The partnership trend grows ever more solid and promising every day, and the newest evidence comes in the form of a new intelligent water management system, called Phyn, built in tandem by Belkin International and Uponor Corporation.
The partners said in their announcement that Phyn represents the next wave of the smart home and will create an intelligent water solution that protects family homes and businesses from leak damage, enables mindful conservation, and enhances household water usage with automated and anticipatory controls.
“Plumbing has essentially provided the same function for centuries,” said Bill Gray, president, Uponor North America. “And while it will continue to provide that essential function, we believe that real change is finally coming. We must find a better way to use our water more intelligently and with purpose.”
And they plan to do all that by tapping into the data. Pun intended.
“You only improve what you measure,” Gray said. “Measurement leads to insight, and insight to awareness, and awareness to optimization of this scarce resource.”
The technology offered by Phyn will create an intelligent water system designed to benefit homeowners, and commercial builders. Builders can provide higher value as part of their smart-home offering; insurers can reduce their number one claim frequency and the number two paid-claims dollar amount — estimated at more than $1 billion annually in the U.S. alone. Utility companies can avoid costly investment into infrastructure by eliminating water loss and waste. Engineers can gain water-use statistics across a broad customer base as units become installed in hundreds of thousands of locations. And plumbing professionals can increase services offered and monitor and mitigate leak concerns of their customers.
“Water is a precious and vital natural resource, but there has been a fundamental lack of technology dedicated to protecting and preserving it — especially for home users,” said Chet Pipkin, founder and CEO, Belkin. “With the creation of Phyn, we're bringing water up to speed with the rest of the smart home, helping to not only protect consumers' homes and wallets, but also do our part to solve the very real challenges facing our global water supply.”
Phyn will be a standalone company using Belkin's proprietary water-sensing technologies, data science and IoT expertise, in addition to its product design, consumer insights and global retail channel. Uponor will bring its plumbing expertise, knowledge of the trades and global wholesale distribution channel.
“With years of research, technological advancements and field trials under our belt, we're excited to partner with Uponor to help accelerate the mass scale commercialization of this technology,” says Ryan Kim, former VP, engineering at Belkin, and CEO, Phyn. “With our rich background in consumer IoT, sensor and machine learning, coupled with Uponor's expertise in water delivery infrastructure, our dedicated team is ideally positioned to scale and deploy an intelligent water solution that sets a new bar for reliability, accuracy and intuitive user experience right out of the gate.”
The water will flow, and now, we’ll know how and why.