Does this sound like you?

* You’ve decided to opt out of corporate employment in favour of working for yourself
* You don’t want unnecessary risk that goes with a start-up
* You’d prefer to work from home and choose your own “office hours”
* You want a business that is affordable and does not place big demands on your cashflow.
* You’d rather have a small team of staff or no staff at all

Water Rhapsody is an ideal, low-risk, easy-to-start business opportunity:

* All you need is a passion for the environment, a Computer, Internet Connectivity, and a willingness to learn.
* You can work from a home office
* You can be the only staff member
* You’ll start generating turnover from Month 1
* You could be earning R40,000 per month income after 9 months. Some of our franchisees have been much quicker
* Build up a lucrative, saleable asset, that will earn income for you for years to come.

See more on the WaterRhapsody Green Business Opportunity and change your life now.

Water Rhapsody have established 16 franchisees in water conservation over the past 6 months from the Cape to the Limpopo. They are still looking for ecopreneurs who want to own their own green businesses in the Free State, North West province and in the Northern Cape. Water Rhapsody has been in business offering water conservation systems for the past 16 years and has some 3000 installation to date. Six months ago it started expanding its operations from Cape Town into the rest of South Africa and there are a few key positions left. For further information see Green Business Opportunities and the Water Rhapsody website

17 years ago, as I became aware of the impact our lifestyles were having on our environment and coupled with a growing sceptism of big corporates, from municipalities to private sector conglomerates, I looked around for more opportunities to go off the grid.  We already had a solar hot water heating system installed in 1987 which is still going strong today! We were busy planning new bathrooms and looking at options for rainwater harvesting and grey water recycling. The search was difficult with most information originating out of California and it seemed that we would have to put together our own system working with very cynical local plumbers when we came across Jeremy Westgarth-Taylor at Water Rhapsody. Jeremy was an inspirational breath of fresh air, a non-materialistic idealist with a strong practical streak – seemingly out of step with our peers’ conspicuous consumption lifestyles but light years ahead of them in terms of what we needed to do to ensure there would still be a planet for our grandchildren. Jeremy had devised a series of water saving devices using strong robust catalogue components that could be clipped onto standard plumbing systems. As I am interested in simple and elegant design of buildings and architecture, hate the need for regular home maintenance, and being a great disciple of the “set and forget” philisophy, I scrutinised Jeremy’s systems very carefully. My wife was also an important test in that she thought that all of these ideas were a bit cranky and didn’t want to have anything to do with inventions that would cause smells, regular maintenance or lifestyle adaptations. The pool was bad enough! There didn’t seem to be any clever tricks designed to hook one into ongoing maintenance contracts and supply of overpriced essential bespoke maintenance items or patented parts only available from Jeremy – as I had found to great cost with a swimming pool filter system we had installed from another contractor. We made sure that the plumbers fitted the necessary dual plumbing systems in the new bathrooms and retrofitted them in the existing amd installed the grey water recycling system. We are happy to report that we have never used municipal water on the bottom lawn again. As you will gather we are not very good on regular maintenance but the system, whose filters do need cleaning from time to time, – usually takes 5 minutes at the end of winter – has operated successfully ever since. As you can imagine with our erratic approach to home maintenance the filters do eventually block up with lint etc. At this point the overflow to the sewer kicks in and we never suffer any problems other noticing the garden sprinkler doesn’t come on. We then clean the filters and off it goes. The cleaning is also simple and the parts robust enough to enable unskilled staff to do it. We still get a great sense of satisfaction after showering or letting the bath water out to go and watch the sprinkler working. Our staff think the system is magic. We have enthusiastically endorsed the product to friends and family over the past 15 years and have not heard a single complaint. There are now the very attractive Water Rhapsody signs in every street in our neighbourhood. My wife’s sister has had a double system installed in the front and back of her house. Her husband is a perfectionist engineer with the council who watches the pennies very carefully but they, too, have been very happy with their system.

Simon Nicks
Environmenal Planner and Urban Designer
Fynbos Conservation Award winner 2009
Johnny Walker Celebrating Strides nominee 2010

Timeline

—5 Billion Years Ago: Planet Earth forms 

—10,000 years ago: Last Ice Age ends

—1500-1850: Little Ice Age occurs, temperatures in Northern Hemisphere drop by approximately 1 degree Celsius, triggering disease and famine.

—Mid-1700s: Industrial Revolution begins and manual labor-based economy is replaced by industry and coal-burning machinery.

—1824: French mathematician and physicist Joseph Fourier discovers that atmospheric gases could raise the Earth’s surface temperature. His observations would later be known as the greenhouse effect.

—1896: Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius predicts increased levels of carbon dioxide in the air due to burning of fossil fuels by humans will cause a slow increase in Earth’s temperature.

—1938: British engineer Guy Callendar publishes one of the first studies demonstrating how the burning of fossil fuels is raising the Earth’s surface temperature. His work is largely ignored. Continue Reading