Island Water Technologies has completed the first installations of its Regen water-treatment facility, and those two projects are providing the company with the one thing it needs to win other contracts — data.

Based in Montague, P.E.I., IWT now has two products on the market, both of which offer efficient means of treating water away from urban locations. Regen can treat waste water for remote facilities ideally housing 75 to 250 people. And the company also offers ClearPod, an efficient septic system for individual households.

While ClearPod is gaining traction across Canada, IWT in the past year has installed Regen facilities with the Canadian military at Gagetown, N.B., and at a remote oil services camp in Hassi Messaoud, Algeria.

CEO Patrick Kiely said in an interview this week that these two Regen installations are giving the company data on such facets as the amount of water treated and the overall energy consumption. And that means it can prove to potential clients that the system works. Kiely hopes he can record a couple more installations by year’s end.

“Our big barriers to sales are the lead times it takes to do a deal, but we should be able to minimize that because we have the data,” he said. “So now we’re ready to ramp up our business development.”

Regen is a self-contained product that provides state-of-the-art water treatment in remote locations. It all fits in a shipping container, so it can be delivered virtually anywhere in the world. Solar panels bolt on to the exterior to power the operation.

Remsoft Adding Staff in Move to the Cloud

Kiely explained that the technology is effective because it requires so little energy — it relies on a unique plastic material that can treat water using a fraction of the energy required by competing systems. Regen uses so little electricity that it can draw all the energy it needs from solar panels, meaning it does not need an external source of electricity. And because of its plastic system, Regen needs no chemicals to be added during the treatment process.

The Algerian project, which was installed in a couple of days once the people and materials arrived at the camp, is successfully producing water that is pure enough to be used to irrigate farms. At

Gagetown, IWT is working with emergency disaster relief teams so that Regen could be deployed in the event of a humanitarian disaster.

ClearPod, meanwhile, continues to gain clients in Canada and abroad. Island Water is selling the product through a distributer in B.C., and it just received approval from the Ministry of the Environment in Ontario. IWT’s distributor in Ontario is also active in China and has sold demo products to potential partners in the country. IWT has also began to reach out to clients in such countries as Honduras and Kenya.

Having received $250,000 in funding from Innovacorp, Island Water now employs 10 people and is in the process of raising capital to scale up its business development team. The target is an equity investment of $2.5 million, which would transform the business.

“Every industry is different and the waste water space requires a lot of patience,” said Kiely. “For the last four years, we’ve ... purposefully been keeping costs very low. Now it’s a matt of scaling and making sure we have the outreach with the clients.”