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The grand scheme of kitchen upgrades exists, like many things, on a spectrum. Some high-end kitchen accessories, like ridiculous pot fillers, aren’t usually worth their exorbitant cost. Other little nice-to-haves, however, are more likely to prove their value multiple times a day. Hands-free faucets fall into the latter category.
It’s reasonable to expect that you’ll have to wash your hands upwards of five times throughout the course of just one dinner preparation. Let’s say you’re setting out to make perfectly textured tuna burgers. You’ll scrub up before you even get started, and then you’ll want to wash your hands again after you’ve patted the fish dry with paper towels, handled it once more to mince, formed your ingredients into patties, and finally dropped the burgers into a pan to cook. For four of those five instances, you aren’t even just washing your hands as a basic precaution, you’re washing them because they’ve come into contact with potentially dangerous raw fish, traces of which you can easily transfer to hardware like your kitchen faucet if you keep having to turn it on and off.
A touchless faucet removes most of the headache and helps prevent cross-contamination. And this is only for hand washing over the course of one recipe that takes all of 30 minutes to throw together — think of how much more use you’ll get out of a hands-free faucet over the course of a whole week or month, or for years to come.
What to know when considering a hands-free faucet
Hands-free faucets operate via some variety of sensor, which needs electricity to function. Some will require professional wiring into a dedicated outlet. Electrical codes for this sort of work can be tricky to navigate, turning what seems like a small project into a big undertaking, depending on where you are in the world. There are also plenty of battery-powered touchless faucets as an easier immediate alternative, but those obviously require a modicum more maintenance as you’ll have to switch out the batteries as needed. Naturally, it’s a pain when they run out of power at an inopportune time.
In either case, as self-defeating as it may seem, you might want to consider a faucet with both hands-free and manual functionality, like Owofan’s touchless kitchen sink faucet. As much as we love modern gadgets and smart features like you might find in the best electric ranges, sometimes it’s still nice to know that the old, analog way of doing things is still an option when, say, the power goes out or you’ve run out of double As.
