No-frills Water Comfort for Developing Regions

In developing countries, majority of the households use overhead water tanks to have running water in their taps. These water tanks are exposed to the elements, which usually render the tap water uncomfortable to use, given the extreme subtropical weather conditions. Externally weatherproofing these tanks to maintain the groundwater temperature is short-lived, and only results in a marginal (0.5 −1 ◦C) improvement in tap water temperature. We propose Ashray, an IoT-inspired, intelligent system to minimize the exposure of water to the elements thereby maintaining its temperature close to that of the groundwater. Ashray learns the water demand patterns of a household and pumps water into the overhead tank only when necessary. The predictive, machine learning based, approach of Ashray improves water comfort by up to 8 ◦C in summers and 3 ◦C in winters, on average. Ashray is retrofitted into existing infrastructure with a hardware prototyping cost of $27, whereas it can save up to 16% on water heating costs, through reduction in natural gas consumption, by leveraging groundwater temperature. Our proposed system, Ashray, can positively impact the lives of millions of people in developing countries.