A countertop dishwasher called Shabosh is attracting lots of backers on Kickstarter, having raised over $55 thousand from 535 backers.
At first glance, the dishwasher looks a lot like an awful lot like another small countertop dishwasher that garnered a whole lot of buzz five years ago at CES. But while the Shabosh is visually reminiscent of the Tetra, which promised to run a cycle in ten minutes with just a half gallon of water, it’s a far cry functionally from the little wonder that had many of us lusting for something as pedestrian as a dishwasher.
Before we get to the differences, we must look at what happened to Tetra. Unfortunately, for those of us who have been patiently waiting for the little guy, we may never get to put it through its paces since Heatworks, the company behind the Tetra, shut its doors and put its assets up for auction last fall.
The news that the company had put its assets up for auction surfaced last fall when an IP acquisition firm named Hilco Streambank announced it would bid on Heatworks assets. The company was ultimately successful, stating on its website that it had “contacted more than 300 potential targets and brought 16 of those parties to the table through advanced discussions and negotiations. The process culminated in a public auction, and a sale closed in December, 2022.”
The first signs of trouble for the Tetra were the seemingly endless delays and on-again, off-again promises of a ship date. Along the way, Heatworks struck up deals with companies like BASF to create the detergent modules, but it looks like they may have run out of capital before it could build the machine and ship it.
So while there may be an outside chance that we see something resembling a Tetra, it won’t be from Heatworks.
Which brings us back to Shabosh. While the tiny dishwasher looks a lot like the Tetra, the way it works is very different. Unlike the Tetra, which was designed to run a fully automatic washing cycle within its closed glass enclosure, the Shabosh has an open top that allows the machine’s user to spray dishes with its water spout. That’s right, washing dishes with the Shabosh is not that different than hand-washing dishes in a sink, only you get to do it in a cool-looking glass enclosure.
But hey, that’s probably why the Shabosh’s full retail price is targeted to be $200, which is about 40% of what the Tetra was targeted to sell for. And who knows, unlike the Tetra, we may actually see the Kabosh make it to consumer homes sometime soon.
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