Are there any household gadgets you found unexpectedly useful after you'd gotten them?
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?
You are viewing a single comment
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.