One of my biggest pet peeves in the kitchen is getting my dirty hands all over my soap dispenser. It sounds trivial but when I’ve got BBQ sauce or raw chicken hands I don’t want to be touching anything until my hands are clean and that includes a faucet handle and soap pump.
I haven’t splurged on a fancy touch faucet but I have had an opportunity to use the touch-free sensor pumps from simplehuman and they have instantly made my kitchen area much cleaner.
I started out with one sensor pump for hand soap that instantly dispenses your desired amount of soap without having to touch or pump anything. It’s got a clear reservoir so you can see how much soap you have left and the stainless steel body works with the design of any kitchen.
I loved our sensor pump so much that we grabbed another one to dispense dishwashing soap. With one swipe of the dish brush we’ve got soap on it and can move quickly into scrubbing and cleaning. I’ve used the sponge/handle reservoir type of cleaning products but they never worked that well.
With both pumps we’ve got “twin” cleaning dispensers that match perfectly and take up very little room on our windowsill. We could dump the plastic pumps which are unsightly and add a more upscale look to our sink area which we always need help keeping clean and de-cluttered.
Sensor pumps haven’t always been this perfect. There have been models out there from other manufacturers that drip or are incredibly slow or get clogged easily. During my day touring simplehuman (yes it’s a perk of the job), I spoke to engineers and product designers who obsess about these types of problems and have eliminated them from this unit.
When the simplehuman team first developed the sensor pump it dispensed soap in 1 sec. Everyone thought that was great including the CEO and founder Frank Yang, but the engineers said “we can make this faster.” At first Frank thought that “No one’s even going to notice! Why spend R&D on that?” But then his team got the soap pump down to .25 seconds and now using the old one is a frustrating because it is too damn slow. The new soap pump made him care about dispensing speed. I liken it to internet speed. There was a time when we expected and didn’t care that a simple page took 5 seconds to load. We accepted it. Then high speed came along and now when you even have to wait 2 seconds for a YouTube video to buffer, you’re all like “Eff this, man!” and you click out. You didn’t realize 56K modems were lame until 6MB came along.
The sensor pump is so fast we did an experiment to see if you could swipe your hand underneath without getting soap on it. Couldn’t be done.
I guess the one drawback to an automated sensor pump is it running out of batteries. We’ve had ours for more than 6 months and only changed the battery once but simplehuman has addressed this by releasing a rechargeable sensor pump. You simply plug it into your computer or smartphone jack and you’ll have a charge that lasts you three months.
For our family the sensor pump is a little piece of heaven and a touch of convenience that you don’t even know how awesome it is until you have it. As a bonus we’ve found that our son who constantly needs his hands washed really enjoys the “magic” behind the sensor pump and it makes washing his hands more fun.
Simplehuman has offered to extend their gratitude to our readers who are fans of their brand and by simply leaving a comment below about your favorite and most innovative simplehuman product, you’ll be entered in a Giveaway to win that product. If you also tweet about the product and include @simplehuman and @Charles_Hudson you’ll also be entered to win. Check out simplehuman.com and start commenting! Leave as many comments as you want but please leave a valid email as that’s the only way we have to notify the winner.
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