Reckitt Benckiser Lime-A-Way®

Lime-A-Way’s new nozzle design is dangerous!

Before turning nozzle on, you have to PUSH to disengage the detent.

Reckitt Benckiser Lime-A-Way®
Lime-A-Way’s new nozzle design includes a venturi which injects air to convert the spray stream to a foam – a very clever and useful design.
But the new design has a dangerous flaw: It has a circular, razor-sharp edge, made worse by micro-serrated flash. The first time I used this new nozzle, I gripped it firmly, and, assuming it was just a high-force, child-resistant type of detent, I tried to horse it. This resulted in deep, bloody lacerations to my finger and thumb.
This is an extremely poor design for a circular knob designed to be gripped and turned! Before turning the nozzle “on,” you have to PUSH to disengage a non-obvious, non-intuitive detent tab. I learned this the hard way.

Lessons Learned/Solution:
First of all, to design a grip-and-turn knob with a circular, razor-sharp, micro-serrated flash edge is horribly irresponsible. It is just reckless, willful endangerment. If molding this venturi really necessitates such a sharp edge (and I don’t think it had to), then Reckitt Benckiser should have molded, hot-stamped, or applied a label with a “PUSH HERE” instruction, as per my photo. This was ommitted because the parting for this molded shroud is in the wrong direction for such a detail. They attempted to make up for this shortcoming by including an instruction in tiny print on the rear label. But come on, who really reads the instructions for a spray nozzle??? As mentioned above, the detent should have been made either more intuitively obvious or been labeled.

This design also provides a classic example of Murphy’s Law: If something can be done wrong, it will be done wrong. Granted, once a user understands how to release the detent, the nozzle works very well. But punishing a user’s ignorance with horrific injury is not good practice.