One of my life hacks is that I try and use the same product everywhere. For example, we have the same refillable soap dispensers in every bathroom, and we purchase one kind of "refill", in bulk. That way when the soap runs out, we have plenty of refill on stock and it's the same in every bathroom. In our house we have 7 places where we have a soap dispenser. Why do I do this? I don't want to think about any of this stuff. When the soap is low there is only 1 thing to do. Refill. When we are low on refill pouches there is only 1 thing to do. Buy more in bulk. I do that maybe 1x every 2 years.

There are other ways to apply this technique, but this post is about Soap dispensers.

What is it?

simplehuman makes a variety of soap dispensers. For those paying attention, simplehuman is also the company that makes those awesome makeup mirrors I told you about on mother's day.

For pumps you have:

Rechargeable Pumps
Battery operated pumps
Hand pumps

The nice thing is you can spend as much or as little as you want, and the soap is all the same. You can buy the soap by the 1 or in bulk. I order them in bulk directly from simplehuman as their prices are the lowest. I hate paying for shipping just like you (Amazon Prime FTW), but for $4.99 I'm willing to get consistent prices on Soap (Amazon seems to have an inventory problem with this company and when that happens 3rd party sellers jack up the prices).

In terms of dispensers, we have a few of the simplehuman Compact Sensor Pump

Amazon just sent me a simplehuman Rechargeable Bath Sensor Pump

And we have a couple of the manual simplehuman 15-Ounce Square Push Pumps (for the adults in our bathroom)

For a Kitchen or high volume soap area, you may want to upgrade to a larger pump (they come in 8oz and 13oz sizes)

The batteries for the non rechargeable ones last about 3-4 months. You can use AA rechargeable batteries, but they don't seem to be as strong as Alkaline. The newer ones with the built in USB charging are lithium ion and should be amazing. But this comes at a large premium over the non rechargeable model.

For soap, we use the lavender soap and we get 6 packs direct from simplehuman.

note: it seems everyone is out of stock of lavender right now, which explains why the prices on Amazon are so high.

Why did you get it?

We first saw these at my son's pre-school. They use them there to prevent the spread of germs (getting on the soap container/pump) and preventing the kids from dispensing too much soap. Smart. I was thinking, why not get these for our entire house? I have certainly seen my kids use WAY too much soap.

How has it made your life better?

Simple is good. At least that's what I think. And I don't want to think about something as mundane as soap. Finally, this system produces very little "trash" or recycling assuming you are purchasing refills and using rechargeable batteries, the rechargeable pump or the hand pump.

Are you going to keep it?

We've been on this system for about a year now and it's worked out great.

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