An August side quest

I always have a lot of projects on the go, some big and/or important, and a lot that aren’t—actually, most of them probably aren’t even remotely important. However, some of them end up being useful, making my life easier. This is one of that kind.

For a long time now, I’ve been using liquid hand soap (among other products) from a New Zealand company called Ecostore which makes soaps, cleaners, etc., made using plant and mineral-based ingredients, instead of chemicals derived from petroleum (back in July 2-18, I talked about why I started using the company’s products). Over time, the company changed their packaging, moving from small bottles for use at sinks/basins to a larger size. This mattered to me because the larger size didn’t need to be refilled as often—but they still need to be refilled, of course.

The photo above shows the current pump bottle in the middle, and the refill bottle on the left. The small bottle holds 300ml, and the refill holds 800ml, and so, refills the pump bottle two and two-thirds times, which frankly is a bit odd (I wonder if users tend to under-fill the pump bottle and get three refills?). At any rate, since I use the pump bottle in the en suite to most of all, I need to refill that bottle the most frequently. The bottle on the right side was my solution.

I refill the hand soap bottle at the kitchen sink (in case I spill… and because I use the refill method I talked about back in October 2021)), and then I wash out the empty refill bottle before putting it in the recycling bin. I recently had a pump mechanism from an old bottle laying in the kitchen bench, and I thought, “Hm, that looks like it would fit in the refill bottle.” Since I had an empty refill bottle, I tried it and it worked (I didn’t try the original pump bottle’s pump mechanism because the plastic tube that sucks up the soap would be way too short).

The next time I needed to refill the bottle in my ensuite, I tried putting a large pump mechanism into the refill bottle, and it worked perfectly! I should emphasise that IT worked, however, I grabbed the wrong pump mechanism and use one that had been in a bottle of Leo’s dog shampoo, and I I hadn’t cleaned it after I took it out of the bottle. This meant that for several uses, the soap was lavender-scented dog shampoo, then an odd mix of lavender and citrusy secnt of the actual handsoap. Oops. It didn’t take long to come right.

I’ve had a couple weeks using it now, and I would’ve probably needed to refill a regular-size bottle by now, and it turns out that I really do appreciate a (very) small improvement in the amount of time that my routine household rituals take up. I thought it would work, and I’m glad it did—but I probably wouldn’t have mentioned it if it hadn’t worked. Possibly.

This was obviously a very small, largely insignificant project, but it’s still nice to see it work out the way I thought it it would. I think the actual larger lesson I take away from this is that if I can find ways to improve even common things, why not try it? They won’t always work, but there’s only one way to find out, and I’m glad I did.

And, it also turns out that I’m still a helpful blogger. Nice.