Your company ValRhôn’Energie promises savings on water consumption: through which device in particular?
Our company for 12 years has been offering two very distinct concepts: water saving and natural water treatment as well. So saving water by regulating in each water point of a structure, and also by remote management of water consumption which allows us to achieve 20% savings by compensating for existing leaks and by anticipating.
Concretely on the control of water consumption how does it work?
A flow regulator is installed on each water point of a structure. We created software in-house that allows us to measure the initial flow of water, and after installing our product we can measure a flow that is less. In fact, we arrive at a water saving often of 8 liters per minute per water point.
Who are you addressing: individuals or rather large structures?
We will say that this is for all people who consume water. Our market is mainly the professional market. We are referenced in the large distribution in France. (A market) also very important today which represents, let’s say, 50% of our turnover, it is hospitals then. Our first result was a bit gigantic but very interesting: we equipped the 205 Carrefour France hypermarkets in 2010-2011 with our control concepts, and we were able to observe a very significant saving with a return on investment of 4 months. This represented approximately 35% water savings in all Carrefour France hypermarkets.
Today in terms of numbers, what does ValRhôn’Energie represent?
ValRhôn’Energie got off to a strong start with the Carrefour concept, since Carrefour was immediately interested. Today, this represents between €500,000 and €700,000 in turnover each year. In staff today we are 5 (…). The manufacturing in fact belongs to us and it is done in the East of France in Alsace.