The complete guide
How much water do you actually pour at a time?
Volume selection sounds like a gimmick until you count how many times a day you stand holding a button, and how often you get it wrong.
The four pours in a normal day
Most households only ever dispense four amounts:
- A glass — roughly 200 to 250 ml. The most frequent by a distance.
- A mug for tea or coffee — 250 to 350 ml, and usually filled to a line inside the kettle rather than measured.
- A water bottle — 500 ml to 1 litre. The one that takes long enough for your attention to wander.
- A jug or pan — a litre or more, for cooking or the table.
A simple button handles the first two fine, because they are over before you can get distracted. It is the third and fourth where a manual pour becomes a small daily annoyance: long enough that you look away, short enough that looking away means an overflow.
What volume selection actually buys you
Unattended filling. Select a litre, put the bottle down, and go back to what you were doing. This is the whole feature, and whether it is worth £100 over a simpler dispenser depends on how often you fill bottles.
Repeatability. Everyone gets the same amount of water in the same cup without thinking about it. Useful for cooking, and useful if you are trying to keep track of what you have drunk.
No overflow. Sinks, worktops and laptops all benefit.
When a plain button is the better buy
Be honest with yourself about this. If you mostly fill glasses one at a time, you will use the smallest preset and nothing else, and you will have paid for five settings to use one. The Aqua Optima Lumi gives you more than twice the tank capacity for half the price with a straightforward button, and for a lot of households that is simply the better machine.
The drip tray is not a footnote
Adjustable drip tray height sounds like packaging filler. It is the difference between a dispenser that works with your containers and one that does not.
A fixed tray is set for a glass. Put a 1-litre bottle under it and the neck sits too close to the spout, or does not fit at all, so you tilt it and pour badly. On the Aurora the tray drops to give bottle clearance and rises for a glass, so the spout is close to the rim either way — which also means less splashing.
Before you buy any dispenser, check the spout-to-tray height against the tallest thing you fill regularly. It is the single most common source of day-to-day irritation with these machines, and it never appears in the headline specification.
What it does not do
The Aurora is chilled only. If a machine that also gives you 95°C water for tea is what you are after, that is the BRITA YOURCE mini or the Waterdrop CT01, both of which carry volume presets of their own.