We've just been granted the UK patent for the shiffter, the alternative to the toilet brush
Great news – we’ve just been granted the UK patent for the shiffter. We’ve been working on the brushless alternative to the toilet brush for several years. It takes time (and money) to get a patent but this is a huge breakthrough. On top of that, we’ve had loads of positive feedback over the past year – all of that means that it should now be relatively easy to bring in the investment to go into production. A big ‘thank you’ to everyone who has taken the time to provide their feedback and also to the excellent patent attorneys at Wynne-Jones IP who made it happen. (If you have an idea and are looking to protect your intellectual property, I thoroughly recommend them!)
Here’s a quick rundown of where the shiffter is in January 2022. It’s a press release which gives a pretty good overview, but we’ll be expanding on the environmental benefits and charity giving elements in the near future. Anyway, here’s the release…
News: Patented toilet brush alternative could save tens of billions of litres of water
A new way of cleaning our toilets will help save the planet and revolutionise the way we do one of every household’s most unpleasant but necessary tasks.
Entrepreneur Kam Mistry has been granted a UK patent for his replacement for the toilet brush – the shiffter – a hand-held jet wash which allows householders to clean their toilets using a jet of water rather than a brush.
“Toilet brushes have been around for decades and using them is universally regarded as an unpleasant experience,” said Kam, from Gloucestershire. “The Shiffter changes all of that as you simply jet wash the bowl clean after you get up from the seat and the flush hasn’t completely washed poo away – and it takes seconds. As it’s used straight after you go, it does away with need to put on the rubber gloves and scrub with a toilet brush for the weekly clean.”
Aside from helping to make toilet cleaning less unpleasant, the invention will also have huge benefits for the environment.
Why the shiffter means eco-friendly toilet cleaning
He added: “The Shiffter will reduce plastic waste from throwaway toilet brushes and lower bleach usage, but perhaps more significantly it will save tens of billions of litres of water a year in the UK alone.”
Most of us are familiar with repeat flushing, when the flush hasn’t cleaned the toilet bowl properly. Sometimes you have to do this more than once and often it’s in vain. But if you can clean it using a small jet of water rather than repeat flushing with several litres it all adds up. In the UK there are 27.8 million households1 made up of an average of 2.4 people. With the average person flushing five times a day and toilet cisterns containing six litres of water2, that equates to 730 billion litres of drinking quality water used to flush UK toilets every year. For scale, England’s largest lake, Lake Windermere3, contains 300 billion litres of water and it is 10.5 miles long, one mile wide and 220 feet deep!
If we all flushed once less a day it would reduce water use by around 146 billion litres a year and in the USA it would save close to a trillion litres.
Giving back money to good causes
Now, armed with the patent, Kam is confident that he’ll be able to raise investment to manufacture the product in the next few weeks, but how can he be so sure that there is a demand for the product?
He added: “Over the past twelve months there have been over 5,600 visits to the Shiffter website and 10 times as many searches from people putting terms such as ‘alternative to the toilet brush’ into Google – and that’s for a product that does not yet exist! With hundreds of millions of households out there, many with more than one toilet, and businesses, hotels and B&Bs to add to the mix, the product has the potential to sell well. I don’t need a solid gold house and am not looking to send billionaires into space. My aim is to give away a big chunk of the profits to help sanitation projects in developing countries and charities supporting people with issues we don’t talk about such as Crohns, Colitis and IBS.”
Find out more about the Shiffter at www.shiffter.com
1Population statistics from Office for National Statistics
2Flushing data from Energy Saving Trust based upon toilet cisterns of varying sizes
3Volume of water in Lake Windermere from World Lake Database
Website data from Google Search Console data
