S a t u r d a y S t a r M a y 1 6 2 0 1 5

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ANTHONY SETTIPANI

IT ALL started with a cold

shower. While living with his

friends in a Cape Town apart-

ment, emerging entrepreneur

Harald Oswin got the idea that he

hopes could help to solve South

Africa’s load shedding problem.

“I realised that they had a very

inefficient routine,” he said of his

flatmates. Most of the time they left

their geyser off to save the money

required to heat the water through

the day. Harald explained that this

meant if he wanted a warm shower

when he woke up at 6am, he had to

wake up at 4am to turn the geyser

back on.

While the routine caused him to

lose some sleep, it also got his head

wrapping around ways to make the

process a little easier.

“I started realising that this

wasn’t something that only my

friends and I were going through,”

he said. “Most of the people in our

area were doing the same kind of

thing to save energy.”

Today, Harald is working on what

he believes will be a solution to this

cumbersome daily ritual: a small

device that clips on to the geyser

itself and, like a sleepy finger, flips

the switch on and off at the appro-

priate time. He calls the project

“Geyserflicker”.

Oswin sees in his project a mas-

sive potential not only to sell a pro-

duct, but also to bridge the gap

between South Africa’s massive

peak electricity demand and the

amount the average South African

pays for power.

“It’s not necessarily that they

can’t supply electricity to everyone,”

he said. “It’s just when everyone

demands it at the same time, then

the problem comes into play. And

within the domestic sector, the gey-

sers are a primary contributor to

that spike.”

Oswin envisages his device as

one that can be bought cheaply, over

the counter, and installed by the con-

sumers themselves.

“The units will come pre-pro-

grammed so they don’t turn the

geyser on during those problematic

peak hours,” he said. “So we’re only

taking a chunk of two hours in the

morning and two hours in the

evening.”

Oswin, 23, is not your average

young South African entrepreneur.

Originally from Swaziland, he

attended Waterford Khamhlaba Col-

lege, where he graduated at the top

of his class. He played on two

national sports teams and served as

chairman of the Student Represen-

tative Council.

After matric Oswin was accepted

into Harvard University in Cam-

bridge, Massachusetts, where he

spent five semesters before return-

ing to South Africa in February to

work full-time on bringing Geyser-

flicker to life.

The concept won him the McKin-

ley Family Grant for Innovation and

Entrepreneurial Leadership in

Social Enterprise at Harvard in 2013.

“It was called the Springbok,” he

said, explaining that his team

named their first prototype after the

spring that powered it.

Essentially, the device was like a

wind-up egg timer, where the con-

sumer would wind it up the night

before and wake up to warm water

in the morning, after the device had

switched the geyser back on.

“That was in the dustbin around

August or so,” he said. It seems that

no matter how promising an idea,

there are always bugs to work out.

According to Oswin, the mistakes

and hurdles are what’s really taught

him the most.

“They call it school fees,” he said.

“You know, burning through time

and money, and you’re not getting

anywhere, but it’s teaching you.”

Oswin said that one of the

biggest challenges he’s faced since

getting back from Harvard is the

manufacturing process.

“That’s one thing you should

never underestimate. You can have a

product, and it can look very nice.

But even if you have a good design,

each little detail only comes to life

when you take it to a manufacturer.

And there are more little nuances to

manufacturing that can impact

whether your product is a success.”

For Oswin, though, the learning

is just as valuable as the final pro-

ject. “I feel like I’ve obtained an

MBA just from working on this pro-

ject,” he said. When asked what

advice he would give to other young

people hoping to succeed, this ready-

to-learn mentality ranked highest

on his list.

“Don’t underestimate how chal-

lenging it is,” he said. “Because you

don’t know what you don’t know. A

whole lot of guys would say ‘Yeah, in

six months I’m going to have this,

this and this running,’ and you

know it’s good to be ambitious, but

you really don’t know.”

John Storer – director of admis-

sions and a football coach at Water-

ford Khamhlaba College – named

2008 as the year when some internal

spark ignited an insatiable love of

learning in Oswin.

Storer said he could see it from

day one. “His 4th and 5th year here,

I taught him geography,” Storer

said. “And I still remember him sit-

ting in the front row, very wide-eyed,

eager to learn.”

He did agree, though, that as

Oswin approached his last years at

the school, his studies reached a

whole new level.

“He got through on his natural

ability for the first few years,” Storer

said. But when he got to the last two,

Oswin was forced to choose whether

he wanted to sink or swim.

Oswin, for his part, said all he

wanted was to make his mother

proud.

“I wasn’t really the brightest kid.

I wasn’t really the most serious kid,”

he said. “Because of that, I never

took my studies seriously enough.

For some reason, in 2008, when I was

writing my IGCSC exams, I decided

to buckle down and just try and

make my mom proud.”

Oswin said he has no clue what

made him finally change his rou-

tine, but once he did the possibilities

seemed endless.

“Once I got my exams back, even

the teachers didn’t believe that this

was the same guy,” he said. “And you

know what they say, that once your

mind has been stretched by a new

idea, it never returns to its original

dimensions. So I couldn’t now even

fathom going back to being that

mediocre student.”

None of Oswin’s teachers ever

thought of him as mediocre.

“Waterford is probably the top

school in Swaziland,” Storer said.

“We are an international school. We

have students from over 70 coun-

tries, but we are also the first choice

for middle-class families looking to

send their children to private school

in Swaziland itself.”

Storer can’t think of a year in

which at least one student from his

school didn’t get into Harvard. Even

in an environment like that, though,

Oswin still stood out.

“He was one of our most memo-

rable students this century,” he said.

“Even if you didn’t teach Harald,

you knew who he was.”

BRIGHT IDEAS: Harald Oswin,CEO of Geyserflicker, has taken a hiatus from his studies at Harvard University in the US to start his project whichcould take some of the pain out of load shedding. PICTURE: BHEKIKHAYA MABASO

FIRST ATTEMPT: Harald Oswin and Barry Mckenna work on the geyser-switch prototype at Harvard.

REFINING THE PROCESS: Harald Oswin and his colleagues work on fine-tuning their geyser-switch.

FUTURE IN SIGHT: Harald Oswin with his engineer friends Barry Mckenna and Michael Semone at theHarvard Universtiy Innovation Lab after developing the first mechanical unit, which they named Springbok.

Warming up to student’s clever idea

Innovative geyser-switch rules out coldshowers while saving money and power

Even if youdidn’t teach

Harald, you knewwho he was