Look, I get it. I was a holdout on bidets. Like most Americans, I didn’t grow up with one. I hadn’t tried it, but didn’t like the idea of jets of water pointed at my keister.
And then I moved into a house that already had one installed, and became a convert in less than a week. Turns out that the French, the Japanese, and the self-righteous citizens of South Park were correct, and I was wrong. I now feel extra-clean, all the time. But here’s the problem: A large percentage of American bathrooms don’t have a power outlet easily accessible from the toilet. This includes my new front bathroom. Which means a lot of the best bidet models, the ones with heat and lights and fans and fancy doo-dads, are inaccessible to me.
The Tushy Classic 3.0 is a great option for that problem in particular. I didn’t really need all that to begin with, to have a clean bottom. For a lot less money, a company called Tushy specializes in bidet attachments that don’t require electricity. They instead hook in easily to the room-temperature water hose that connects to your toilet tank. Analog knobs control the water jets.It slips under your existing toilet seat for extra-easy installation, and right now, it’s also on sale for less than $100.
My colleague Nena Farrell tested this model for well over a year, and said that while she noted a few cracks on some of the rotating flanges inside of the housing (which you have to remove to even see), hers is still going strong. Note also that the Classic comes in a few colors, but there’s a chance it won’t exactly match your existing toilet.
The Classic is not the model I’ve tested, however. I have an updated model of the Wave, whose O.G. model is also on sale for a hefty discount on Prime Day, just $141. The Wave actually replaces your existing toilet seat, with a couple different shapes depending on the shape of your toilet bowl. (Make sure to check whether your toilet is “round” or “elongated” for proper fit.)
I found installation pretty easy, once I made sure to line up the seat so it nestled appropriately. I’d say the full process took 20 minutes, tops.
The benefits of the Wave over the Classic are twofold, to my mind. One, the Wave has multiple jets. A “DuoFlow” knob can be turned backwards or forwards for full front-to-back coverage. I.e., one water nozzle flows from the front of the bowl, the other from the back, so the tide goes both ways for extra cleanliness. Also the seat itself is easy to clean, without any crevices that are hard to get at while scrubbing the toilet.
Do I sometimes wish for fans, or bowl lights, or gentle warm-water spray like WIRED reviewer Jordan Michelman’s top luxury bidet picks? Do I sometimes want my toilet to play me a little congratulatory tune? Or hinge itself up and down without me needing to touch the seat?
Maybe. Maybe not.
But these non-electric Tushys are not about luxury. What mine does is get my bum clean. And it makes me fit for polite society, which includes only those people who use water to clean their bum. This is enough for me. And on Prime Day this year, the cost of entry to polite society is apparently less than $100. This, too, is civilized.
