Pumps and dispensers for water cooler bottles
Pumps and dispensers for water cooler bottles
The category holds two groups that solve the same thing in two opposite ways. The electric pumps go on the neck of the bottle, carry a twelve-hundred or eighteen-hundred milliamp-hour battery, charge over USB and measure about fifteen by thirteen centimetres. Beside them stand gravity dispensers for the fridge in three and a half, six and a half or ten litres, with a tap on the bottom edge. Among the pumps there are plastic ones and one in stainless steel, and two come with a glass holder in the set.
Before you buy a pump it is worth knowing that the bottle called twenty litres holds eighteen point nine. The figure is no accident, because the standard dispenser bottle is five US gallons and a gallon is three point eight litres. The range shows it plainly, because one pump is quoted for three point eight to eighteen point nine litres, which is exactly one to five gallons. Another is described as a pump for the universal twenty-litre bottle, and that is the same bottle, only rounded up.
The second thing is what the tube reaching into the water is made of, because materials in contact with drinking water have a rule of their own. The framework comes from European Regulation 1935/2004 on materials intended to come into contact with food, and plastics are pinned down by Regulation 10/2011. The latter sets migration limits and calls for a written declaration of compliance, which the maker passes on down the supply chain. That is why a drinking water pump and a diesel pump are never swapped, not even after rinsing.
The third thing is a phrase that keeps returning in the descriptions, because the wording cold water dispenser does not mean cooling. Five items in the range carry it, but none of them names a cooling element or any power drawn for chilling. The water therefore comes out exactly as it stands in the bottle, and if it is to be cold, the bottle has to stand somewhere cold. It is the same with the gravity dispenser, only there the whole thing is meant to go into the fridge from the start.
The choice between the two groups fits in one sentence, because a tap needs no charging and a pump needs no pouring. Into the three-and-a-half to ten-litre dispenser you pour the water by hand first, but after that it runs without power and empties to the last drop. The pump instead lifts water out of a bottle you cannot carry yourself, though every so often it has to go on the USB.