A water-saving device designed to help schools monitor water usage during the 2018 drought in the Western Cape has received international recognition after featuring on CNN.
Designed by the University of Stellenbosch's Professor Thinus Booysen the special water monitoring device called the Count Dropula records water usage and sends the results to the user's app.
Partners, including CapeTalk, sponsored the installation of the device at hundreds of schools in the province.
RELATED: How the smart water meter dropula works
But despite its success, Booysen says initially it wasn't an easy idea to get off the ground.
We spoke to about 30 or 40 investors before this thing happened. We had to keep knocking and keep knocking before anything happened.
— Professor Thinus Booysen, Associate professor at the University of Stellenbosch's Faculty of Engineering
Booysen says it's helped local schools with their water-saving efforts and saved them millions of rands.
In the end, we reached 352 schools in the Western Cape, in total, we have saved more than 500-million litres of water.
— Professor Thinus Booysen, Associate professor at the University of Stellenbosch's Faculty of Engineering
RELATED: The Smart Water Meter Challenge
Listen to the full interview below:
This article first appeared on CapeTalk : Cape Town water saving invention goes global
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