The Lunatec Aquabot cap transforms a regular water bottle into a pressurized spray bottle. Like a Geigerrig in bottle form, the spraying action adds extra function and versatility to the average bottle. Instead of just drinking out of it, you can spray your hands clean, rinse dishes off and mist yourself in the face.
"Have you ever washed up in an ice cold river, used a bazillion wet wipes to clean your kid’s hands and face, poured out half your drinking water trying to rinse off your hands, got sand in your car, dreaded doing camp dishes, needed to water balloon your friends in the outback, or just wanted to cool off?" Lunatec inquires, among other questions, on its Kickstarter campaign page.
If you said "yes" to any of those questions, you've presumably experienced a need for an Aquabot-like device. Lunatec president Nick Rhea sure did. He thought of the idea on an Alaskan backpacking trip when the lack of running water became a nagging inconvenience. Looking around at everyone's water bottles made him realize that he already had the perfect building block for a solution – all he needed was to design something to change the sipping and sucking action into a faucet-like spray.
The something that Rhea came up with is a simple, pump-action pressure system compatible with most 63-mm wide-mouth water bottles. The Aquabot serves in place of the standard cap to create a spray bottle. With a few pumps, you have a steady stream of water. You can adjust the nozzle for stream, mist or shower settings, depending upon what you want to do. It's constructed of food-grade materials so you can still drink the water.
Rhea estimates that it will take two or three separate pumping sessions of about 4 seconds each to empty a 1L (34 fl oz) bottle. A demonstration video he forwarded to us shows the Aquabot spraying continuously for more than 35 seconds. The pressure does reduce over time, most noticeably around the 26-second mark.
It's not hard to imagine a variety of uses for the Aquabot. With one 5-oz (142-g) accessory, an Aquabot user can take a makeshift wilderness shower, rinse dishes, spray down dirty bikes and muddy boots, spray-clean sandy feet at the beach, mist your face on a hot day, and perform many other activities, all with a water bottle that many already carry around. You could do some of those things with a traditional spray or squeeze bottle, but the Aquabot does seem to offer a stronger, easier, one-handed stream and more versatility.
Lunatec has put the Aquabot up on Kickstarter with a goal of US$35,000. A pledge of $29 logs your Aquabot pre-order with a listed December delivery window. It is not compatible with stainless steel or aluminum bottles.
Source: Kickstarter
