SiliconExpert Podcast Episode 8 with Cody Soodeen of Kara Water - Transcription
Host: Eric Singer
Producer/Director: George Karalias
[00:00:00] Cody: There is this little beetle called Namibian desert beetle that lives in the Namibian desert, which is the driest desert in the world. And the way that it survives is once every few weeks a fog will come over the desert and it will climb up on top of the sand dune. And these are gale force winds, like 50, 60 mile per hour winds it'll perch itself against the winds and let the fog hit its shell. And as the fog hits its shell, it starts to accumulate water on its own back. And as it starts to accumulate enough water, it becomes subject to gravity. It'll go into a handstand and then drink the water off of its own back. And that's how it survives. And for me, I was like... Career changing mind blowing moment for me.
[00:00:47] And I was like, this is the most practical solution for drinking water in the world, if we can make it a technology.
[00:00:54] Eric: Welcome to the Intelligent Engine, a podcast that lives in the heart of the electronics industry brought to you by SiliconExpert. SiliconExpert is all about data-driven decisions with a human driven experience.
[00:01:06] We mitigate risk and manage compliance from design, through sustainment the knowledge experience, and thought leadership of the team, partners and those we interact with every day expose unique aspects of the electronics industry and the product life cycles that live within it. These are the stories that fuel the Intelligent Engine.
[00:01:30] Today's spotlight is on Kara Water. Kara Water is creating the world's first alkaline air to water dispenser that operates fully indoors. The company just launched on Indiegogo and has raised over a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars in 10 days. Joining us today is Cody Soodeen CEO and co-founder of Kara Water.
[00:01:51] Cody is an architect, turned entrepreneur who has a passion about finding a solution to the world's drinking water problems. Cody, thanks for being here with us today.
[00:02:01] Cody: Thanks for having me.
[00:02:03] Eric: So I saw in your Indiegogo video that one of your inspirations for creating this product was growing up with well water that was often contaminated.
[00:02:13] That was something I grew up with as well. We had a 40 foot well, so it was more or less groundwater and we're constantly having to deal with. With things I'm getting in there that you wouldn't want to be drinking. I'm curious to know just a little bit more about that. Could you tell us where you grew up and how that, how that lack of safe water influenced you and maybe helped you come up with the idea to create this product?
[00:02:39] Cody: Yeah, we were downhill from everyone. We live in kind of a small community and, uh, anything that would be spilled, it would always run downhill to our well, and my family comes from a third world country. They didn't know about these things. So. We had discovered that we had bacteria in our well water. When my folks had went to the doctor and they had complications that were things reoccurring over years.
[00:03:05] And the doctor finally figured out that they had an increased level of bacteria and it came from our well water. When we found that out, that was quite shocking. Well, you kind of know when you have bacteria, you will, because your tap water smells a little bit funky, but we didn't really do too much about it.
[00:03:20] And, uh, you know, we shocked our well, we put the chlorine tabs in there and did what we had to do. But after that, we just completely lost faith in our well water, especially because of the health issues that came from it. And from that point on, we then just became a bottled water family. It's something we never thought we'd do.
[00:03:35] We never thought that we would just purchase bottled water for all of our needs. It's not even about sustainability, it's just an impractical thing to do. So once we started doing that, and then I went to university and learned about this technology called vapor harvesting, but it really struck a chord with me.
[00:03:51] This could have been a solution for us for such a long time and could have prevented all of these health issues that my parents still deal with. So I know a lot of other people probably faced similar things just as you have. And that's a big point of why I, I pursued this and I'm trying to bring in an alternative solution to drinking water, to people all over the world.
[00:04:10] Eric: Man. That's such an amazingly powerful thing. The lack of access to clean drinking water. Sure, we think immediately of people in third world countries who just don't have access to basic sanitation and that's their issue, but there's also groundwater contamination from industrial sites. There's lead leaching into the water from pipes. There are so many cases where people just don't have access to clean drinking water, whether they're in a remote location in the developing world, or they're in Flint, Michigan, let me ask you, what's it like to be launching a startup in these uncertain, unprecedented times in the midst of a pandemic, this seems like a pretty crazy time to launch a business venture. What's the experience been like?
[00:05:05] Cody: That's a great question because starting a startup in itself is extremely difficult to begin with. And the pandemic just multiplied that, trying to get anything done overseas with manufacturing or consultants or whatever, a zoom only takes you so far.
[00:05:25] And having video calls only takes you so far, but being able to communicate with people in person really makes the difference and you just couldn't do that on top of that, even if you could communicate properly, it doesn't mean that they could even go to their facility or go to their office to actually do any of the work that you needed them to do.
[00:05:43] Right. We all know the shipping and logistics nightmare that's happening around the world. We've been facing that for two years now, trying to build a hardware product.
[00:05:50] Eric: Where were you in your process when the pandemic hit last 三月份 the 三月份 before last, when the pandemic really took hold, how far along in the process were you at that point?
[00:06:01] Cody: It was rough for us, because we primarily wanted to sell into India because obviously there's a really big need for water in India. There's a need and an awareness. So it made sense to go there. India, when the pandemic hit, it was obvious that soon as it got spread in India, they were going into lockdown for God knows how long.
[00:06:21] And we were super scared of that because we were, that was the only place that we manufactured. And then as things started to progress with the pandemic, we'd get these phone calls being like, yeah, we don't know when the facility is going to open back up. Yeah. We don't know if we can even have enough people to support your project.
[00:06:36] When we heard that we always had a really intelligent group of advisors around us at all times. Like I am not the person to be like, no, this is, this is my way or the highway. Like I trust the experts. So we had called one of our advisors who is our marketing advisor. He is an ex P and G executive who launched the Swiffer and he launched Colgate total.
[00:06:57] And when he was at P and G. He had known somebody who helped build out the P and G brands in Asia and the nineties. And he's like, I'll refer you to that person if you are really interested in switching shop. And again, it's uncertain times like it does. Is it going to matter if I switch shops or not, or is the whole world just going to shut down?
[00:07:15] So we preemptively before we got the full notice being like, yeah, we can't do anything for you. Well, we reached out to our project manager in China and asked if he was able to help us with this. And he was willing and he had a great reputation, a lot of contacts, and he vetted a few manufacturers for us.
[00:07:35] And within six months we were back up and running.
[00:07:37] Eric: So you were, you were already in production. Things coming off an assembly line, pandemic hits India is the only place that you're creating the product. At this point, you can't create it there at this point anymore. So you're able to pivot and move. Did you move all of your production to China?
[00:07:56] Cody: Everything, everything.
[00:07:58] Eric: Okay.
[00:07:59] Cody: We have to redesign some things had to relearn the learning curve. Was there again, we shipped a unit over. They broke it down, rebuilt it. Changed some systems. The supply chain was the hard part. We had to redo the entire supply chain through China now, not through India.
[00:08:12] Eric: So different partners, potentially even different components. Did you actually change the design?
[00:08:17] Cody: We did change the design. There was some improvements that we wanted to make. We figured it was a good time to take this opportunity that we tried to look at as much as we can as an opportunity versus crisis.
[00:08:26] And we improved some of the structure. We improve some water flow. We improve the software particularly. We spent a lot of time improving the smart features of the unit. Adding more sensors, adding automation, adding more visibility with LCDs, which we didn't have an LCD prior. So it was a really good opportunity as I like to call it now.
[00:08:44] But at the time it was super not exciting.
[00:08:50] Eric: Yeah. Funny thing about opportunities. They often don't feel like it in the heat of the moment. Right? Tell me a little bit more about particularly your challenges in the supply chain side of things. When you had to switch the entire operation over from the Indian operation to the Chinese operation, how were you able to navigate the parts shortages that have of course been affected everybody over the last couple of years. And I can imagine all the more. So when you're starting a new relationship with a manufacturing facility, with parts suppliers, with all that, you're starting over, how did you navigate that?
[00:09:29] Cody: You know, the saying hardware is hard. It's not just hard. It's expensive software, you can iterate through a software with just some code on the computer, but with hardware you have to buy new parts, bend new metal, and metal is not cheap at all, especially stainless steel. And when it came to purchasing new parts, they're not, you've never tested them before. So you don't know the quality. And having to redo everything in six months was it was stressful obviously. We did get very lucky that our project manager was on top of this. He was very good at being able to build out an entirely new supply chain remotely, which was great. He was very well-connected in the industry, very well-connected in the Chinese manufacturing market. And he just was able to get things through pretty quickly, which was pretty awesome.
[00:10:15] The biggest effects that we faced was our cost of goods went up about 75%.
[00:10:21] Eric: Wow. 75%.
[00:10:26] Cody: Just about yeah. And trying to mitigate that. It's very difficult because you expect one thing, what you recorded a year ago, manufacturing in India, and then your quote comes back almost double.
[00:10:40] Eric: Wow. Yeah, that that doesn't feel like something that's surmountable by, oh, we just pass on the cost to the consumer when you, and you're almost doubling your costs. That's not, not a viable approach to remediate that. How do you manage something like that.
[00:10:57] Cody: As you're manufacturing and developing, you're not really counting the costs. You're just doing MVP pricing and you're just trying to get it done.
[00:11:02] And then once you sit down and look at the bigger picture. And you're like, this is not what I expected, but you still got to figure it out somehow. We're doing more market research. We really want it to come out as like the most efficient, premium, but most also cost-effective air to water dispenser on the market.
[00:11:17] And we actually still are, which is the best part about that. I'm an architect. So there's a term in architecture called value engineering, where you start off with the most expensive, beautiful design that worked for renderings and showing investors and getting buy in from the community. And then you VE it.
[00:11:31] It's not what I wanted to do, but we tried our best to reduce the cost after making like the best version of it. And then maybe reducing the thickness of the steel here so that the steel was a little bit cheaper, reducing the size of some of the internal structure so that we could reduce some costs there as well, or removing some of the options we wanted like wifi. We took that out because the chips were too expensive. Those things skyrocket in price. So little things like that have helped us reduce the cost. Not trying to be perfect, but great.
[00:11:58] Eric: It's amazing to me to hear you say that it is the most cost-effective air to water solution out there because when you look at it and I encourage our listeners who haven't seen this, go to the website and check it out.
[00:12:12] It's a, I hesitate to even call it an appliance, but I don't know what what's a better word for it, but it's a, it is a beautiful device. It's it is not something that looks in any way utilitarian it's it looks like it was designed by an architect, which I guess makes sense. So I'm just shocked that it's as, as efficient as it is in both from what it costs as well as what it takes to convert the moisture from the air into a drinkable liquid. So you've got your architects hat on to design this beautiful product. How do you get to the next phase in terms of the electronic components and production?
[00:12:55] Cody: Our current manufacturer. Before we chose them because we gave our project manager a lot of leeway in deciding who we should work with.
[00:13:03] They were great for hardware, but they had zero to no skill when it came to electronics. And we were so far along the line already that we couldn't go back. So we had to move forward. I was like, let's hire somebody, let's bring them on the team and we'll have them work in your facility. This is where the pandemic made it difficult because I couldn't actually really interview people too well.
[00:13:22] They were disconnected and how to interview people for a contract job because China just doesn't do contract work too much. You need to be a full-time salary employee. And we don't have a entity in China so we can bring them on as an employee. So we had to contract them and we found an electronics engineer online who could take on our project. He's developed like IOT technologies and things like that. So he's quite experienced and he has been living in China for 10 years, but he's not Chinese, so he's not native, but he's been there for a long time. He lives in Shenzhen, our facility. It was like two hours south in Jiumeng. And when we got these two together, there was just no cohesiveness at all, they didn't communicate in the same way. And it was always pointing fingers and butting heads of why is this not working? Why is that not working? As we started to upgrade the PCB add some new components to it and make it more robust. It was definitely a prototype version prior to that. But now this is a very fully functional commercial version.
[00:14:24] The lack of experience from the manufacturer and the actual experience from the EE, but not, but he was a contractor not actually working at the facility. It was a lack of trust that came there. So it was just constant bickering with these two. And it was like being a parent sometimes trying to communicate or facilitate these conversations.
[00:14:44] Cause we all have a common goal of just getting the product done. And the PCB that we had in India was fully handmade. And I didn't know the difference between printed boards and handmade boards because I didn't know that there's specific things you need to do or have to have it be printed versus handmade.
[00:15:03] And sometimes you just have to have it handmade. And that's just common. I learned that now, so we are always pushing to get them printed and it just wouldn't work for the PCB that we had. It wasn't the layers weren't there something, whatever it was, because the knowledge wasn't there for me, it wasn't there for my project manager.
[00:15:17] They're always like, why can't you just do it? Why is this so difficult? Why do I have to do all this work? And it came down to being like, look, this is what it is. Just take what we give you. You may not understand it, or be able to read a schematic for some reason, but just follow the instructions and you'll get it done.
[00:15:32] Long story short, the hard part there was, we kept running into functionality issues where like a transistor would fall off and they're tiny or. Some component would come, not component, but like a push connector would come loose on the board. And it was always from the manufacturer side being like now the PCB was built poorly.
[00:15:51] The system, the software doesn't work, the program doesn't work so on and so forth. And this went on for a month and we'd send the boards back to the heat, restart the components back on whatever came off or whatever. And we came to find out that as we were installing these PCBs into to the unit, if it didn't work or something didn't function the way that the manufacturer thought it would, they would rip it out, take out all of the wires and the push connectors and put another one in there.
[00:16:19] Not realizing like these are sensitive parts. You can't just keep taking them in and out and in and out, things will fall out. It doesn't come like that. So after realizing it was just a human error, they weren't handling them delicately enough. It was just like the most ridiculous situation of understanding, like all this finger pointing didn't need to happen.
[00:16:39] Eric: That's so frustrating, but probably another example of how things get, get more complicated in the pandemic. If you're not regularly doing a factory tour or getting people together in the same room, there's so much more opportunity for miscommunications and missed opportunities and broken connections. Apparently.
[00:17:01] Cody: I mean, they do a fantastic job now. It's been really great. The learning for them, it's been a good experience because they got to learn a very new skill set. And that company, I got to learn a lot about like PCBs and how they work and the software and the programming and whatnot. And it, I think all those road bumps were important.
[00:17:18] So that we could really understand what we were doing and why it was important to do it the way that we were doing it. In the end, it turned out to be a great situation, but hardware is hard, you know, it goes right back to that.
[00:17:30] Eric: So have you been able to, to move to a printed solution, are you still needing to rely on the hand-built boards?
[00:17:38] Cody: We're still going to have to rely on handbuilt boards because we have a high voltage components and you can't get the temperature high enough if you print it that way. And so because of the high voltage, we still have to hand solder.
[00:17:47] Eric: Tell me a little bit about the Indiegogo efforts. How did you decide to create that campaign? And first of all, I'll just say, congratulations.
[00:17:58] I know you. Uh, greatly exceeded your goal. The things just caught fire would love to know more about how you got the idea to do that campaign, what your goals were originally and what are the new goals now that you've raised so much more than you originally, uh, intended?
[00:18:16] Cody: It's been super exciting doing this.
[00:18:19] It has been to answer your first part about when did we start thinking about doing the Indiegogo? Probably like three years ago, but we were just never in the position that we could produce the units fast enough for the technology was still getting sorted out in India or something of that nature just wasn't quite there yet.
[00:18:39] I think we've come in at a perfect moment and the time of our startup to put the word out that we're launching this product. We bootstrapped this company for a very long time, and once we were able to raise funds, we were able to put this game plan together where we understood that there is no name brands in the air to water dispenser industry there isn't, there is absolutely no name brand out there.
[00:19:04] And we wanted to create this ecosystem where Kara Pure would be the household name. The air to water dispenser appliance. So we started with branding and marketing, not even selling just awareness campaigns. And we put some money into that. And then we started building more lead generation to inquire with people like, what do they think about this?
[00:19:25] Get some user feedback. We ran our pilot tests. We understood what people liked, what they didn't like and understood what can we do to improve on this, but ultimately, I think the major benefit for our brands was my design backgrounds, because I understand that it's a consumer product. It's not an industrial product.
[00:19:42] Some of the air to water dispensers I've seen prior. I wouldn't even want an office, none the less my own home. So putting that into place, building the awareness, getting that early marketing out there, letting people know it's because we have great advisors, our marketing advisor, who again, was an ex P and G executive. He said that you'd be created as a brand when one in 100 people know who you are. So if you walk up to a random stranger and you say who's Apple, they're gonna know who Apple is. They have a brand. So you start off. Everyone would know that like probably 99 out of 100 people would know who Apple is, but for a startup, you want to have one in 100, it's a start.
[00:20:17] And we have people calling us, asking us, how did you target me? How did you get my information to know, like I am your right customer? And it's great because we had to spend the time, it takes time to build that kind of marketing strategy and understand your customer better and talk to them and go through that journey with them.
[00:20:35] So we did that with the understanding of, let's not just try to go out there and force sales, let's build a company that would last. So when we started building it and we saw all the awareness increasing and the desire for the product increasing, we were like, let's try this Indiegogo campaign again. We have set it up two or three times over the last two or three years, and we just never pulled the trigger.
[00:20:54] Luckily enough. In 2019, we did a incubator called future works incubator, and we also did the Cleantech open accelerator at the same time, two pretty large, one global one to New York state based incubator and accelerator. And in the incubator, we were one of the top three companies to be listed for like showcasing. When we were showcased this company called B8ta had reached out to us. I'm not sure if you know, B8ta it's like B 8 T a. It's like a Brookstone for innovative new technology. It's super cool. And they have store fronts. So they reached out to us being like, we love your product. We'd love to put you in our stores. And at the time the contact the person that contacted us was working at B8ta.
[00:21:30] When we got to know him, apparently he was the head of sales at Indiegogo, previously
[00:21:35] Eric: There's an unintended benefit of the campaign.
[00:21:40] Cody: Yeah. So we talked about it with him for about a year or so, maybe more. And he was like, you guys just aren't ready yet. Maybe your price point is too high, maybe your value proposition isn't there yet.
[00:21:49] We were too sporadic. We're offering too many things and not really sticking anything. And this is where the marketing campaign came in handy. He has his own consulting firm that he helps companies to launch products for crowdfunding campaigns. And he said, the only way that you can really do a crowdfunding campaign successfully is to work with an agency.
[00:22:06] And he's let me introduce you to some of the top people that I worked with. And we had a round of interviews with these agencies and we ultimately landed with this one agency who was just absolutely phenomenal. And they have beem partnered with us since the start of the campaign through pre-launch, you know, pre-prelaunch things and they have smashed it.
[00:22:25] They're doing such an amazing job getting this campaign out there. I mean, we hit our 10,000 goal in 48 minutes the first day.
[00:22:34] Eric: It's amazing.
[00:22:36] Cody: Yeah,
[00:22:36] it was. I remember waking up I'm in San Francisco at 6:00 AM by seven o'clock. We had hit our goal. And then we had a hundred K in 10 days and we were trending number one on Indiegogo on 星期五.
[00:22:48] It's been phenomenal.
[00:22:50] Eric: Unbelievable. So is that the agency, are they focused on the Indiegogo campaign or are they involved in other aspects of your marketing as well?
[00:23:00] Cody: They are specifically a crowdfunding campaign marketing agency.
[00:23:04] Eric: Okay. And apparently it's working.
[00:23:06] Cody: Yeah. Their name is TCF, the crowdfunding formula, and they genuinely have a formula that works.
[00:23:11] Eric: So have your plans for what to do with that money changed since you have crushed the original goal?
[00:23:20] Cody: Kind of. This has been the life changing moment I've been waiting for a long time. I've been doing this for 10 years. And, for me, it's been there's ups and downs in the start-up there's highs and lows.
[00:23:30] There's times you want to quit there's times you're super passionate about it. And this has definitely reignited that first-year passion that I had for this company. When I first started doing this and it's going to change the future of me and the people that work with this company and the people who will get these units.
[00:23:46] And our first goal was just to get across the first milestone of 10,000 and then we're hitting really high numbers. And now that we're in the six figures, this is when you start getting more publicity. We were in Uncrated the other day, like on 星期四, and that was our highest ticket sale day. It was wild.
[00:24:03] And. It's been phenomenal to get this coverage and get this awareness. And we're building that brand are still sticking to our playbook of build the brand, become the name brand. And we haven't changed that as we continue to learn from our customers, what they're looking for and how we can better assert that that's the direction we'll continue to move in.
[00:24:22] Eric: Beautiful. We're going to do a discount for listeners, right?
[00:24:25] Cody: We are.
[00:24:26] So we have an exclusive discount. That's super cool how Indiegogo works. It's called a secret perk. When you go on the actual campaign, if you would just click on it just regularly, you'll see three different perks. When you click on that link that I've sent you guys you'll see a secret perk pop-up and that has a discount that's lower than all of the ones on here so far.
[00:24:48] And it's exclusively offered to SiliconExpert and their listeners.
[00:24:52] Eric: Oh, that's amazing. So listeners, if you go to SiliconExpert.com/KaraPure, you will be able to access the secret perk, giving you 50% off the price of Kara Pure. Was the original idea for this yours?
[00:25:08] Cody: Yes. I wrote this. I came up with this when I was in university and my sophomore year.
[00:25:13] Eric: What was the spark for it?
[00:25:15] Cody: That's a great question. This one of my favorite stories to tell actually. Cause it's, there's the why of what's personal to me. And then there's the why of my design driven passions. I've always wanted to be an architect since I was like five years old. When I went to university, we had a mechanical electrical and plumbing class that we're taking and standard research paper at the end of the semester, but the professor did something cool.
[00:25:38] He's like, you have to watch these three Ted talks before you start your paper to get like inspiration and let you know what you should be writing about. The whole topic was write a research paper on an, um, up and coming technology or something that's emerging. I don't remember the other two Ted talks, but I remember the one that inspired this.
[00:25:54] It was by a guy named Michael Pollan. Who was an architect in England. He base all of his design work off of a study called biomimicry and biomimicry is the study of nature and replicating its function, not just its aesthetics. Think of solar panel. It's like a leaf, right? That's the same concept. That's the basis of biomimicry.
[00:26:14] So in that video, which is funny because now I'm going to show people this video. It's like a 15 second clip. That was my full inspiration. There's this little beetle called the Namibian desert beetle that lives in the Namibian desert, which is the driest desert in the world. And the way that it survives is once every few weeks a fog will come over the desert and it will climb up on top of the sand dune.
[00:26:36] And these are gale force winds, like 50 to 60 mile per hour winds and it'll perch itself against the winds and let the fog hit its shell. And as the fog hits its shell, it starts to accumulate water on its own back. And as it starts to accumulate enough water, it becomes subject to gravity. It'll go into a handstands and then drink the water off of its own back.
[00:26:58] And that's how it survives. And for me, I was like, career changing mind blowing moment for me. And I was like, this is the most practical solution for drinking water in the world if we can make it a technology.
[00:27:12] Eric: The Namibian desert beetle.
[00:27:14] Cody: Yeah. And funny enough, the company's name is Kara Water again, the Namibian desert beetle and all inspired by that beetle, so the scientific name of that beetle is Stenocara gracilipes.
[00:27:26] Eric: There we have.
[00:27:28] Cody: Full circle.
[00:27:31] Eric: What a cool origin story.
[00:27:33] Cody: Yeah. My desire to help people and come up with the solution. And my passion for design came together and Kara Pure was born.
[00:27:42] Eric: That's an amazing source of inspiration. Uh, so how did you get from the beetle to the Kara Pure?
[00:27:50] Cody: So, how Kara Pure actually works is really interesting. Take that beetle and it's a natural phenomenon, right? It doesn't use electricity to capture the water on its shell. It's a bug same concept. So there's two ways that typically you can use to capture water out of the air in technology today.
[00:28:06] One is how your air conditioning unit works. It cools the air and it drips water, cause it's condensing it. That's super energy intensive. It's a compressor. It's loud. We use something called the desiccants and a desiccant is like a little packet of silica you find in your shoe box, that's keeping your box dry.
[00:28:23] It doesn't require energy and it's keeping your box dry because it employs the fundamental physics of Van Der Waal forces. And it attracts water like a magnet to its surface because it's negatively charged water is positively charged and they just naturally attract one another. A very small force, but it works.
[00:28:39] We use desiccants and other technologies use the compressors. The benefit of a desiccant, which are so many is it's sustainable. It's a natural component I can put right back into the ground when it's done. It's quieter because it's not a compressor. And there's another added benefit that I'll get over in a second, but how the desiccant works in the unit is we simply just pass air over it. And as air passes over this desiccant, it collects it. It just removes it from the air. It gets trapped, unlike a compressor that needs to cool the air, desiccants need heat to extract the water that we captured, create this pseudo steam. And then we passively condense it in a passive condenser and we recycle the air that we're bringing in to cool that condenser with just natural air and that small differential will condense the water.
[00:29:21] When you think about what that means, to boil water to make it into steam. It's a temperature that kills viruses and bacteria. And we had a lab test done where we tested the air quality performance against the flu virus, the H1N1 virus, and it had a 99.9% removal rate in the space. So in reality, it's also an extremely strong air purifier, and that's one major benefit of desiccant technology compared to compressor technology that just cools the air.
[00:29:50] And it's actually a breeding ground for viruses and bacteria versus the opposite here. Once we have the water and we process it, it's technically distilled water, super pure, nothing in it. No contaminants. It's in a stainless steel tank. We then add minerals back to it naturally alkalize the water with these minerals.
[00:30:06] And then we store it in a second tank in the unit. Then it goes through every four hours at UV cycle to just make sure it's sanitized like sanitized. And once you pour it, it then goes through that UV cycle again, and a carbon filter for just double added, uh, protection and make sure it's extremely high quality.
[00:30:23] And then it just pours right out the unit.
[00:30:24] Eric: It's amazing to me that something as especially currently topical as air purification is just kind of a, an afterthought that people are spending thousands of dollars for just air purifiers. And here we have it as just a side effect.
[00:30:40] Cody: In fact, Kara Pure is a water dispenser, a really strong air purifier, and also a dehumidifier.
[00:30:48] So three really great technologies packaged into one beautifully designed product.
[00:30:52] Eric: Awesome. Cody, thank you so much for an amazing discussion and for being our guest today.
[00:30:59] Cody: Well, thanks for having me. I appreciate it was a great time.
[00:31:02] Eric: I'd like to thank you again, Cody, and also thank Kara Water for sponsoring this episode of the Intelligent Engine podcast.
[00:31:09] And a special thanks to you, our audience for tuning into this episode, be sure to tune in for new episodes that will tell them to more of the electronics industry. Upcoming episodes will explore location-based advertising technologies and the changing landscape of traditional electronic product contract manufacturing.
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[00:31:57] Until next time, keep the data flowing.