Treating yourself to a bidet toilet seat may be the best money you ever spend. Not only will it actually get you clean, but it will pay for itself in saved toilet paper almost instantly. We regularly see bidet toilet seats go for ~$20 on Kinja Deals, and Tushy comes in at fifty bucks if you grab a deal from our Promotions Team [Sponsored]. So what sets apart models that cost almost forty times as much?
Looks
For this comparison we’re looking at BioBidet’s flagship A8 Serenity, and let’s start with the obvious. Because the A8 doesn’t have a control panel jutting out of one side, and because the actual toilet seat and bidet components are one unit, the final result looks far better than installing a bidet attachment under your current seat. On the flip side, the seat cover of the A8 is massive, and too sloped to sit on when closed.
Installation
You might expect the installation of a more feature-packed product to be more involved, but because the A8 heats the water itself, you only need to attach it to your cold water tap. Again, on the flip side, the A8 needs to be plugged in to an electrical socket.
Interface
The controls on budget bidet seats are absolutely terrible. The different between off and painfully strong blasts of water are measured in millimeters, and because budget bidets have no mechanism to regulate temperature, you better start with cold and make things warmer from there. The A8 will never burn you, and the process of heating water to your desired temperature is basically instant.
I obviously understand why the A8 isn’t controlled via smartphone, but its remote really just cannot be explained by any kind of design logic. A remote being two-sided is not a feature, and the differentiator for the spray geared toward women is that the silhouette has breasts. What do bubbles mean? What does the letter “A” mean? It’s a remote control that requires you to memorize things from the paper manual before use, and some functions are duplicated on both sides of the remote while most aren’t.
Features You Can Get Elsewhere
Nightlight
Illumibowl made a... splash in 2015 by turning your toilet into a disco, and we’ve seen toilet bowl lights go for around ~$7 on Kinja Deals. However, it is my experience that anything that uses rechargeable batteries and is regularly around water will break almost immediately, including said toilet bowl lights, so for me the A8's built-in light is a big upgrade on that front.
Deodorizer
It’s unlikely you were spared the... plop that Poo-Pourri’s marketing made back in 2015. You can make your own version of the product (but you won’t), and even if you do, there can be unintended consequences. For stubborn smells, check out Jolie Kerr’s excellent guide. For everything else, the A8's scentless, always-on deodorizer is the ideal solution here.
Slow, Silent Lid
You probably don’t think of slamming toilet seat covers as top of your list of concerns, and you can easily buy a slow-closing lid on Amazon, but hey, it’s nice to have.
Features You (Probably) Won’t Get Elsewhere
Fully Customizable Spray
You can customize the temperature, force, width, angle, aeration, pulsation, and more. There’s literally a massage option.
Body detection
This isn’t going to spray everywhere unless you’re sitting on it.
Heated seat
Dryer
The BioBidet A8 Serenity is in many ways the sum of recent bathroom product trends, made reliable, premium, beautiful, and expensive, with a foolproof installation process. Every single human should own a bidet, and if money is no object, remote control aside, this one is pretty fantastic.