Make your house smarter starting with this shower head

Prepare for your phone to now yell at you if you’re in the shower too long. At CE Week 2016, we ran into a gadget called the SWON, which not only monitors your water usage and saves you money on your utility bills, but also connects to other devices to make your home smarter.

Creator and founder Jeff Frommer tells us that if you shower in the morning, say between 6 and 9 am, you can connect the SWON to automatically turn your Wemo coffee maker on and brew you a fresh cup. If you shower at night, you can set it to turn your lights down.

While the SWON isn’t a showerhead itself, it is a device that fits between the existing showerhead and its piping and is marketed to both home owners and renters. Once attached, the gadget measures how much water you’re using and the temperature, and relays the data to other connected devices over Wi-Fi.

The device focuses on what Frommer calls “connected conservation,” which not only saves water, energy, and money, but also tells your other smart devices what to do while you’re in the shower. You can tell your Google Nest thermometer that you like the temperature at a certain degree and the SWON will have it set by the time you get out of the shower. If you forgot to lock the door when you got in the shower, don’t worry, SWON will do it for you. It allows you to make your home smarter starting with the shower.

The gadget comes equipped with sound notification, a water flow rate sensor, an adjustable water flow gauge (5-25%), a temperature sensor, and Wi-Fi connectivity. It is powered by a removable battery, which lasts approximately a year before having to be replaced.

On average, we use approximately 2.5 gallons of drinkable water every minute in the shower. With the SWON, we have the potential to save more than 650 billion gallons in the U.S. every year alone, which would put $20 billion of savings back in our pockets.

And since the device itself focuses on saving consumers money, it only makes sense that the hardware is affordable. Frommer and his team are launching an Indiegogo campaign in the next coming weeks, where consumers will be able to pick up the SWON for $30.

Source: The SWON