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Both of My Cats Have Been Demanding the Bathroom Faucet for Years. I Have Bought Five Fountains Trying to End This Routine. Last Month I Finally Figured Out What I Had Been Getting Wrong About All Five of Them. I'm writing this for anyone who has bought a cat water fountain hoping it would replace the tap routine and watched their cat use it for a week before going right back to crying at the sink. If this has happened to you with more than one fountain, you are probably starting to wonder whether your cat just prefers tap water as a personality. I want to tell you what I figured out after going through five different fountains in the last three years, because the answer is more specific than I had assumed it was, and I wish I had understood it before I bought the second one, never mind the fifth. A little about me. My name is Spencer. I'm forty, I work as a game designer at an independent studio in Vancouver, British Columbia, and I live alone in a small apartment in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood. My cats are named Goose and Maverick. They are seven-year-old, I adopted from a shelter in Burnaby five years ago, and they are exactly as silly as their names suggest. Goose is the brown tabby. Maverick is the gray and white. They have lived with me through three years of remote work, the end of a five-year relationship, and the slow decision to stop dating for a while. They are good company in the way two cats from the same litter are good company, which is to say they handle most things together. Both of them have been demanding the bathroom faucet for years. I want to be specific about what that looks like, because I think it is a more universal household scene than people realize. Every morning when I go into the bathroom to brush my teeth, one or both of them will follow me in. They will jump onto the counter. They will sit between the two sinks. They will wait for me to turn the water on. When I turn it on, they will take turns drinking from the running stream, sometimes pushing each other gently aside to get under the flow. When I turn the water off they will stay on the counter looking at me. If I do not turn it back on, they will eventually leave. This happens at least twice a day. Sometimes more. It has been happening for the entire five years I have had them. Their water bowls and their fountain in the kitchen are full of fresh water at all times. They walk past those sources to come find me at the bathroom sink instead. I bought my first fountain about six months after I adopted them. It was a popular plastic flower-top model from a chain pet store. Both cats used it for maybe ten days and then went back to the bathroom routine. I bought my second fountain a year later, a ceramic-bowl model, thinking maybe the plastic was the issue. Same outcome. I bought my third fountain after seeing a recommendation in a subreddit thread, a stainless steel one this time, ninety dollars on Amazon. The cats used that one for two weeks, which I took as encouragement, and then they went back to the sink. I unboxed it again after Goose stopped using it and discovered that what I had bought was a stainless steel bowl sitting on a plastic reservoir. The marketing on the listing had said stainless steel about fifteen times. The actual water-holding part was molded plastic. My fourth fountain was advertised as a multi-cat model with a larger reservoir for households with two or more animals. Plastic. The cats used it for a week. My fifth fountain was the most expensive yet, around one hundred and twenty dollars, with a built-in UV sanitization light that the manufacturer claimed would kill bacteria continuously. Both cats used it for nine days. Then they went back to the faucet. By the time I unplugged the UV fountain I had spent over four hundred dollars on cat fountains in three years and the cats had spent every morning of those three years asking me to turn on the bathroom tap. I had started telling people, when the topic came up, that my cats just preferred running water. I had stopped believing the category could solve the problem. I was halfway to writing off fountain-buying as a lost cause and committing to being the person who turns on the bathroom sink twice a day for the rest of my life with these two animals. What changed all of this was a conversation at a wedding last fall. An old friend from college named Priya was sitting next to me at the reception, and she had brought her partner who happened to be a veterinarian. Priya knows I have cats and she had been hearing about my fountain situation for years. She mentioned it to her partner at dinner. The partner, a woman named Dr. Mahmoud, asked me what fountains I had bought. I listed them. She asked me what each one was made of internally. I had to think about it. Three were plastic. One was the fake-stainless. One had the UV light but I had not actually checked the reservoir material. She told me, very politely, that the reason none of them had worked was almost certainly the same reason for all five of them. She explained it to me at the wedding table while the band played. I am going to repeat what she told me as carefully as I can, because it is the piece nobody had told me in three years of researching fountain reviews. Cats prefer running water for two reasons that have to be present together. The first is that moving water triggers an instinct that says fresh and safe. This is the part most fountain marketing talks about. The second reason is that the water has not been sitting in contact with a porous surface long enough to develop bacterial biofilm. The tap satisfies both conditions automatically. The water is moving and the surfaces it has touched, the metal pipes and the chrome-plated brass faucet, are non-porous. The cat smells clean water on a clean surface. A plastic fountain, even when the water is moving, satisfies only the first condition. The water is in motion, but it has been sitting in a plastic reservoir all day. Plastic develops biofilm on its surface within twenty-four to forty-eight hours of being filled, and cats can detect that biofilm at a resolution humans physically cannot. A cat's sense of smell is somewhere between fourteen and forty times more sensitive than ours. The fountain looks clean to a human. To a cat it smells like contamination on top of moving water, which is worse than a clean bowl with still water. The moving water actually amplifies the bad signal because it keeps lifting the biofilm odor up into the air around the spout. This was the part that I had been failing to understand. The fountains I had bought were not failing because the cats did not like fountains. They were failing because the cats were getting both the bad smell of biofilm and the moving water at the same time, and their noses were telling them to walk away. The tap, which I had been trying to replace, was the only water source in my apartment that gave them moving water without the biofilm. I had been trying to replace the one correct source with five incorrect imitations of it. Dr. Mahmoud told me what she recommends to clients in my situation. A fountain whose entire water-contact surface is made of medical-grade 304 stainless steel. Not just the bowl. The reservoir, the pump housing, the impeller, and every internal surface the water touches. She told me 304 is the grade hospitals use for surgical instruments. At a molecular level it is non-porous, which means biofilm cannot grip the surface. The fountain delivers moving water on a clean surface, the same combination the bathroom faucet has been delivering for free. The brand she recommends is called Cattasaurus. I ordered one before the band finished playing. It arrived four days later in a heavier box than any of the previous five. I unpacked it on my kitchen counter and ran my finger around the inside of the reservoir. Solid metal. No plastic anywhere I could find. The pump was so quiet I could not hear it from across the kitchen. I set it up in the corner of the kitchen where my previous fountain had been living. I went into the bedroom to read and waited to see what would happen. Maverick found it first. I heard him drinking before I saw him. I came back into the kitchen and watched him drink from the falling stream for almost a minute, which was longer than I had ever seen him drink from any source other than the bathroom tap. Goose came in a few minutes later and used it after him. The next morning I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth and neither cat followed me. I waited for them to come in. They did not. I finished brushing my teeth and walked out into the kitchen, and both of them were at the fountain. That was about four months ago. The morning bathroom routine is gone. They still occasionally come into the bathroom for other reasons. They no longer ask me to turn the tap on. They drink from the fountain on their own schedule, throughout the day, while I am working at my desk in the other room. I can hear them at it sometimes. The sound has become familiar in a way I did not realize the absence of had been weighing on me. What I want to say to anyone who has tried multiple fountains and ended up back at the tap is this. The cats are not picky and they are not in love with the faucet as a personality trait. The faucet is satisfying two requirements at once that the fountains you have bought have been satisfying only one of. Moving water by itself does not solve the problem if it is moving across a surface the cat's nose has flagged as unsafe. The category sells you the moving water part. Almost none of the products on the market sell you the clean-surface part. If you have been trying to find a fountain your cat will actually use, the variable to change is not brand or design or filter quality. The variable is what the water is sitting on between drinks. The fountain I bought is the Cattasaurus one Dr. Mahmoud recommended. I'll leave the link below in case any of you want to look into it. Goose is on the back of my couch as I am typing this. Maverick is on the windowsill behind my monitor. The kitchen is quiet because the fountain is quiet, and the bathroom is quiet because nobody is in there waiting for me. I have my mornings back, and I had not realized how much of them I had been giving away until they came back.