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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Delta

Delta’s Innovation Lab Crowdfunds Home Glass Rinser Like You Find in Bars

If your house is anything like mine, then you have a number of resuable water bottles of all stripes stashed in various kitchen cabinets. These water bottles are a great way to cut down on waste, but not all of them are dishwasher safe, and if they have a narrow mouth, they can be difficult to clean with standard brushes.

And it turns out that not cleaning your reusable drinking bottle can result in a nasty bacteria bio-film build up that can make drinking from an unwashed bottle worse than licking a dog’s chew toy.

To help you stay hydrated and keep your drinking vessels clean, First Wave, the Innovation Lab at Delta, today launched a crowdfunding for the First Wave Glass Rinser. If you’ve worked at a bar, or even watched people work at Starbucks, you’re familiar with how it works.

The Glass Rinser installs easily in a standard kitchen sink hole (it can replace an unused soap dispenser, for example) and attaches to your plumbing. When you push a glass or waterbottle upside down on top of the Glass Rinser, jets of water shoot up to clean out the inside of the glass. It even works on narrow-mouthed water bottles.

Backers can pick up The Glass Rinser for $85 on Indiegogo (all the $75 perks sold out), but they’ll have to wait until October of 2019 before it ships. That’s a long time to wait for what probably amounts to a little more convenience in your life. After all, you have to install it (which may require hiring a plumber) and you still actually wash the bottles after you rinse them out.

The advantages to backing this Glass Rinser seem to be that other, similar glass rinsing solutions are more expensive and more industrial, and require more custom installation. And unlike so many other crowdfunded hardware projects, the fact that it is from a division of Delta, which already makes kitchen sink related items at scale, means that there is a better chance of this actually coming to market if funded.

On this, its first day, the campaign has already hit 67 percent of its $200,000 crowdfunding goal. Looks like this Glass Rinser is making a splash.

Kohler and Delta Debut Voice Controlled Faucets

Filling a measuring cup to the right level with water can sometimes require ninja-like dexterity. Water shoots out of the faucet too fast, you have to pour some out, then pour out a little more. Whoops, too much, have to add some back. Then you hold it up to eye level to make sure the the bottom of the meniscus is on the right line.

New faucets from Kohler and Delta announced at CES this week are poised to eliminate that hassle by giving you voice control over your water. You can tell both the Kohler Sensate and the Delta Touch20 faucets to turn water on and off as well as dispense a precise amount of water. Ask for 8 oz of water and the faucets will dispense 8 oz.!

Both the Kohler and Delta faucets work with Alexa, and Kohler also supports Google Home and Apple HomeKit. Mike Wolf here at The Spoon actually uncovered the Delta Alexa skill last month, and now we can see it in action.

No word on pricing or when they will be available. For those of us with plain ole dumb faucets, both Kohler and Delta are looking at ways to provide the voice activation retrofits without needing to buy a whole new product.

As we’ve noted before, voice command is actually a perfect interface for the kitchen faucet. Turning the kitchen sink on and off with your voice is super helpful when your hands are messy, or contaminated by something like raw meat. And, filling up a measuring cup won’t require ninja-like skills anymore.

Delta Faucet Will Soon Let You Pour Water With Your Voice (Exclusive)

Want to pour yourself a glass of water with your voice? It looks like you soon can with a Delta Faucet.

The Spoon recently discovered a new Alexa skill from Delta Faucet company that will allow you to do such things are pour a glass of water or fill your coffee machine simply by asking Alexa. The skill looks like it will work with forthcoming voice-enabled Delta Faucet product or products enabled by what the faucet maker is calling its “voice module” and the Delta voice web app.

The only problem is if you want to buy the Delta voice module or register for your Delta voice account with the web app, neither of those exist today. In fact, the only clue to Delta’s voice-enabled faucet – at least as of now – is the Alexa skill called Delta. My guess is the company is preparing to launch a new voice-enabled line of faucets in a few weeks at CES or the upcoming Kitchen and Bath Show.

There’s also a good chance these faucets will connect to Wi-Fi. As far as I can tell, Delta doesn’t seem to have any Wi-Fi enabled faucets on the market today (but they do have a Wi-Fi leak detector), so it’s quite possible the mysterious ‘voice module’ is also a ‘Wi-Fi module’.

So far the Delta Alexa skill has one review, which again is strange because Delta hasn’t yet released its voice module or voice web app. Chances are the review, which calls the Delta skill “Easy Peasy”, was written by a Delta employee familiar with the initiative.

I don’t know about you, but I think using my voice to pour water is one of the cooler and more practical uses for Alexa in the home. I could imagine scenarios where my hands are full or simply messy, and using my voice to turn the water on or off with my voice just makes sense. I guess I’ll just have to wait until Delta actually releases the product that works with the skill before I get my hands on one.