Home office setup with built-in boiling water tap for tea and coffee without getting up is a monument to deskcess A luxury desk designed based on what Brits "want to see" in their home office setup is not sure what it wants to be. Games room specialist Liberty Games says it undertook research to discover UK remote workers' ideal desk and whipped up a concept that "meets all your working-from-home needs." As technical director Stuart Kerr …
A sub €150 10" Lenovo will be better than any built in tablet.
This isn't ergonomic and even with the so called features it's overpriced.
One of the UK's most prolific writers used a portable typewriter, on a plank, on her knee. Outside if weather permitted.
I found that the most comfy chair was for a counter. It 's like a stool with a short back. So I put the pillar at minimum height and raised the entire desk on blocks and put a stiff foam block at the laptop rear to have a nice slope on the keyboard and have the screen at a perfect height and distance.
I like an L shape so there is space for stuff as well as laptop, mouse and extra screen. Separate drawer units, not attached.
I have a filing cabinet, but only one of the four drawers has files. One is full of cables.
For £2,000 you can get a double bed that folds flat against the wall and has a desk underneath it. The single version is about £1,400 - the desktop is gimballed so that it stays upright as the bed is folded back down.
I'm happy to stand up to get my cuppa, the excercise is good for me. And if it tires me too much, then simply fold down the bed and sleep away the afternoon.
Penguin icon, because cuddly toy to help keep away the nightmares (about the boss catching me!).
They want £8k.
BOM:
Low capacity Quooker tap: £720 - assumes plumbing is readily available, both source and waste, plus electrics in place. Perhaps this desk has bodged a "refill with water every day" tank for it to add a little more.
Built-in speakers (presumably with a USB/Aux connector to hook up your rig to) - if BRAND == BOSE, price = £1000, else price=£200 (generous to allow for "built in").
Fridge - small under-desk unit, £100-200
Slabs of material to assemble, Ikea style - looks to be aluminium, but could be a silvered wood, or even just laminate. Perhaps £1000 including all the fittings like the crap monitor stand and keyboard/mouse floating storage shelf.
Sun lamp: £30-100 retail
Foot rest with warmer: £50?
Table tennis bit (looks a bit shit and narrow, imho): £50
"Built in" tablet for note taking: £200
Alarm clock: £10
I may be slightly out, but struggling to get to a £3k BOM, so the rest is pure profit.
Also, very amusing to mount the tap in the corner with seemingly no drainage to take spillages away from the built in tablet just in front of it.
As others have mentioned, a portable commode is all you need to complete this. Available for around £30 online (may not be that luxurious!)
I built a bed with a desk under it. All the wood (plywood, not MDF for desktop) was less than cost of the mattress. Less than one day to assemble. I fitted spots in ceiling for my daughter to read in bed and under the bed for the desk for the occasions she did homework. She lived in that till she got married.
Indeed I deliberately don't have fridge/kettle/coffee makers in my upstairs library-study so as to have exercise on the stairs.
Actually you have hit one of the really disadvantages of WFH. It is far too easy to spend too long sat at the desk/sofa/table/bed. At least when in the office you had to walk a bit to get to the loo, kitchen for refreshment or heaven forbid, actually go outside the building for a walk round, get that all important mochafrappocinolatte or whatever the hell passes as coffee in Starbucks now.
I'm mildly concerned that your WFH arrangements maybe don't involve getting up to go to the loo.
Perchance you have a remotely summoned roboloo? Trundles in when you call it, trundles away when done.
Hmm. I may have found a gap in the market. It's mine! You all saw it first here. No dibsies.
[Icon: hoping for no shit, Sherlock]
They are a luxury, yes, but it's rather nice to just be able to instantly get boiling water for a cuppa or while cooking, even if it's possibly a bit wasteful on electricity.
True, you can get by with a kettle and a bit of patience, but I'm guessing you don't cook over an open fire in a pit at the mouth of your cave?
The energy use is a moot point, once hot the litre or so of water stays at about 98 degrees and they are insulated. A kettle invariably boils far more than you need and even if you do try for the mugful.
The Legionnaires issue mentioned earlier is irrelevant as you just need to be over 60 degrees. If a commercial hot water dispenser is not above this then it will fail its annual safety check.
Saw an ad in the dead tree daily some months ago, for a boiling water tap that was proposed to be sited beside the hot/cold. As I recall they looked interchangeable. My 1st thought was 'well that'll boost A&E admissions!'
Even if they didn't look alike, half-asleep/distracted/aging/wasted people will inevitably put their hands under the wrong one eventually, sure as eggs is eggs.
You aren’t going to get Legionella from a boiling water tap. The word boiling being the clue.
Admittedly some keep the water under boiling, so make rubbish tea, and the ones I’ve tried that actually boil it spit steam when you first turn them on. I’d rather boil a kettle. And I’ve seen one drunk person scald themselves as well, despite the weird spring loaded controls that are supposed to stop that.
But hot water above 60 degrees will pasteurise your hot water system in 2 minutes. So even coffee from a normal hot tap should be safe, just horrible.
"... than poorly heated Legionnaires' disease coffee made from a warm tap."
How can you get Legionnaires' from a tap that's been broken since 2017?
And if you're fast enough to get to it in the few seconds between the maintenance people "fixing" it and it breaking again, I suspect what ever gave you superhuman speed likely also gave you an improved immune system.
At that price I would want to have it height-adjustable, motorised of course, with enough range that you can at least use it as a standing desk. The ones at the office[0] can even go a fair bit higher, allowing you to merely squat, not crouch under them if you have to rearrange some cabling.
The few times I had to visit the loo to rearrange some network and power cabling were at a CCC camp and two others in NL. In none of those cases bodily waste processes were involved; they were using mobile toilet units to house the network switches spread over the fields. Lockable and weatherproof although they often had to be covered using those emergency foil blankets, to keep the inside temperatures acceptable. At buildup people wanting a wired connection would stick a cable through the vents, and every hour or so someone from the buildup crew would go around and plug in all those cables. Teardown was more or less the reverse, people rolled up their cable, put it next to the 'datenklo', and after the next round would find them disconnected to retrieve them (or not; I've got multiple lengths of 30m and more that were left behind, trailing from a datenklo to where a tent had been).
They clearly don't know anything about working from home. Making a cup of tea is a great excuse to get away from your desk for a few minutes, relax, stretch legs, do a bit of washing up, tidy the junk drawer, cut the grass, clean the hob igniters so they light first time, stick some tea towels to soak with a bit of bleach, put the bike lights on charge, make another cup of tea, then get back to work.
Bloody health and safety! You just reminded me of when I was in my teens and used to go to barn dances in barns and we'd get a ride home on a trailer on the back of a tractor at 4 in the morning. It was 76 so it didnt rain for months but no-one I know has any idea who drove the tractor(s).
...separate compartment for the Mother-in-law?
Many, many years ago (late 80ies, probably 1988) in Poland I took a ride in a Polish Fiat 126 with 2 Poles. They sat in the front, so I had to climb in to the back seat. Very helpfully, and somewhat apologetically, they explained that it was habitually called "the Mother-in-Law Seat".
Well as Fr Ted said, it is a bit cornery, and there's no keyboard tray so your posture is going to be crap.
But on the plus side, you'll get plenty of exercise polishing the bloody thing, plus a bit of yoga crawling about underneath to disconnect/replace the doubtless crappy speakers.
And there are no drawers, so you'll have to give your side abs a bit of a workout to get anything out of the cupboard. Another benefit will be the added exercise of that occasional leap to your feet when some of that boiling water comes across the desk towards your unmentionables.
"a boiling water tap for instant tea and coffee seems to be the killer app here. "
Doesn't make sense unless the respondents really didn't take it seriously, or they targeted lots of those insecure / hero types that feel they can't be away from their desk for more than a few minutes. Going down to the kitchen to make tea and/or to have that regular break from the screen is a very welcome relief, and I would expect part of most companies updated H&S policies for working from home for extended periods. It certainly was at the client I'm working for.
Risks:
Equipment may be destroyed by influx of water.
Paperwork may be rendered illegible.
User may receive potentially fatal (>5% body area; which is the size of one hand) burns.
User may receive potentially fatal electric shocks from water contacting the electricity supply which is below the height of the tap. (it not being pictured as being above it suggests this at least...)
I'll take a dozen with a high voltage mains supplies to the desk with remote activation options for the taps.
when you hit the wrong button,
Button? You mean a physical thing you have to press to make the boiling water come out, right near where your hand is? For Elfin Safe Tie raisins it should be controlled from an app on that tablet, with a detector to sense a receiving vessel is in place and calculating the amount of water it should dispense.
Right when the next cuppa is filled an OS or app update hits while the valve is open, inundating the tablet which, now being buggered, fails to close the valve again, thus flooding the desk, one's groin and major parts of the room before the power gets shorted stopping the water boiling.
"If you can afford the £7,995 asking price for the desk, we sincerely doubt you'd still be slumming it with a flatmate. "
Nowadays, 8k barely gets an estate agent to answer your phone calls, and a newspaper article I read a few days ago was more or less about how if you were in your thirties and hadn't managed to buy a house yet, you might never. Prices have been rising way faster than income levels, even for well-paying jobs.
The only thing that seems to be missing for this purpose is a built-in bog. Just imagine the productivity gains!
/slow clap
Nah, I prefer a simple desk. Due to space constraints (I rent a small room) the desk is a plastic fold-up desk and I have a canvas fold-up camping chair.
Should I need a bit of space, desk and chair can be folded up and stowed out of the way until I've changed my mind.
Need milk? Fridge in one side of the room.
Need the bog? Inna other corner of the room.
At least this is not permanent, only temporary for now.
For the last 7 years or so, I've been working mostly from home and going to a client's premises a couple of times a month. When WFH, it is a good idea to take a walk to the kitchen to get a drink or a snack every so often and a bad idea to have a desk or office setup that encourages you to sit in one place for hours at a time.
I can only imagine a boiling water tap being useful for the physically disabled. For the rest of us, being able to get up for a moment at a short break-point in the middle of whatever task is a bonus. Too easy to get stuck to your chair as it is.
Perhaps you can't do that during video calls, but seeing a conference participant reaching across, then steeping and mixing and stirring, doesn't look very professional, either. Perhaps it'll make for interesting Zoom videos on youtube, as we get to watch people bump the lever by accident and scald themselves.
And there's no tap for the milk, so does it really count as tea?
We've got one of these in the office (I believe it's still there. The tap that is, not the office. Well, maybe the office.), not sure what brand, but it's insufficiently hot for tea. Okay for instant coffee if you're desperate. However, there are a few scattered around my employer of different makes and they all have a safety feature to stop you dispensing hot water by mistake, generally you need to depress or activate two buttons at once. More interested in the lack of a sink for the tap, any drips or accidentally dispensed cold water are going all over the desk.
> it's insufficiently hot for tea.
Quooker, at least, state it's 100C, and from experience I can confirm it's boiling as it comes out at least once the (short) pipe from the boiler tank to the tap has heater up (perhaps the first few dozen ml are not at 100C due to the pipe cooling it a bit)
and they don't show where all the plumping for that hot water tap will go? And speaking of that, you'd need to locate it near a water source and the extra cost of hiring a plumber (only to discover later they were a cowboy) to plump it in. Then the maintenance required on the boiler and pump.
Designers annoy me.
For sure you'd need a water supply, unless this has a water tank that you fill up every so often.
As for maintenance, a Quooker tap needs a descale once a year but other than that nothing needed. It's a fairly simple job to disassemble the water tank/heater it comes with to do this, too.
But the company that supplies it will be against Right To Repair and will attempt to make it illegal to repair yourself, won't supply spare parts, will charge over the top prices for their engineers to fix who'll say its not repairable and you have to buy the new tank at a cost of £10k
In addition to being kind of lazy and not liking exercise, I have worked remotely in front of a PC for years.
Not exactly obese but would definitely like to look a little more trim/fit.. without having to change or put in any extra effort.
This reminds me of "inverse" exercise machine.... one of my fantasies.
Where I could sit/lie down and the system would cycle thru a set of mechanical motions.
This in turn could move specific parts of my body... while I could offer some resistance but otherwise be perform my "work".
Next... I'd just need to figure out a way to boost heart rate?
My home office is a 1974 VW T2 Camper Van.
It originally cost about the same as that desk.
For that I get a cooker, a fridge, a desk, lighting, a private space, a space for a load of biscuits.
Internet is both wired and wireless.
And I am left handed so putting a tablet in the desk to the right would not be useful. Also I would probably smash it with a coffee cup.
And what is more, I can relocate the whole thing to anywhere I like where there is a decent 4G mobile signal.
I can tell you from experience that without a drain under that boiling water tap, not only will you get puddles on your desk from the inevitable drips, but the tea will be lukewarm and not properly brewed. The water in the pipes will be cold, you need to run that first without your mug underneath until boiling water starts to come out.
I've got a very lovely home office desk, L shape, solid wood, room for my six screens (not counting the 50" on the wall behind me). And all for the lovely price of free.
I suppose I could add water taps and a fridge if I wanted.
But the reality these days is that if I don't have to go to a client site, I'm typically working from bed using a laptop or three.
There's something seriously wrong with the scale of the picture. The keyboard looks like it's a standard tenkeyless keyboard, but comparing it to the tablet, it seems like the diagonal of the tablet is about the same as the length of the keyboard. My tenkeyless keyboard is about 14" in length, which would make that either one big tablet or a reduced size keyboard, which I would not want to type on such for very long.
The mouse appears to be in scale with the keyboard, i.e. too small.
Also, from the pictures, the keyboard appears to be suspended from the back of the desk, several inches above it. Now I know that I have my keyboard in a location that makes the workstation health check people complain at me, but this would give them apoplexy, and I can't see how I could type or use the mouse in that setup without severe fatigue.
And what about power? or places to put a laptop, deskside or even an ultra compact desktop system? Or cable routing? Where does the monitor get it's power and signal from? And if that is brushed aluminum, would that interfere with a wireless keyboard and mouse?
And why does the clock say 12:07 in all the pictures you can see it in? And where the fuck does the plumbing for the tap go, bearing in mind that the pull-out table tennis table slides right under it? Have you seen what is under the counter with an insta-boil tap?
And a light at the level of the desk? Huh? I cannot imagine the value of such a thing, even as a vitamin D lamp (remember, it is the UV light in sunlight that generates the vitamin, and the hands, being above the keyboard shelf would obviously not get any benefit.)
This is clearly somebody's clueless render of what they think such a thing would look like, rather than a photo of a real desk. I just wish I had 8K to to frivolously spend to make them actually build one!
I had to check the date, because this looked like it could be a left-over April Fool's joke, but apparently not, not even on the company's web site.
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