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Showerhead with mind-blowing tech and turbine generator, this Silicon Valley startup aims to save the water crisis
Showering with running water will soon become a luxury, as the earth is drying out. Oasense, a smart-showerhead producer, won the CES Innovation Awards in 2022 for its sustainability, eco-design, and smart energy. To put it simply, they help you save water while showering. The startup also has its product Reva showerhead recognized as one of the TIME Best Inventions of 2022
Going viral online at its debut, Oasense’s showerhead prototype ignites demand for saving water
The frequent droughts prompt people to save every drop of water possible. As of the end of November, 48% of the U.S. are in a drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor of the United States. Oasense's story dates back to 2014, at the time when the early 21st-century U.S. drought in 2014 ranks as one of the most severe in 120 years. Evan Schneider, a mechanical engineering student at Stanford University, was in an effort to help his family save water and fight the drought. The showerhead idea came to Schneider, aiming to save water from the source.
“I realized that a large amount of shower time is spent doing things that don't require running water, like shampooing and lathering soap,” said Schneider, who invented the prototype of the smart shower head. The bathroom is the largest consumer of indoor water use, among which showers account for around 20 percent, according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency.
The idea is to make water saving in the shower easier and more enjoyable. When users take a step back, the showerhead will tune to the small flow of shower water automatically. Then, the thought grew from a simple concept into an intelligently designed innovation. It was not until 2018 that Schneider made the showerhead debut in a video, showing how the showerhead works to save water while showering. The video went viral overnight, reaching 16 million views in two weeks.
People continued calling in to place orders. Schneider decided to team up with talents to manufacture the device. That’s when Chih-Wei Tang and Ted Li came on board.
An Ace team makes the sophisticated showerhead come true, a device built with turbines and sensors
“Bathroom equipment with electricity is definitely not easy to build,” said Tang, co-founder and CEO of Oasense. In a watery and foggy environment, devices featuring both safety and efficiency require state-of-art technologies. The sensor embedded in the showerhead needs to be sensitive enough to adapt to different people and long distances, and environments with lots of water vapor. Meanwhile, the showerhead needs to generate power by itself, as the shower rooms are usually not equipped with sockets. Not any ordinary showerheads can do the job —— thus the team builds one from scratch.
As a classmate of Schneider at Stanford University, Tang worked at the Silicon Valley Lab of Ford Motor Company. From hardware engineer, technical lead, and to product manager at Ford, Tang played different roles and accumulated experience in product design and product strategy. In the beginning, Tang helped Schneider out by contacting the manufacturers in China. He soon found out that the product requires a fundamental shift in product architecture and high-quality parts. After working for a giant company, Tang desired to try out something on his own. In 2018, He then accepted the invitation from Schneider and started with the product design of Oasense.
Tang also recruited Li, an ex-Apple engineering program manager and sensor expert, to join the team. After graduating from the University of Southern California, Li worked at the image sensor startup InVisage technologies, which was later acquired by Apple. He has worked on sensor development for more than five years, witnessing the small lab grow to a 100-people startup. He later joined Apple, dealing with vendor management and sensor technology development. Within two years, Li found himself missing the atmosphere and workflow of a startup and desired to build something that could make more impact for the world. Li works now as a co-founder and COO of Oasense.
With three elites teaming up, Oasense gave birth to a smart showerhead featuring a micro-turbine generator, high-power battery pack, advanced sensor suite, microprocessor, and auto shut-off valve. “We wanted to make the showerhead that everyone can use and need,” said Tang. Showerhead’s sophisticated design centers around users’ situations.
Don’t have any sockets in the shower room?
The integral hydro-turbine will generate electricity to power the sensors, achieving water and energy saving in one stroke. Inside the device, running water can generate power for sensors. To ensure sufficiency, Oasense’s team has improved the power generation efficiency of the same-size engine by ten times.
Can the sensor work well with people of all heights?
Oasense packs in an array of custom infrared sensors and has a supplementary sensor to allow it to detect in all conditions. The showerhead also intelligently adapts to everyone's way of showering and improves with each shower.
Oasense’s delicate product, known as “Reva Showerhead”, was listed as one of the 2022 TIME Best Inventions.
Hand-assembling showerheads and selling them on streets, Oasense takes user feedback to heart
Rome wasn't built in one day. It took the Oasense three years to get the smart showerhead ready. When talking about the development period, Tang shared that relationships are important, with vendors as well as customers.
Before Reva Showerhead, they made an MVP prototype to verify their product-market fit. They assembled and installed the device in Tang’s garage, and tested it out in the 3rd-floor bathroom. “It’s 50% that the showerhead would burst and water sprays everywhere.” Tang laughed, “but that’s also why we later forged close connections with our suppliers for quality guarantee and detail control.”
After a wide search, they teamed up mostly with Taiwanese vendors. Reputed as the “Kingdom of Hand Tools,” Taiwan has its hardware industry ranking second by value, and third volume, with nearly 70% of enterprises of the industry concentrated in the Taichung and Changhua areas in Taiwan, according to the reports of DIY International and Taiwan Excellence. Given that two of them are Taiwanese and Li has accumulated a great deal of know-how in manufacturer management, they commuted from Silicon Valley and Changhua to seek opportunities to collaborate.
“Our mindset, different from others, is to innovate a product within the quite mature industry,” said Li, “we design the showerhead from scratch instead of finding the ready-made sensors.” The architecture is fundamentally unique, as Oasense is the first to embed and customize sensors into a showerhead. The first difficulty they encountered was that nearly no electronic factories allow actual water tests since sensor production needs to occur in a dry operating environment. Through breakthroughs and innovations, Oasense has the ambition of disrupting the sanitary ware industry.
“Customers are the key to disruption,” said Tang. Besides working with carefully selected vendors, Oasense values their customer the most. They headed to the streets and asked people for opinions, and sell the products to all walks of life, such as plumbers. They called and collected feedback themselves, and they even recorded audio of showering to better understand customer behaviors. Thousands of hundreds of tests were employed, just to optimize the product to 100 percent. According to Oasense’s survey, the smart showerhead could save 60% of the water and energy every time they shower, saving up more than US$100 per showerhead on the water bill in those drought areas.
To further build their networks, the team got into StartX, a community of serial entrepreneurs in partnership with Standford University. With only an 8% acceptance rate, StartX now has more than 1800 serial entrepreneurs, industry experts, tenured Stanford professors, and over 700 well-funded growth-stage startups. Oasense has actively participated in the discussion and built its networks for the products. “StartX especially values the teams’ tolerance of extreme difficulty,” said Li, “trying to pick those teams that survive in the most down days.” Oasense has been there, done that, breeding their star product in the garage with bare hands.
Oasense Reva is the winner of the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) 2022 Innovation awards, Red Dot design Award 2022, Red Dot Innovative Product 2022, and Fast Company World Changing Ideas Award. The intelligent showerhead is ready to arrive at homes, contributing to a greener and smarter lifestyle.
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