“Most people live in cities, and either don’t have enough space for a tank, or don’t want an ugly one. So we embarked on a long journey designing and building a water tank which looks good and holds the maximum volume of water for the minimum space.” Mitch O’Sullivan and Gail Davidson applied themselves to the process of building what has become Waterwall, and the product recently made its public debut at the HIA Home Ideas Show in April eliciting an enormous response.
As co-founder Mitch O’Sullivan puts it, “getting the product right has been very difficult.”
“For starters, 1200 litres of water weighs a lot and we needed to redesign Waterwall three times to get it tough enough to hold the capacity we wanted.
“Since the launch at the Home Ideas Show, we’ve been deluged with enquiries from people wanting to use WaterWall in many ways, some which we’d not even thought of. A number of architects have expressed interest in Waterwall for its thermal and acoustic qualities. For example, one wants to use a series of waterwalls down the centre of a house to form a backbone with significant thermal mass and another is going to use it as the western wall of a home, so that it absorbs all the heat from the sun during the day and releases it slowly into the home at night.
"Another is planning on using waterwalls around a pool as it has excellent acoustic absorption qualities and will help to dampen the noise.
"But the greatest part of our market will come from people who want a water tank and don’t have a lot of space. The footprint is 330mm x 2400 mm so it doesn’t take up a lot of space.
“As soon as we rolled out the Waterwall at the HIA Show, people got it straight away and we now have a different challenge ... supplying a local and international market which clearly wants new Waterwalls NOW!”
