Sparkling Water: The new cool for plumbers
The plumbing industry is generally associated with supplying what might best be considered as staple services to the consumer, such as hot and cold water, drainage and guttering. Despite being necessities, none of this is exceptionally sexy stuff, except for the more elaborate bathroom furniture items such as showers, baths and technologically advanced point-of-use outlets. Aside from water-saving devices and technology that responded to Australia’s drought situation over the past decade, nothing particularly new, in the way of something extra for the plumber to sell the consumer, has really stood out… until now.
While many readers would have been brought up in an era of sourcing their drinking water in a glass from the kitchen or workplace tap, or a jug in the fridge (if you were lucky) – the rehydration market has come a long way in the past 20 years.
Gen Y has certainly embraced the idea of buying drinking water in a disposable bottle on a daily basis. In fact, bottled water is far more expensive than petrol (a price we constantly complain about) – yet many don’t seem to blink an eye when handing over $2.50 for 600ml of still water.
Many years ago, workplaces also felt compelled to offer staff and customers drinking water (sometimes chilled) delivered from plumbed-in dispensing units in foyers or with cumbersome replaceable 10-20L bottles. The expectation of consumers has just kept growing and despite the fact that most Australian cities/towns have some of the finest drinking water on the planet, the consumer is more than happy to shell out good money for bottled or dispensed h2o.
Carbonated water (sparkling) has also grown as a category and cafés and restaurants now ask patrons if they would prefer still or sparkling water with their meal. No doubt you would have also seen the vast amount of shelf space that sparkling water bottles command in the country’s biggest supermarket chains.
Plumbed-in commercial sparkling systems are also growing in number but the real news for the plumbing industry is the significant growth of plumbed-in sparkling water systems in homes/apartments and workplaces. And the company that is showing the way is Zip Industries – the same company that made boiling and chilled dispensed water so popular in the commercial sector, not just in Australia but across the globe. With a desire to remain the market leader in point-of-use, Zip has developed the technology to be able to deliver sparkling water (along with boiling and chilled) via a compact, under sink appliance.
“We’ve been leading the way in boiling and chilled filtered drinking water for a long time and we have recognised the emerging trend in sparkling water. Some of our partners in the UK made it clear that there was a growing need for an appliance that could deliver sparkling water at the point-of-use which is when we begun to investigate the possibilities,” Alan Butler, Group Sales Director for Zip Industries explains.
“Typically, sparkling water has been bottled and being that a lot of our products reduce the need for bottled water, we knew we could make it happen.”
Like preceding products in Zip’s stable, the company recognised a consumer trend and responded to it in an efficient and effective manner. While doing so, Zip has managed to design, develop and manufacture all of the units in Australia – not an easy feat when much of the country’s manufacturing industry heads offshore.
“We found a need for it in the marketplace so we took the necessary steps to engineer it. The technology we initially looked at was quite bulky and cumbersome so one of our biggest challenges was to establish how we could create something that could deliver chilled and filtered sparkling water into a sizeable unit under a bench. There was also a challenge from an approval point of view because no one had done it before,” Manufacturing Director of Zip Industries, Brian Chertkow commented.
“Our Zip Hydrotap already featured a boiler and chiller so adding a sparkling section and getting it packaged into something small and practical was our biggest challenge. We managed to overcome it and the new unit is even more compact than the last.
“Delivering sparkling water uses different technology to some of the more traditional chilled water products but from our market leading boiling and chilled water technology we adopted and invented new technology. It was our leadership in technology from boiling and chilled water that made this possible,” Brian says.
Zip also looked at how they could create a standalone unit that didn’t require the user to add anything to it – as is the requirement with systems such as SodaStream. The Zip HydroTap Sparkling model simply requires the push of a button. The new product was launched into the Australian marketplace approximately 18 months ago and it has taken Zip roughly the same time to get the message across to the residential market. The message is beginning to be heard though as a growing proportion of their residential business is now in boiling, chilled and sparkling filtered drinking water.
SPARKLING BENEFITS
The good news for plumbers comes from the new offering that can be presented to customers either looking to install a new point-of-use drinking water appliance or for those who are thinking about upgrading. Zip’s HydroTap Sparkling and All-in-One Sparkling delivers sparkling chilled filtered water at a fraction of the cost of bottled water – be that still or sparkling. It’s a long term investment, not just a short term fix.
“When we first released the Zip Hydrotap with boiling and chilled water, we helped to standardise boiling and chilled water delivery from under sink applications in home and workplace kitchens. From there we introduced filtered water and now we’ve taken the leap into sparkling,” Senior Marketing Manager Tom Fisher says.
Despite adding new technology to the under sink applications, Zip is confident that installation time is only marginally longer, yet just as easy to install as previous Zip HydroTap units.
“Most plumbers are familiar with how our boiling/chilled units are installed. You’ve got a power point, a plumbing connection and a hole in the bench top – that remains the same with the sparkling unit. The only difference is that you have a disposable or refillable CO2 cylinder that sits in a bracket that can be attached to the inside of a cupboard. The technology sits in a similar sized box to our standard boiling/chilled units and if one has previously been installed, it’s easy to upgrade to a new unit because the connections are already there and you don’t require anymore space.”
Zip also has a national technical training team that trains authorised technicians around the country every single day. They conduct field trips to rural areas across the country and for those who can’t attend, training is also offered online.
“For residential models we supply the unit with two CO2 bottles. One bottle of CO2 will deliver 130-150L of sparkling water – that’s about 70 2L bottles of sparkling water from the supermarket. The commercial model range that we have just launched has a larger capacity that needs to be changed less frequently. The bottles are refillable and are really easy to change over once a bottle has run out too – it’s just a screw off/screw on method.
“Another key selling point to customers is the fact that our sparkling water tastes just as good, if not better than bottled, and that comes down to our filtration technology. The Zip HydroTap now filters water significantly finer than before.”
The 0.2 micron filter ensures crystal-clear, better-tasting water on tap, filtering out chlorine taste and odour, sediment, and impurities as tiny as one five-thousandth of a millimetre, including protozoan cysts such as Cryptosporidium. There is nothing added to the water – just an infusion of CO2.
“Unlike other brands in the market; Zip uses air cooling technology. Other players are using water cooling methods and environmentally that can be seen as quite an issue. If you take heat out of something it has go somewhere and normally that’s behind the appliance – think of a split system air conditioner that refrigerates inside while extracting heat outside. When it comes to chilling water the same concept applies.
“The heat from the water needs to go somewhere and we chose for it to go into the atmosphere. It’s convenient and environmentally friendly. While water cooling technology is smaller, quieter and lacks the need for cupboard ventilation, it can waste a lot of water. In a commercial environment this type of unit can waste around 12,000L of water per year. That’s a lot of water going down the drain,” Brian explains.
With a focus on being environmentally friendly and technologically advanced Zip might just provide that sparkle your customers have been searching for.