meet Gris: a water saving system for the real world

Water consuption is a serious issue in Colombia. Usually the water usage is the biggest cost in the household’s overhead. In such a tropical country people use more water than in Europe. They take a bath 2 or 3 times a day, because of the hot weather. The other reason is that in Colombia an incredibly uneffective saniter-system has spread that use almost 8-10 liter of water for each flush.

The problem is that generally graywater-systems are too complicated and too circumstantially can be installed – in some cases you need to rebuild your complete saniter-system in your house. Besides most of them are incredibly expensive (1000-15000$).

The other big problem is that due to climate change in South-America the dry season in the last decades became longer and dryer that is critical, because it leads to serious social conflicts. In many smaller towns and villages the water network is supplied by local water reservoirs and when there is very few rain the water resource decreases. 

It occurs many times that farmers who lives closer to the water reservoir hijack the water flow to give water the animals – however it is unethical to the community but if their animals die the farmers will starve to death either. This creates such hard to solve conflicts that endangers whole communities.