Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi had once said, “There is enough in this world for everyone's need, but not for anyone's greed”. Today, this statement of Gandhiji is standing true with respect to the world’s resource consumption, especially water consumption. India’s expanding population has triggered the water consumption over the past few decades. Although India is not a water-poor nation, a simple shift from trying to increase water to trying to manage water consumption within the country can cause major changes. Established in 2011, FluxGen Engineering Technologies Pvt. Ltd. is a bootstrapped venture which realized the need to bring this change. Brainchild of Ganesh Shankar, an IISc alumni, this firm aims at providing low-cost and local Internet of Things (IoT) solutions for Energy and Water Management (EWM). It is a complete monitoring and control solution including wireless smart water monitoring modules that constantly updates the data over FluxGen cloud platform in real time.

Mapping your Energy and Water Consumption
Believing in age old notion of ‘What gets Measured, gets Managed’, FluxGen has created unique Energy and Water Manager

(EWM) solution which measures and monitors the energy and water consumption practices, using the ‘Smart Energy and Water Manager’. With a vision to integrate electronics with information and communication technology which should actually communicate with the cloud and be able to monitor it, FluxGen has adopted IoT. The firm realized that if it was able to measure energy, monitor it and put that into the data, the cloud would do the remaining management of this electricity. Hence, FluxGen created EWM which measures the energy and water consumed at any facility and then it sends this data via IoT technology to generate personalized energy and water reports along with useful tips about equipments’ health. People would get their water bills on their mobile phones, which is something that’s unique.

Established in 2011, FluxGen Engineering Technologies Pvt. Ltd. is a bootstrapped venture which works in support of renewable and sustainable energy systems by offering solar installations and monitoring solutions

“Over the last two years, we have aimed at developing solutions for renewable energy sector that have been merged with IoT. We realised the application of these solutions in water management as well and hence we got into monitoring of energy as well as water consumption for individual houses. From R&D projects for institutions

to building microgrids for villages to actually building energy and water management solutions for houses and enterprises like TITAN and BOSCH, we realised that water had a similar case like that of electricity. The amount of water that you consume is also the amount of electricity that is used to pump it. So, if you are saving water, you are saving electricity. We work on both; we package it together and bring it for our customers,” says Ganesh Shankar, Managing Director, FluxGen Engineering Technologies Pvt Ltd.

Listed as one of the 25 most iconic IoT start-ups in India by NASSCOM and DeitY, FluxGen has also won the engineering impact award for SMEs from National Instruments, India - the runner up for engineering impact at a global level from National Instruments, Austin Texas and has been feature in the Forbes, Asia edition. Sharing the future plans for the firm, Ganesh shares, “From R&D projects, to building microgrids to serving clients like Indian Railways, Titan Watches, Robert Bosch, Bulher group, ITC, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and many more, our journey has been full of discoveries. We are already working on combining dissimilar technologies like IoT, Machine Learning and Analytics with Renewable energy to help customers save their cost and enhance productivity. We believe that with the advent of technologies we are making things that make us comfortable; instead we should understand the uncomfortable truth that our planet is getting affected. Sustainable technology should hold a higher precedence and we are constantly motivated to make sustainable technology a default choice for the world.”