The Sipp Manifesto
Aug 4, 2025
The Stoic philosopher Seneca once said, “Excellence withers without an adversary.” While this type of quote is usually deployed for sports, career development, or personal growth, I think about it in the context of our drinking water infrastructure.
Let me explain.
Clean drinking water, piped into homes for on-demand use, is one of the greatest achievements of modern society. For more than a century, centralized treatment and distribution have been the cheapest, fastest, most sustainable, and most efficient way to meet entire communities’ drinking water needs.
When it was first implemented, water treatment had a clear adversary—contamination—and we became excellent at defeating it. So excellent, in fact, that many people now believe contamination is only a problem in the developing world. Whenever we tell people about SIPP, the response is often, “Is that really a problem here?”
Almost immediately, they follow up with a reference to Flint, Michigan, the most infamous water quality disaster in recent memory. But then they’re surprised to hear about:
In each of these cases, tens of thousands of people faced serious water quality issues, service disruptions, or both. These aren’t remote towns in a developing country, but major U.S. cities.
If you’re expecting a dose of doomerism from us, you’ll be waiting a long time. We don’t have to accept this reality, but we do have to change our thinking. The only way to avoid these scenarios is to adopt a proactive maintenance approach at the community level.
The problem? Most community water systems are repaired reactively. Action is taken only after people get sick, infrastructure fails, or homes are damaged.
It’s like waiting for your car to crash before fixing the brakes.
Unlike cars, our water distribution networks are sprawling, aging, and expensive to maintain. Many pipes are past their useful life, serving either dense cities or vast rural regions. Add strained budgets, limited resources, and understaffed utilities—and well - you get a lot of metaphorical car crashes.
To restore excellence to our water systems, we need a proactive approach. That means recognizing that our adversary has evolved. It’s no longer just contamination but has come to include consistency, communication, and convenience.
SIPP is ready to tackle all of them.
Contamination
No matter how efficiently water is distributed, if it’s contaminated, it’s not safe to drink. At SIPP, we prioritize point-of-use treatment to protect you from any contaminants that slip through. In systems this large, contamination is inevitable at times. Our promise: you’ll be protected when it happens. By combining filtration with UV disinfection, SIPP safeguards against as many contaminants as possible directly at your tap.
Consistency
Proactive maintenance requires continuous action. Utilities do test water regularly, but they can’t do it all—especially not at both the system-wide and individual-home level. SIPP equips every home with continuous water monitoring, contextualizing results with nearby homes and benchmarking against public utility data. This empowers you to know, in real time, whether an issue is unique to your home or affecting the whole community.
Communication
To most people, utility operations are a black box. Other than a monthly bill, they rarely hear from their provider. This lack of transparency breeds distrust. So much so that many turn to costly, unhealthy, and unsustainable alternatives like bottled water. Regaining trust starts with clear, open communication. Through our SIPPlytics water quality map and dynamic home alerts, we make water quality visible, understandable, and actionable.
Convenience
In much of America, complacency about water quality has set in—the “Is this really a problem here?” mindset. People don’t take action until a crisis hits their own home, and by then, it’s too late. Instead of expecting everyone to share our passion for water safety, we’ve built convenience into our product. SIPP is the first smart home water system: filters arrive automatically when they need replacing, and leak alerts help you avoid costly damage. You set SIPP up, and we take it from there.
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Letting our water quality excellence wither away is a choice—one we don’t have to make. We need a system that enables proactive, community-wide maintenance. SIPP can be that system.
But we won’t get there alone.
Join us on this journey back to excellence.
One issue at a time.
One community at a time.
One SIPP at a time.