About the office
One office. One name. One number you can look up.
EKOWAI Engineering is the engineering office of Alvaro Burgos Cifuentes — based in Krefeld with an office in the Heinsberg district, specialising in water planning: infiltration, rainwater harvesting, constructed wetlands and nature-based systems. Small enough that you always speak with the responsible engineer. Registered, insured, verifiable.
The engineer behind the calculations.
Alvaro Burgos Cifuentes, M.Sc.
„Two disciplines shaped me. Industrial engineering taught me to think in systems — processes, material flows, numbers that have to add up. Bionics showed me who the best engineer really is: nature, with a 3.8-billion-year head start. Constructed wetlands and nature-based water systems are not experiments — they are proven technology under recognised codes of practice (DWA, FLL) that harness nature's intelligence.“
„EKOWAI is the consequence: water systems that sustain themselves because they work with nature instead of against it — designed with the precision an authority can verify. Building with nature means building resilience.“
„Nature is the more experienced engineer. You don't have to design against it — you design with it.“
Don't take our word for it. Look it up.
Every one of these can be verified independently:
Chamber of Engineers NRW, member no. 754661
Registered in the chamber's member directory; registration is a prerequisite for signing off design work under professional responsibility.
Professional liability insurance
HDI; the design services are insured.
B.Sc. Industrial Engineering · M.Sc. Bionics
Qualification of the responsible engineer.
Memberships: DWA · VDI · fbr
German Association for Water, Wastewater and Waste · Association of German Engineers · German Association for Rainwater Harvesting and Water Utilisation — all memberships confirmed active.
Standards library: over 14 DWA codes and guidance sheets on file, in original
Designs are checked against the current edition, not secondary sources.
Method over portfolio.
A young office, deliberately transparent.
EKOWAI is a young office — we don't dress it up with an inflated project list. Instead we show how we work: every calculation documented, every design parameter with a source reference, every standard precisely cited. And a registered engineer who signs off on the result under their own name. We add references once projects are complete — not before.
Every figure has a source.
In our documentation you can trace every value: to the KOSTRA-DWD dataset, to the kf-value from your soil survey, to the formula in the DWA code of practice. That's more work than a results PDF — but it's the difference between "trust us" and "check for yourself".
Direct, in both directions.
You speak with the engineer who does the calculations — not with sales. That also means: if a project doesn't make sense, we say so at the initial consultation, not after three paid rounds of design work. A small office lives on referrals, not on project volume.
Krefeld, Heinsberg — and digital beyond that.
The office operates from two locations in western NRW: registered seat in Krefeld on the Lower Rhine, working office in Heinsberg near the Dutch border. Service area is NRW as a whole — from the Lower Rhine through the Rhineland (Cologne, Düsseldorf, Bonn) to the border region. Since water planning largely works with documents — site plan, surveys, calculations, drawings — collaboration is mostly digital; on-site visits and inspections by arrangement.
Get to know us through your project.
The initial consultation is free and clarifies within 30 minutes whether and how we can help you. Or test how we work on a concrete case: plausibility review of an existing verification for €600 net (€714 incl. VAT) — with a written review memo.