Commercial Restroom Reflections: Sloan DropSpot™ Bottle Fillers

Bottle fillers are an effective method to enhance a building’s sustainability efforts. But they can often be an eyesore, while at the same time causing maintenance headaches with hard-to-reach filters.

That’s why Sloan has introduced DropSpot™, its first-ever line of bottle fillers and water coolers, designed to be aesthetically attractive and maintenance-friendly, all while providing sustainability benefits and staying NSF-61 compliant.

We sat down with Iris Liang, Sloan’s Product Line Manager for bottle fillers, to discuss this new product solution, how they provide an attractive specification for architects, and the burden they help to ease for maintenance teams.

What was the catalyst behind the development of Sloan’s first-ever bottle fillers?
From a sustainability standpoint, there's a need in the market to get rid of single-use plastic water bottles, and there is some pretty daunting data on the topic. Specifically, plastic bottles take anywhere from 100 to 1,000 years to decompose, and microplastics themselves never fully decompose.

Bottle fillers in general can help with these sustainability efforts by reducing the production and usage of these types of single-use plastic water bottles, so it's great for the environment.

The other consideration is from a human health perspective. Single-use plastic water bottles can end up in human bodies as microplastics and pose risks to our health. On the other hand, we know that 75% of school-age children today in the U.S. don't consume enough water, and they also don't drink the daily recommended allowance for water. Thus, bottle fillers can help promote human health by reducing our exposure to microplastics from single-use plastic water bottles while providing easy access to drinking water. Those are the main drivers behind this initiative, and with Sloan’s long history of sustainability, this new product line aligns perfectly to our mission. 

How is DropSpot reducing chemicals and contaminants like PFOA and PFOS to provide safe drinking water?
That is really tied to filtration. Sloan offers unfiltered and filtered units, and we encourage people to purchase the filtered units due to the water quality concern in many areas. The filter that we are launching, along with the bottle fillers, can filter out a long list of contaminants. For example, PFOA and PFOS are the two leading contaminants in the PFAS group. They are currently being monitored by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and there’s a new regulation coming up in a few years that will require manufacturers to reduce the level of these contaminants. 

There’s also the very well-documented problem with lead. A lot of the infrastructure in the country is already old, and so many of the water pipes are lead. Lead can get in the water and pose a threat to human health, too. Sloan’s water filtration is proven to filter out chlorine, microplastics, and other types of contaminants, and our bottle fillers are also NSF-61 and NSF372 compliant, ensuring safer drinking water.

How important were aesthetics when developing the bottle fillers?
Aesthetics were a very important factor in the development process. When we looked at other brands and products that are on the market today, we felt that based on customer feedback, there was a need for a more aesthetically attractive design. Many of the designers that we interviewed felt that bottle fillers are unattractive. Some of them even called them an eyesore. As they design a building with beautiful features, architects and designers want bottle fillers that extend that design vision. Therefore, we felt there was a strong need for aesthetically attractive bottle fillers that designers and architects would be excited to specify.

We actually have a patent pending design on our DropSpot Bottle Fillers, and so far, the feedback has been excellent. When we interview the architect and design community, their number one criterion is aesthetic design. Alongside our patent pending design, we offer two types of finishes: stainless steel and black. Not only does no prominent provider in the bottle filler market today offer a black finish, but Sloan’s black finish option comes at the same price point as our stainless-steel offering.

How are Sloan’s DropSpot Bottle Fillers designed to make retrofitting easier?
We wanted to target both the new installation and replacement markets with this launch. There are lots of existing water coolers that are old and worn that are just screaming to be replaced, so we wanted to make it easier for our customers to be able to replace those old water coolers or bottle fillers with Sloan’s. 

The DropSpot Bottle Fillers are designed to match the rough ins of existing manufacturers, with minimal wall work required to replace similar units. This would also lead to little, if any, rework needed on the walls. It would be as easy as removing one station and installing the other.

What are some of the maintenance benefits that DropSpot provides? 
One of the key elements we focused on in the development process was allowing easy access to the filter, a common pain point among a lot of existing products. 

We offer three models, all which take filter access into consideration. The DRS100, which is a standalone bottle cooler, has a swing-open cabinet design that allows you to simply open the entire cabinet and easily access the filter. The other two models, the DRS110 and DRS120, each have a drop-down assembly door that you can easily open with a proprietary key that is shipped in the box along with the unit, to simplify opening that drop-down door and accessing the filter. There’s also an internal shutoff valve that’s built into our filter that allows for a filter change without turning off the water main. 

In contrast, it can be very challenging to access the filter with a lot of other products in the market due to very tight spacing. Even if you remove the entire front frame of the cooler, you have to really squeeze your hand in the fixture in order to twist the filter and remove it. It’s both a time-consuming and painful process. Even with some of the newer advanced products out on the market, they still require someone to unscrew the whole cabinet and remove the whole wrapper.

One of the other maintenance differentiators with our new DropSpot Bottle Fillers is the filter light. DropSpot features a soft, subtle, ambient white light that indicates the filter status, and it turns on when the filter needs to be replaced. After conducting market research, this is a differentiation compared to some other units in the market, as they have a very annoying bright red light that turns on when their filter needs replaced. Maintenance professionals hate it so much that many of them just remove the filter altogether, so users don’t see that red light. That’s because every time they don’t change it fast enough, people will think that there’s something wrong with the bottle filler and will stop using it. 

How is DropSpot working to enhance hand hygiene? 
Touch-free bottle filling is another important element to these new products. The DRS110 Bottle Filler with Single-level Cooler and DRS120 Bottle Filler with Bi-level Cooler offers all the benefits of the DRS100 Bottle Filler, while including an easy-to-clean hygienic water cooler. The bubbler and push bar are made with an antimicrobial material that reduces the risk of germ transmission and features a design that makes sanitization and cleaning simple.