I got a SinkShroom. Is it worth the money?
I bought this plastic drain stopper called the SinkShroom from Amazon. I removed the original stopper from our sink long ago and have been using another easily removed plastic sink stopper that was supposed to catch hair but never did. It didn’t work too well at all, but it sells for about $8.
The SinkShroom and its bigger cousins the TubShroom and ShowerShroom have a lot of marketing behind them.
I opted for a “chrome” model SinkShroom, which cost $11.99 with free shipping on Amazon orders over $25. We quit Amazon Prime a few weeks ago. That is a topic for another post, but I’m sure with Prime they’ll happily send you this in its own padded envelope within a day or two. I’m OK with slow delivery and more crap in one box (even though a pack of canned cat food smashed a box of tea bags … but as I say above, THIS IS A TOPIC FOR ANOTHER POST).
I got the SinkShroom today and freed it from its packaging with scissors. I was expecting something a little more substantial for $12. Maybe I should have gotten the even-more-expensive stainless steel version. If this one is even slightly effective, I might do that.
Back to the “chrome” SinkShroom. The “chrome” part is really just plastic (or VERY thin sheet metal) that is chrome-colored. Not cool. I don’t expect this finish to last very long.
The plastic on the SinkShroom seems kind of flimsy. It’s thin. The part that fans out on the bottom to hold the stopper in the drainpipe doesn’t seem like it will last either.
I’ve also heard these things attract mold and are hard to clean.
But I just got the thing today. My problem is that looking at the SinkShroom, it should cost $5, not $12. At $5, if the thing lasted six months and than gave out or was super slimy and disgusting, I’d just pull it out of the drain and get rid of it. But at $12, I feel like it needs to last a full year.
Will this piece of plastic work without looking horrible 12 months from now? Time will tell.
I will either add to this post, or write a new one, when I have some new (and no doubt exciting) SinkShroom news.
Update on 10/12/2020: As others have said, the SinkShroom is held in the drainpipe by plastic fanning out from the bottom, and there’s nothing to keep it straight in the drain — except for you straightening it by hand.
Update on 2/21/2021: I pulled the SinkShroom today and replaced it with my previous drain stopper. The SinkShroom doesn’t look great after four months in the drain. The soft plastic tends to attract black mold that is hard to get off. Worse that that, even when I clear the hair and other crap from the ‘Shroom, it still drains too slowly. I think I’m better off trying to pull hair from the trap with one of those “hooky” plastic drain clearers and having full flow of the drain.
I could see the SinkShroom lasting another six months, but overall I’m not terribly impressed with it, and I still maintain this is a $5 item that sells for $12.
In addition to the image above, I pulled more chrome SinkShroom images from Amazon. They look better than what I could have shot myself, and it pretty much does look like this:
