The Lede, It's Buried!

There are many benefits to having motion-sensing soap dispensers in your house. 1) They are convenient; 2) They are easy; and 3) they are a germaphobe’s dream. Because motion-sensing soap dispensers don’t just provide soap; they keep you from having to touch something that might require additional hand-washing. The only problem is, motion-sensing soap dispensers are always on.

This makes sense. What motion-sensing soap dispensers do is sense motion, and the only way to sense motion is to also sense non-motion. There is no way to tell a motion-sensing soap dispenser to turn off when it doesn’t sense motion and turn on when it does, because this would require the motion-sensing soap dispenser to sense motion when it is off, which is an impossibility.

There is also no good way to turn off a motion-sensing soap dispenser (if there even is any way to turn off a motion-sensing soap dispenser) because washing one’s hands is not something that happens on a schedule. Therefore, if you turned off your motion-sensing soap dispenser–or if you just ejected the batteries so it could no longer sense motion–and then you had to wash your hands, you would have to touch your motion-sensing soap dispenser to turn it back on (or re-insert the batteries). And the whole reason you got a motion-sensing soap dispenser was so you wouldn’t have to touch your motion-sensing soap dispenser.

It is likely that in the next few years, there will come a motion-sensing soap dispenser that can somehow power down when it doesn’t sense motion and power on when it does. It will employ some sort of sub-sensor: a strange low-power sensor that will trigger the higher-powered sensor that will trigger the soap. Or it will employ some technology we’ve never even conceived of. But do you even want this? Do you want a sensor that can sense things even when its sensing capacity is powered down? Does this not seem like a slippery slope? Isn’t a monitoring system that can monitor without needing to be turned on the ultimate infringement of our already tenuous sense of privacy?

Yes, possibly it is. Luckily, that day has not arrived. At present, motion-sensing soap dispensers still need to be on all the time to detect motion or the lack of motion and dispense or not dispense soap accordingly. And this uses a whole lot of batteries, which happens to be what we are selling today: a whole lot of batteries.

So go ahead and buy a whole lot of batteries, please.