72 TECHNICAL
Saving water for the future
Prompted by prolonged drought in many parts of our country, government is pressing on with stringent water cuts to change consumption patterns drastically. Residents and businesses are urged to use water sparingly and to prevent unnecessary water wastage through leaks, both accountable and unaccountable.
Sheryl Thiel Consulting
Paseka Lesolang( on left) with the team from Resolution Circle.
Come the innovators! Designed by Paseka Lesolang, the Water Hygiene Convenience( WHC) Leak-Less Valve innovation is a control mechanism that prevents water loss in toilets due to toilet leaks when the toilet is not in use. The innovative valve saw Lesolang being chosen as the winner of the 2015 Green City StartUp initiative.
How it works The valve is placed in the toilet cistern and locks at a predetermined level after each flush, prohibiting an excess influx of water and preemptively stopping water flow in the instance of a leak. Therefore, it serves as a leak detector as well.
Lesolang’ s mission is to retrofit as many toilet cisterns with the WHC Leak-Less Valve as applicable and to encourage the industry manufacturers to install the WHC Leak-Less Valve before sale of their toilet cisterns. This is an opportunity for plumbers to offer this as part of their value-add assessment concept, which was introduced in the Plumbing Africa January issue.
Over the past year, Lesolang has teamed up with Resolution Circle to get his idea to market. His winning innovation— the WHC Leak-Less Valve— has recently gone through Resolution Circle’ s unique Idea-to-Barcode product development ecosystem: idea to design, design to prototype, and prototype to first production.
Through this process, he consulted with engineers who have refined and streamlined his design into a working prototype. He was also assisted in applying for an international patent. The project went through prototype demonstration with the use of CAD software and rapid prototyping techniques, and then moved into smallscale production phase. Resolution Circle uniquely manufactured 7 000 components for the WHC Leak-Less Valve using injection moulding techniques.
Unemployed workers were then contracted to assemble these components into 1 400 units, which are now ready to save households water in the City of Tshwane. The WHC Leak-Less Valve is expanding the‘ green’ culture and accelerating innovation in cities. PA