Should I treat myself to a smart shower, Guru?

NICOLE YOUNG

Time for one of GaGu’s patented ‘not the views of TechLife’ rants, reader: oh dear, no you should absolutely not get a smart shower, outside of some very slim niche cases. If you are disabled and can’t easily operate standard controls, by all means do. If your skin has a very specific Goldilocks zone of comfort, setting an exact temperature might be the answer. In no other situation can GaGu see any reason to pick up a smart shower, but boy can he list plenty of reasons why they’re stupid.

For a start, you’re adding an expensive and potentially volatile point of failure to your shower. An LCD screen you don’t specifically need, controls offered to weedy chips rather than beefy handtweaked thermostatic valves and the price of both a plumber and an electrician to get it installed. In no universe is that a preferable option over a good thermostatic shower like the Cefito WELS ($116), which gives you an easily grokkable knob and a great shower experience. Don’t even get Guru started on how ridiculous it is to control a smart shower with your phone, because you can work that one out for yourself.

And then are the voice activated examples, which Guru will not name because he doesn’t want any companies to be upset with him. They’re a fantastic idea, as long as they’re able to interpret yelled strings of curse words as an indication that’s it’s time to tweak the temperature, or indeed work out whether ‘agh, jeez what the ow’ means the shower is too hot or too cold. If they could hear GaGu’s scalded yelps, they would be fighting through the almighty FSSSHHH of a shower to do so, and they probably won’t be able to manage that. Even if they could hear all that, even if the technology was as good as it could possibly be, Guru would still struggle to see the point.