Waking up in the middle of night to pee is never a fun activity. When nature calls, you’ve got to choose between flipping on the lights and momentarily blinding yourself, or skipping the switch and using the john in complete darkness … Or, you know, you could buy some night lights. But if none of those options sound appealing to you, don’t worry — there’s an awesome alternative up on Kickstarter right now.
Instead of putting lights in your walls, IlumiBowl puts a light where you need it most: the toilet bowl. Using a set of motion-activated LEDs mounted just above the bowl, the contraption illuminates the toilet without actually being inside of it. This way, the gentlemen of the house have enough light to adjust their aim, and the ladies needn’t worry about falling in because the seat isn’t down. Necessary? Probably not — but it’s certainly an interesting idea.
Related: Make your toilet touchless with Kohler’s new ‘wave to flush’ kit
At this point in time, IlumiBowl only exists in prototype form, but creator Matthew Alexander hopes to finalize the design and bring the device to production in the near future. In just a few days on Kickstarter, his project has already blasted past its initial $20K goal, and still has more than a month left in the campaign. Back the project now, and you can get an IlumiBowl of your own for a pledge of just 15 bucks. The project is already a success, and assuming that the tooling and manufacturing process goes smoothly, Alexander expects to ship the first units to backers as early as January 2015.