Droptimize: making rainwater management smarter

But, there is a strategic point underneath the product work. Connecting physical infrastructure to a real customer experience is one thing. Using what that experience produces to decide whether and how to scale is another, which is why we launched Droptimize as a pilot.

Droptimize is a collaboration between Leap Forward, Aquafin, De Watergroep, VITO, KU Leuven, Voxdale, Sumaqua, Regionaal Landschap Dijleland and Regionaal Landschap Brabantse Kouters, with financial support from the Province of Vlaams-Brabant. We handled the experience layer, turning raw sensor output into something a resident can read at a glance.

A first challenge was joining physical infrastructure to a digital experience. Sensor readings had to travel reliably from a rainwater tank in someone's garden, through the backend, and onto a phone in real time. Our setup also had to hold up as more households came on board, so the architecture needed room to grow from day one.

Next, we designed and developed a mobile app that gives households live water-level data from their rainwater tank sensors. It shows current levels, usage trends over time, and recommendations that take the weather into account, all drawn from a continuous stream of sensor readings. The aim was a screen that answers the everyday question, "how much water do I have, and what should I do about it," without asking the resident to interpret data themselves.

We started with a pilot group of households. That phase let us test the experience in actual gardens and kitchens, learn from how people used it, and refine the app before any wider rollout. Alongside the consumer app, we set up a research dashboard in Retool that gives Aquafin a clear, data-driven view of how the pilot is performing.

Droptimize is still its pilot phase today. It has not shipped as a finished product, and we're scaling up slowly. There is a working app in real households and a research dashboard collecting the evidence that will guide the rollout decision. That is the point of running it this way: the pilot earns the data before anyone commits to the next step.

Connecting the infrastructure was the straightforward part. Getting households to change what they do once they can see their water reserves is the harder problem, and that is what the pilot really puts to the test.