Puraset Provides Safe Drinking Water to At-Risk Communities Using AWS

Puraset doesn’t just want to do business—it wants to do good. The Hungarian company aims to deliver safe, reliable, and affordable water treatment to at-risk communities around the world, for less than a tenth of the cost of bottled water.

It needed a way to connect and remotely manage its innovative water purification units, which are currently undergoing field trials in Africa, with a unit operating in Ghana. The goal is to be able to bring safe water to any community that lacks it and to do so more quickly and cost-effectively than other water projects. Reliable remote access was essential to the concept and conceived in the design stage. To provide it, Puraset turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Using AWS IoT Core to easily and securely connect devices to the cloud, Puraset can monitor its portable water purifiers in the field. Just two operators can oversee up to 100 units. It can also collect and analyze usage data to improve the quality of water treatment over time, and ease infrastructure maintenance so it can focus on designing long-term solutions for the developing world.

Puraset is the new name for an established company, formed in 2020, when new owners rebranded S-Metalltech 98. Co. Ltd a company with more than 20 years of expertise in water treatment—to develop a solution. Called PurAID, it’s a portable water purification unit that’s about the size of a large refrigerator. It weighs about 500 kg, can be transported by truck, and can treat borehole water, well water, or groundwater in a community or public institution. Up to 30 units can be networked together into a node to scale treatment to meet local needs. Purification happens entirely within the unit, using regenerable adsorbent technology. Regeneration means that the materials can be reused, ensuring environmentally friendly operation with the smallest possible economical footprint.

Previously, water treatment involved capital-intensive facilities with extensive distribution infrastructure. The expense of the infrastructure and the cost of staff to operate it meant that many communities globally were left without access to safe drinking water. “Our idea was for a mobile water treatment unit that provides a solution that’s easy to install and easy to operate, offering a rapid solution to people in need,” says Csilla Kopornyik, managing director, international sales director at Puraset. “But we needed a way to automate as much of the process as possible so more could be done with fewer staff. This provides smooth, continuous long-term operation, giving people an uninterrupted supply of safe drinking water.”

The PurAID units use AWS IoT Core to easily and securely connect to a centralized operations center. This allows Puraset to remotely manage equipment, including monitoring water volume and quality in real time. The units can also signal if anything requires maintenance. This allows automated operation with minimal physical presence of the operator.

The company knew that it wanted to use the Internet of Things (IoT) to allow it to centralize operation of the units, but it wasn’t sure about the best approach to take. “Our expertise is in materials: water treatment, metals, that’s our thing,” says Kopornyik. “So we sought advice and help in developing a control system, making sure it would be reliable and cost-effective.” To help with that, it chose Budapest-based AWS Partner Parabonum as its internet developer. Parabonum helped to develop the controller and the online systems used in PurAID units.

Puraset chose AWS as its cloud provider because of its global coverage and ready-made solutions. “AWS is very dynamic and evolving and the people are communicative and truly helpful,” says Kopornyik. “Now we can focus on helping people get safe drinking water without worrying about the infrastructure that supports us.”

The global coverage of AWS was important to Puraset, because the company plans to install PurAID units around the world. It designed the units to be extremely rugged, weather-resistant, and capable of running off-grid, using solar power if needed.

Less than 2 years after rebranding as Puraset, the company had installed a PurAID unit in the African nation of Ghana for field testing. That unit can deliver 6–10 cubic meters of drinking water—6,000 to 10,000 liters—per day. The cost per liter, says Kopornyik, is about €0.002. In comparison, bottled or sachet water, commonly used in Ghana, costs 5–10 times as much as PurAID drinking water and generates substantial plastic waste.

Puraset is enthusiastic about the performance of the test installation and sees the potential for larger deployments. A control center staffed by just two operators can monitor and service a network of up to 100 units, although Kopornyik says 30 units is optimal. “By using AWS IoT Core to connect units to the operations center, we eliminate one of the main challenges of operating traditional water treatment facilities—finding enough qualified operators,” she says.

PurAID units are managed remotely, data about the status of systems and their use collected and transmitted to the operations center, where it can be analyzed. Anything unusual can be flagged for attention. The units usually require on-site service every 2–3 months. Service is simple: it requires refilling some materials and replacing the adsorbent tank with another. The replaced tank is then regenerated back at the control center, ready to deploy back in the field. The company continues to make improvements to the units based on analysis of usage and performance data.

Puraset minimizes costs by using on-demand compute resources from AWS. To scale capacity to demand, it uses Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), a fully managed container orchestration service, and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure and resizable compute capacity for workloads. It also uses AWS Elastic Beanstalk, an easy-to-use service for deploying and scaling web applications and services, to continually optimize operations.

Puraset now hopes to increase the number of water purification units it operates in locations around the world. “We believe we can really make a difference in people’s lives and provide safe water to communities that need it,” says Kopornyik. “It simply wouldn’t be possible to do this without using AWS. It gives us the ability to scale and keeps costs down. It’s helped us make our vision real.”