Published in the Saturday Star weekly newspaper in Johannesburg, South Africa. Conducted in-depth interview with local inventor and his former mentor, to convey the journey of a young entrepreneur working to fill a niche in South Africa's energy industry.

1. 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
I
T 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 which
could 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 the
Harvard 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 cold
showers while saving money and power
Even if you
didn’t teach
Harald, you knew
who he was