A small magazine about things that claim to work
7 pieces
The objects in a home and how long they last. Bought at retail, used until something breaks or does not.
The white crust in the kettle
That chalky lining is mostly calcium carbonate left behind by hard water. It won't hurt you, but it does make the kettle work harder and flake into your tea. A kitchen acid, a few minutes and a rinse deal with it, and you don't need the branded sachet.
Where the washing machine's energy goes
Most of the energy a washing machine uses goes into heating the water, not turning the drum. That makes the temperature setting the cheapest efficiency upgrade in the house, as long as you know which loads still need heat.
Twelve hours, six flasks
Every flask in this test kept coffee hot enough to drink after twelve hours. What separated them was the lid, and the lid is not what the marketing measures.
Two years of switching
The rated life on the box is 25,000 hours. We have had bulbs fail in under two years of normal use, and the pattern is not random — it is about where they were installed.
One year, one knife each
Edge retention is the thing knife marketing sells and the thing that mattered least, because a knife you will actually sharpen never gets blunt enough for it to matter.
Two years of eggs
Every nonstick coating fails. What varies is whether it takes eight months or thirty, and the thing that predicted it was not what I paid.
Eighteen months of lids
Every set holds food. What separates them is whether the lid still seals after two hundred dishwasher cycles, and only two of these did.