In this Member Spotlight, mHUB connected with Michael Ramos, creator and co-founder of NOAH System, and Isidro Hurtado, Founder and Creative Director, to discuss how their work is helping prevent lead exposure in drinking water through a retrofit technology designed for existing fountains, sinks, and aging water infrastructure. Michael shares how his experience as a father and engineer for Chicago Public Schools inspired a preventative technology designed to help protect students from lead exposure in drinking water and Isidro describes how the technology works. Plus, visit one of their initial pilot sites.
Across the U.S., lead in drinking water remains a serious concern. In schools alone, a 2018 Government Accountability Office report found that among school districts that tested for lead in drinking water, 37% found elevated levels. And not much as changed in the past decade. For Ramos, the issue felt both urgent and personal.
“When I heard that lead exposure, even at low levels, can lead to permanent irreversible brain damage and lower IQ, I took it upon myself,” Ramos shares. “As a father, and as someone who’s responsible for thousands of students every day, I saw a lot of holes in not only testing but remediation strategies.”
That concern became the foundation for NOAH System, a retrofit technology designed to prevent lead from entering drinking water in the first place. The system can be easily installed onto existing drinking fountains or underneath kitchen sinks, making it especially relevant for schools, community spaces, and buildings with aging water infrastructure.
Many existing solutions respond to lead after it has already entered the water. Filters capture contaminants at the point of use, while lead pipe replacement can take years or even decades to complete.
NOAH System takes a different approach.
The technology uses automated micro-flushes on a timed sequence to keep water moving through pipes. This helps prevent stagnation, the primary condition that allow a lead to leach into drinking water.
“We’re focused more on prevention,” Hurtado shares. “We prevent lead from ever coming into contact with your water in the first place.”
The system has also received third-party validation through Loyola University in partnership with Chicago Public Schools. In testing, NOAH System helped reduce toxic levels of lead at drinking fountains to below the EPA action level, and in many cases, to undetectable levels.
For Ramos, the impact is measured not only in test results, but in trust.
“We’ve had really positive feedback,” Hurtado says. “Students have written letters. We’d have entire classrooms write letters thanking us for installing NOAHs in their system.”
NOAH System first connected with mHUB through its partnership with water innovation group Current. At the time, the company was working on its second version of the technology, which included water temperature and flow readings.
Through mHUB, NOAH System accessed engineering support, design resources, mentorship, and a broader network to help refine the product.
“mHUB has been a huge resource for us,” Ramos says. “They helped us tune that in and make the NOAH a lot smaller and more compact and more cost efficient for not only us but for the customers.”
For a hard tech company building a solution for critical infrastructure, those resources helped NOAH System move closer to scale.
“There’s a lot of resources that they made available for us, whether it’s the electrical engineering team, their design team, their mentorships, opening up their networks of a lot of important people that we really need to scale NOAH up,” Ramos shares. “It’s been crucial for us.”
For NOAH System, the vision is simple: safe drinking water should be expected everywhere, especially in the places where children learn and grow.
“We want to ensure that lead-free, safe water is a must, and that it’s not an exception,” Hurtado says.
What began as a father’s concern and an engineer’s responsibility has grown into a preventative technology designed to protect students, support communities, and improve trust in drinking water systems.
As NOAH System continues to refine and scale its solution, its mission remains focused on a critical goal: helping ensure everyone has access to safe, lead-free drinking water.
Want to learn more about NOAH System? Read Chicago Tribune's Article