem nowadays. Potable water consuption is also a huge cost for every household. It’s crazy that we still use drinking water to flush the toilet! But the problem is that usually greywater-systems are too expensive and too circumstantial to install – in most cases you need to rebuild your complete saniter-system in your house. There is a need for billions of people especially in the Third World for cheap, simple and easily applicable greywater-system
UNIQUE PROPERTIES / PROJECT DESCRIPTION: 'Gris' is an incredibly cost effective water-saving-system which can collect all the water you use during a shower. You can reuse this collected ’greywater’ for flushing the toilet, cleaning the house and for certain washing activities. This way you can save at least 72 liter water/person/day in an average household which means at least 3.5 billion liter saved water per day in such an 50 million habitant country like Colombia.
OPERATION / FLOW / INTERACTION: Decrease of water resources is a world wide problem these days and potable water consuption is a huge cost for every household. It’s crazy that we still use drinking water to flush the toilet!’Gris’ is an incredibly cost effective water-saving-system which collects all the water you use during a shower. You can reuse this collected ’greywater’ for flushing the toilet, cleaning the house and for certain washing activities. This way you can save at least 72 liter water/person/day in your household
PROJECT DURATION AND LOCATION: The project started in september 2012 in Budapest, Hungary and finished in May 2013 Bucaramanga, Colombia.
FITS BEST INTO CATEGORY: Social Design
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PRODUCTION / REALIZATION TECHNOLOGY: Gris consists of 4 watercells. The cells are designed to be rotationally symmetrical so they can be produced by using only one injection molding tooling. Every other (yellow) part can be produced by cost effective injection molding, and can be placed dependetly to each cells. Customers buy Gris Greywater System in a kit that they piece together at home just like an IKEA furniture. This way the assembly phase will be moved to the end-customer which is the most expensive manufacturing cost.
SPECIFICATIONS / TECHNICAL PROPERTIES: 'Gris' is divided into 4 interlocking cells. Each water cell is 42.5cm x 42.5cm x 8cm which is 10 liter of water storage capacity per cell which is the same size of an average domestic bucket – it means that housewives will be able to handle that weight too. This way you can easily flush your toilet with one unit or if you use proper shower gel you can also irrigate your graden with it. The 4 cell together has a dimension of 85cm x 85cm x 8cm = 40 liter capacity.
TAGS: water, saving, system, grey, greywater, third, world, gris, shower
RESEARCH ABSTRACT: I was focusing on Colombia where water consumption is a serious issue. I studied university researches on water consumption habits of developing countries, made surveys on Colombian residents and made market research on current grey-water solutions. I wanted to find out why South Americans consume twice as much water than Europeans and why they can’t reduce their water consumption or change their habits. You can check the results of my research here: http://bit.ly/152WqYN
CHALLENGE: The most difficult was to solve how Gris could fully integrate into people’s everyday habits. We are lazy by nature because we are programmed to allways tend to use as less effort as possible. In order to spread an innovation we have to hit a certain level of people’s willingness to adopt a new habit – this level is as higher as wider we want to spread something. In this case the key factors to win them were to achieve the lowest possible cost and the easest applicability and usability.
ADDED DATE: 2013-06-28 13:34:26
TEAM MEMBERS (1) :
IMAGE CREDITS: Alberto Vasquez, 2013.
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