I was thinking about how I missed having an indoor thermometer that measures humidity. It’s such a small specific thing, one I’d never think of getting unless pushed to it (which I was by one particularly dry winter). But I like having one now.
What are your small, “random” or “junk drawer” type of gadgets that you actually use or like having around?
Safe Cut Can Opener, traditional can openers should be extinct. It unrolls the original seal so there’s no sharp edges. It also doesn’t leave a lip, so none of the insides get stuck on the ledge. Then, if you don’t use all the can, just plop the lid back on and throw it in the fridge.
Technology connections convinced you too?
I only ever used this sort of can opener:
But most cans are now like this:
Is there a specific model you’re talking about? I’m getting a lot of different results searching online and I’m not sure they’re the same. I’m not a fan of the can opener my wife has, though; its cuts are jagged and uneven and sometimes gets the outside dipping into the food.
If you like boiled eggs, you need a boiled egg timer.
It’s a clear “egg” made of heat-tolerant plastic with a color-changing temperature gauge visible inside. You throw it into the pot when boiling eggs and it lets you know when the eggs are soft boiled, medium boiled, or hard boiled. It’s very readable even in boiling water, and the results are always perfectly accurate. These things are totally worth the few dollars they cost.
May I suggest an actual timer? Almost all of us already have one, it’s even more precise, and does not require additional plastic waste. 7:30 makes a perfect medium egg every time.
Can confirm. Elevation may cause variance though.
I got an egg cooker that came with a small measuring cup for water, which told you how much to put in for soft/medium/hard-boiled. It’s about $10 and cooks up to 7 at a time. Others can do more. I’m never cooking eggs in a pot again, as long as I have this.
I have one of those, it’s completely useless. It had novelty value but the eggs never came out the way I wanted them. I’ve gone back to a normal timer.
Got a few cheap ones from Amazon Each one worked once and the egg still came out harder than was supposed to
huh. We always just toss our eggs in the kettle and boil them in there.
A bit on the costly stuff but I find the vacuum cleaner robot (not sure it’s called this in English) very useful. The house is cleaner to be vacuumed every day (even if it’s not as efficient as manual vacuuming or cleaning). Especially with pets and children.
My circle unfortunately calls it a Roomba, even if it’s off brand.
Kind of like how sometimes we call tissues Kleenex.
As soon as I find a decent mop and vacuum that doesnt require the internet for full features I am buying it
If you’re willing to put in some work https://valetudo.cloud/ is a great project that takes an off the shelf vacuum and de-internets it.
You can also make an IoT special WiFi connection without any links in the rest of the home network.
Some routers have this or at the very least a guest network option.
Its more the data getting back out of the house i dont want so the guest wifi woupdnt work. I will look into the IOT network.
I make sure to remind people mine is a Conga (real brand)
Those are great! I loved having one. Unfortunately my wife hates the noise they make, so we stopped using it.
It’s indeed noisy, we schedule it to run when we’re not at home.
I would do that, but we’re never not home on a schedule, since we work remotely. I suppose I could always just manually start the thing when we’re leaving the house.
I automatically set to start at a time I am likely to be away.
In case I am at home I just override the cleaning run and command it to return to the base. In my case it’s rare.
Maybe you can set it at the time you typically go to the supermarket?
We live an hour outside of town, so we do most of our shopping in big runs once per month. I’ll just manually start the thing whenever we’re leaving the house. Thanks for the ideas! I get to start using my Roomba again now!
As a European city dweller the concept of leaving 1h outside town is impossible to wrap my head around 😅
But okay fair enough in the absence of a routine no much of a choice:).
We’re city transplants and honestly, I can’t see us ever moving back to the city unless we are forced to. I’m so glad to be away from the noise, the traffic, the crime, and the filth. I wake up in the morning, open my bedroom window, and look out at a beautiful forest. I walk outside to have my morning coffee and listen to the birds chirping, watch the rabbits and the deer, and completely love every minute of it.
We’re also very glad to have some space to spread out on, an abundance of gardening options, and we like being mostly off the grid. Our only external connections are electricity and Internet, and we’re talking about getting solar, or a residential wind turbine. We have a backup generator for when power goes down, but that definitely can’t meet our needs long-term.
We thought the long drive to the city and reduced access to easy amenities might be a major concern, but it ended up being totally okay for us. The drive is pretty, and relaxing, unlike my commute in the city was, so I don’t even really mind it. There is a small 20,000 person city about 25 minutes away, and that has most of the stuff we need. We do still have to go to the big city if we want high culture experiences, or want to shop at fancy places, or even just Costco, but it has just become part of our lifestyle and we don’t mind at all. This would have never worked for me as a young man, but as a middle aged couple it’s just our speed.
Seriously the most useful thing I ever bought for around the house is barely even a gadget. It’s literally just a screwdriver where you can flip the tips and the shaft so that it has four tip sizes; two Phillips and two flatheads. Oh and also a tape measure. That tape measure will save you literally all of the headaches when it comes to purchasing furniture. A good socket set of Allen wrenches for assembling set furniture too.
I bought several of those flippy screwdrivers and keep 1-2 on each level of the house and in the garage. I never have to leave the floor or often the room to fix something I notice is loose.
A night light that turns on automatically as it gets dark. No more stumbling around when I have to pee in the middle of the night.
When we built this house we specified power outlets in each toilet for exactly this reason. The low light levels from the motion sensor lamps we have don’t sear your eyeballs when you get up in the middle of the night to pee.
I think I’d like to get this; do you have a brand you can recommend?
I’ve been using this one: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B074N9LRCQ/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&th=1. Fun to choose which color or let it change colors on its own.
I got a set of metal picks from Harbor Freight for like 3 bucks. They’re similar to the pick tool that a dental hygienist uses. I use these things nearly every day to scrape stuff out of a crevice, retrieve something out of a narrow hole, pull stuff out of a tube or straw, precision clean corners of things, etc. I love them.
Every day? fascinating
Once you have a hammer the world is full of nails.
Can confirm, I have the same set, and I do probably use them every day. It’s one of those tools that you don’t realize how often you need it until you start using it.
I wish you would clean my house with those things.
Indeed, being Belgian and an adept of the real French fries (double cooked) I was not convinced at all. In the end, I still prefer real fries but I find the air fryer very practical to cook (or warm up quickly - unlike microwave oven it does not make stuff soft) all sort of food.
I’m an American, so I can’t say how they’re cooked in Belgium, but I can say that boiling them in water for ten minutes before frying reduces the workload significantly and produces similar results.
Belgian fries (and any good fries in America) are fried once in low heat for a little while to cook the potato through. Then they are allowed to cool, and they can be frozen to use later, or you can fry them again at higher temp to crisp them up.
I’m aware of the double-fry technique, I’m just saying that similar results can be obtained by boiling in lieu of the first frying step
Came here to share air fryers.
I hate kitchen gadgets. Even toasters.
But I like this!
My kitchen has a solid ban on any product with the word “maker” in the name. They’re all junk that take up space and do a worse job than conventional methods.
An air fryer though. That was money well spent.
I was gifted an air fryer a while back. While it’s generally useful, cleaning if after each use is really obnoxious imo and so I hardly ever use it.
It’s a lot easier to clean a pan I used in the oven because I can just pop it in the dishwasher. I can’t pop the air fryer in the dishwasher. It would destroy it.
You can buy air fryer liners to minimize cleanup.
I recently found out about these and they have been a huge help, but I found that food still manages to make it’s way into the rest of the basket, even if it’s not as much.
Mine came with a little pan or tray that we can line with foil easy peasy. Much less to clean.
The idea of getting something before I know its usefulness confuses me. Do you mean finding that something is more useful than you expected?
If that’s the case, I once had an alarm clock which curiously had a thermometer in it to measure the temperature in the room. I was able to use it - for years - to hold my landlord to account for being shitty on the heat during the winter.
Sometimes its a gift. My bread maker was a gift, and it brings me a lot of value, but I prob won’t pay for it.
Other times it’s something pushed on you for fun. My wife made me buy a thermostat gun and now I love it. I test it on the kids too for fun.
I have a digital clock with thermometer feature and a dedicated thermometer. I’ve been logging the measurements every half an hour for months. The clock is ~1.5-3 degrees off (or the other way around, who knows). Just be aware they are not always super accurate.
The idea of getting something before I know its usefulness confuses me.
My spouse buys things because they seem neat. Uses them once or twice, then not again.
InstaPot. I hate gadgets and things that have limited purpose so when this was gifted to me I planned to regift it. I use it so often I got an upgrade model. Totally worth the counter space!
What can you do with those?
- Put a layer of frozen meatballs on the bottom. I use Trader Joe’s party sized balls.
- Add dry pasta
- Pour sauce over dry pasta.
- Fill sauce jar with water and dump that in.
- Put the lid on set it to go for 8 minutes on high pressure. Wait for it to finish and then release the pressure.
- Yum yum in the tum tum
8 minutes? Damn, it takes me that long just to boil water on the stove
As u/usernameblankface said, 8 minutes is the time it cooks while fully pressurized. It can take anywhere from a little over 5 minutes to a half hour or more to heat up everything inside enough to generate the steam necessary to pressurize.
Setting for 8 minutes means that it will heat up, build pressure, then start the 8 minute timer. It then beeps loudly when the time is up, so no need to set a separate timer or keep track of the thing.
We mostly use ours to make rice, potatoes, and artichokes. Not all at once but I guess we could. Oh, and for hummus we get the perfect chickpeas in like 45 minutes from dried. It’s amazing.
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On top of the other reply, soups, chili, ribs, whole chickens, the filling for chicken pot pie, pulled pork, shredded chicken for tacos, and so on.
On top of the other two replies: Mine has a setting to make yogurt. You just add milk and about a tablespoon of active culture yogurt
edit: oops wrong reply
A Moka pot, it’s the best coffee I’ve tasted, I’ll never go back to using those coffee machines with the basket and the glass carafe.
Also, a really good chef’s knife, kept really sharp. I use a couple of Global ones.
Same, but Aeropress for my coffee. I haven’t yet tried a mocha pot, though I’d like to.
Aeropress coffee was always the best tasting. But I found I just didn’t have the patience for making it that way every morning, especially since I drink four cups at least.
Right? My friend talked me into getting a full pour-over setup, and it’s tasty, but I’m not doing all that shit in the morning when I need coffee. I went back to my drip machine after two days. He says that he loves the process in the morning, and that’s cool I guess, but that shit isn’t for me.
That’s fair, it works for me because I just have one cup but it would be tedious for multiple cups each morning.
I bought a variety pack of scouring pads and brushes that I can attach to my cordless drill. Super handy for cleaning stuff that would otherwise take some major elbow grease. Probably bad for my drill, but it’s worth it to me.
I made one of these years ago with a round dish brush and a long bolt. One of the most effective cleaning tools in the house. That plus “barkeepers friend” cleaner will take care of any hard-to-scrub grime.
Extendo arm. It’s goofy as hell but it’s a god send when there’s a bunch of random crap on the floor. They also have deceivingly good grip strength too.
Hand held vacuum. I don’t think this is that niche anymore but it works really well for cleaning tables, random tight corners and I park it next to my clothes dryer to easily clean the filter. I also use it a TON for sucking up bugs. Buy a corded one since battery operated ones die fast (I went through 2 or 3 of these personally)
Bench scraper. Easily removes 90% of any grime on hard surfaces. Honestly more effective than a rag and detergent. When I bought mine I decided to try it out on my “thoroughly cleaned” kitchen counter and removed a disheartening amount of grime. Afterwards I use some detergent just to sterilize everything.
I use my grabby arm thing constantly because bending over kills my back. Sometimes I’ll dual wield the things lol
bend your legs
I clean up my toddler’s mess every day and those extendo arms have saved my back
Hand held vacuum
We splurged on a Dyson battery powered vacuum that can transform between a floor vacuum, and a hand-held vacuum. I thought it was going to be a goofy novelty, but my wife really wanted it, so we got it. It’s awesome! We completely stopped using our corded vacuum, and eventually donated it. It was just such a hassle compared to the Dyson. The Dyson is expensive, but it is so very useful and convenient.
My ex got the dyson in the breakup. I’m still not over it.
Bitch.
A good pair of titanium scissors. They aren’t very expensive, but cut things far better than cheap scissors. They last a lot longer, too; I’ve had mine for a few years, and they’re still sharp enough to cut my skin if I get a little carefree. I got a two-pack and keep a pair with my lunch box for foodstuffs I need to open at work. I even carried a pair around at work for a while when I needed them to cut zip ties, shrink wrap, and banding.
Alternatively, a good pair of hand-forged, high carbon, Japanese steel scissors. They are very expensive, but they cut like a dream and I feel like a bad-ass every time I cut something.
A quality knife sharpening system. It’ll change your life. Keep your knives razor sharp at all times with minimal effort, and all of your cutting experiences will be far better.
Sharpener or edge-straightener?
Explain please. I use a work sharp electric sharpener which has basically sandpaper bands. I guess I have one of those metal rods with grooves but i don’t use it.
Nice! That’s a great system. I have one too, but I only use it if a knife is really bad, or I have a lot of knives to sharpen. I usually use their diamond rod system. As you use your knife the edge gets folded over and malformed at a microscopic level. The honing steel doesn’t actually sharpen (remove metal), but it re-aligns the edge so that it is straight again and cuts better. Ideally you should pass your kitchen knives over the honing rod before each use, which will get you more life in-between sharpenings, and provide better cutting performance.
The honing steel doesn’t actually sharpen (remove metal)
Doesn’t a honing steel also remove burrs?
It does not.
Ideally both, but I meant an actual sharpening system. Either a series of progressively finer stones, some crock sticks, diamond rods, or whatever works best for the individual.
I didn’t know there were “systems”, I use a Pyrénées slab that works like magic, but you do need some elbow grease. Is it a power tool you’re talking about ?
I’ve used many different systems and the one that works best for me are the diamond rods with an angle brace. This is the one that I use, but there are several different brands available. I also have the Worksharp electric belt sander system, and that works really well too, but it removes a lot of metal, so I only use it sparingly. I used to have off-brand crock sticks and those are pretty cool, but they take a lot of time and still have a margin for user error. I used nothing but stones when I was younger, and that’s a cool system that gives the user a lot of manual control, but good stones are expensive, you need several of them, they’re bulky to store, and there’s a lot of room for error. Any of these are good options, and there are more still that I didn’t mention. It just comes down to personal preference.
Oh wow, that’s some serious gear… Thanks for the recommendations !
Project Farm has done a few videos on knife sharpeners. His testing is usually pretty straight to the point
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9Lu71ewVSw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBINMUdlJ14
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEDyYJJ6f9MI actually was just re-watching them as my whetstone has seen better days, and I’m pretty sure it’s now too curved to continue on
I’ve been loving the spider skimmer my wife got me for christmas.
This! So great when simmering/cooking stuff one has to fish out of a pot. Mine is used almost daily at home!
