Yaron Dycian of Wint: 5 Questions

Yaron Dycian is chief product and chief strategy officer at Wint, a water management company for the built world. Although he spends all his professional time thinking about water use and leaks, Dycian and his company are no drips.

Founded in 2018, the Boston-based company claims to have reduced its customers’ water damage costs by 90 percent, saving insurers millions in damages.

On Sept. 15, PropTech Insider spoke with Dycian from his research and development office in Tel Aviv about the company’s artificial intelligence-powered technology, Water Insights, which it is launching Sept. 17 to provide non-real-time insights to help facility managers reduce costs and improve sustainability.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

PropTech Insider: What is Wint and how does it address water use management in the built world?

Yaron Dycian: Wint manages water in buildings, which is a topic that has been ignored for many years. It’s one of the biggest sources of pain for insurers in property and casualty, builder’s risk, and other real estate-related contracts. It’s also an enormous waste adding to inefficiencies. A quarter of water going into buildings goes to waste. Here’s the simple reason for it: When we use water, we do it intermittently. How long do you wash your hands? Or how long does a toilet flush take? Nothing is really lengthy except waste, which goes on 24/7. When you multiply the impact of even one not-too-big incident by time, you get a big percentage of your ongoing consumption. 

For example, a single leaky, running toilet. You go in, you see it is a little bit wet. We give it maybe a split second of a thought, and move on with life. Here’s the amazing metric: This thing runs typically at around 100 gallons an hour, multiplied by 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. If you have one in your building, that’s $15,000 a year of water cost. It’s as much carbon emissions as a passenger car. So there’s a significant financial and environmental impact to these things.

How does water management and waste in buildings impact carbon emissions?

To get drinking water, somebody needs to pull it out of the ground, which is energy. Then it needs to be filtered and cleansed with chemicals. Chemicals, again, have energy and other sources of environmental impact. Then the water needs to be distributed. In some areas you have water nearby, but in others — like Lake Mead, which is actually feeding L.A — it’s 150 or 200 miles away. That’s energy. 

When you’re done using the water, it goes down the drain and is transported again to a sewage treatment facility where it’s being treated with chemicals and energy. So the whole cycle is actually pretty energy and chemical intense, and therefore generates pretty significant amounts of carbon emissions.

Wint announced Water Insights, billed as an AI-powered system to provide facility and sustainability managers, developers and general contractors a predictive view of their buildings’ water usage patterns. How does this differ from what Wint had been doing?

It works at two levels. It analyzes water flow. Essentially it reads data from water meters that are installed in a building at very high frequency — in one second, sometimes in tens of milliseconds. It can then draw a line chart or graph of the flow rate over time. The system analyzes this information, both on the device and in the cloud. When it analyzes it on the device, that is for real-time, very immediate action-type of insights, it looks at a flow and it says, “This flow does not make sense at all in the context of a specific building and location, it’s abnormal.” So I’m making a decision to shut off a valve. We’ve saved many buildings from massive damage.

Then we have your delayed insights. Delayed insights are for things that take much longer, and are gradually increasing your consumption — but not in a scary way where you want to take aggressive actions such as shutting off water. As a concrete example, many buildings in New York City use water, and, through reverse osmosis, they clean up the water as it goes into the building. These systems need to consume water on an ongoing basis. Even if you’re not using water in the building, they will, for whatever technical reason, continue using water over time. As filters and the overall system degrades, it will start using more and more water, which can have significant outcomes.

Our system will use AI to analyze these behaviors over time and say, “Aha, you’ve got a problem there. Maintenance, go take a look.” Those are the kind of low-frequency, non-emergency insights that really help people save enormous amounts of water.

Wint has software and hardware components. How do they work?

The hardware is a sensor on the water pipe, and there’s a specialized computer connected to it. Essentially, it’s a computer that connects to and reads the data off the meter and talks to the cloud to get the information up there. We’ve got those at the Empire State Building and at many Empire State Realty Trust facilities, as well as at the Waldorf Astoria, to protect them during their reconstruction phase. Also, companies like HP and Suffolk Construction use Wint.

Wint claims to have saved insurers millions in potential water damages. How does that work?

Water damage in the U.S. is growing. Five years ago it was $13 billion a year in water damages. In fact, in some insurance categories, 30 percent of insurer payouts are for water damage. We have proof in research from major insurers like Munich Re that Wint cuts down 90 percent of these damages. So insurers take note and they deal with this. When they see high-risk situations, they will mandate that they’re not going to insure a property for water damage unless they put in advanced mitigation solutions.

Philip Russo can be reached at prusso@commercialobserver.com.