After a hard day of getting dressed, driving, working, and shopping—well, after a day made less hard by the secrets revealed in this book—there’s nothing like coming home to your own sanctuary.
But even here, in the rooms you know so well, there are lessons to be learned, and tasks to be performed more efficiently. Here they are: a collection of accumulated home shortcuts, ranging from saving money on utilities to a few handyman specials.
The money your hot-water heater is wasting right now
It costs money and energy to heat your home’s water, right?
Right. Therefore, if you’re heating your house’s water hotter than you can stand in the shower—and you probably are—you’re wasting money and energy.
Examine the temperature handle on your shower. If it’s not turned all the way up to the HOT position, you’re wasting money.
Go into the basement, laundry room, or wherever you keep your water heater. Turn its thermostat down a bit. Most manufacturers recommend keeping it between 120 and 140 degrees Fahrenheit—but even 120 is probably hotter than you really need it.
It may take a couple of showers before you figure out the sweet spot. But your newly lowered gas, oil, or electric bill will give you a warm feeling indeed.
And now that you’ve learned how to adjust your hot-water heater, remember to turn its temperature down before you leave on vacation. No point in heating up water for an empty house.
A quick scissor-sharpening trick
Cut through a piece of sandpaper a few times. Insta-sharpening for your scissors!
Fight back against the razor industrial complex
You’ve heard the old saying “Give away the inkjet printers; sell the ink cartridges”? Nobody’s taken that to heart more than the razor industry. Today’s razor-blade cartridges are incredibly expensive—$30 for a dozen Mach 3 cartridges, for example—and the blades are engineered to need replacing incredibly soon.
According to Gillette, you’ll have to throw away that precious cartridge after only five weeks. According to actual men shaving, it’s even sooner. In fact, most people discover that they get a really close shave from a blade only the first couple of shaves.
But here’s the shocker: The shaves don’t get worse because your blade is getting dull. Your shaves get worse because the blade is getting rusty.
When you leave a wet blade out in the air, the metal oxidizes—it rusts microscopically. Soon thereafter, the weakened metal edge begins to flake, and presto: rough, dull shaves.
If you could eliminate that reaction, you’d be able to make your cartridges last a lot longer.
You can. Just dry the razor completely after each shave. You can do that in a couple of ways:
• Use a blow dryer or a fan.
• Shake off the water, and then swish the razor head in rubbing alcohol. (Use a small flip-top plastic storage container for the alcohol.) Alcohol blasts away the water molecules and then evaporates very quickly.
Drying the blades makes them last at least three times as long; some people report making them last much longer. Months.
Unify your soaps and save money
Pity the bar of soap. Its life path consists of shrinking away, shower after shower, becoming thinner and smaller until nobody can grip it in the shower anymore. And then it winds up in the landfill.
Savvy showerers, however, have devised a better way. When a bar of soap becomes nothing more than a sliver, squish it (while it’s wet) against a new bar of soap (while it’s wet). The two soaps merge into a single glorious block, and you go right on making yourself clean. You save money, goop, and landfill space.
The old shattered-lightbulb potato trick
Every now and then, a happily installed lightbulb shatters. It’s a common side effect of having children who throw balls around indoors.
Or maybe you try to change a burned-out bulb—but because it’s been installed for a long time, it has corroded into the socket, and it shatters when you try to unscrew it.
And now there’s nothing remaining but the jagged, sharp, broken-glass edges of the metal lightbulb base, which is extremely difficult to remove.
If you ask the nearest grandpa, he’ll probably tell you to use the old half-a-potato trick.
• The old half-a-potato trick. First, turn off the power to the light socket. Turn off the corresponding circuit breaker, if you can figure that out. The potato will not protect you from current that’s still flowing.
Now cut an Idaho potato in half. Dry it off completely, especially the cut side.
Gripping the rounded skin portion, press the cut surface of the potato into the amputated lightbulb. At this point, you should be able to unscrew the bulb’s base, using the potato as a handle.
The problem with the old half-a-potato trick is that, unless you’re careful, it can leave potato juice behind. That could lead to more corrosion and a repeat of this whole nightmare down the line.
That’s why you’ll never catch an electrician using half a potato. Instead, here’s the less fun but more professional method:
• The needle-nosed pliers method. Grip the exposed metal of the bulb’s base with needle-nosed pliers and manually unscrew it that way. You may wind up bending the bulb’s base, but that’s totally fine. You won’t be needing it for anything.
And, for heaven’s sake, come up with some rules for indoor sports around here.
Vegetable oil for better shoveling
If you coat your shovel’s blade with nonstick cooking spray, you’ll find that snow doesn’t stick to it between shovelfuls. More efficiency, less backache.
The great rubber-band paint-can trick
When you’re painting a house or a room, you spend a lot of time dipping your brush into the paint can. Most people wipe off the excess on the edge of the can after each dip. Trouble is, that gunks up the rim of the can (where you’ll have to tamp the lid back on later) and often results in paint dripping down the outside of the can.
A much better idea: Bisect the can’s opening with a rubber band or a piece of duct tape. Wipe your brush on that after each dip.
You’ll keep both the can rim and the can outside clean and paint-free.
Vampire power: The Basics
Have you heard of vampire power? No? Then how about standby power, standby loss, or idle current?
It all refers to wasted energy. When you leave something plugged in when you’re not using it—your cell phone charger, for example, or your microwave—it generally consumes a trickle of electricity. Add it up across America, and it turns out to be a lot of electricity: $10 billion worth, according to the EPA.
You’re paying for part of that, of course—your cable box alone runs you $18 a year in vampire power, or $34 if it has a DVR, too. And the Earth pays for the power that must be generated to fuel all of it.
Some devices—TVs and stereos, for example—have to stay on, “listening” for someone to press the remote control’s ON button. Computer peripherals, such as printers and scanners, keep one eye open just in case your computer sends them a signal. Hundreds of gadgets remain in standby mode so that their clocks or status gauges remain up to date.
There are only a few steps you can take to fight back:
• Unplug things that don’t need to be on, or plug them into a power strip that’s easy to switch off. Don’t leave your chargers plugged in.
• Buy a Kill-A-Watt meter (about $18). You can plug a device into this meter to find out exactly how much juice it’s using, when in use or when not in use.
• Buy power strips that use a master-slave arrangement: When you turn off the main appliance (like the TV), the associated outlets (such as the Blu-ray player and sound bar) cut power. Other power strips can cut power to outlets based on time of day or the absence of motion nearby (meaning you’re out of the house).
How not to lose the end of the tape on the roll
Don’t you hate it when the end of a roll of tape somehow disappears into the roll? You claw and claw with your fingernail, but it doesn’t come up easily; maybe it even shreds.
This is a tiny, tiny life problem, to be sure. But then again, it takes only a tiny, tiny amount of effort to prevent it.
Before you put the tape back in the drawer each time, stick something to the end of it. A paper clip, a penny, a toothpick, a bread-wrapper tab. Or just fold the end of the tape under itself.
Your poor fingernail will never have to dig again. At least not into tape.
Sleep: The Basics
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, sleep deprivation is now officially a public-health epidemic. Half of Americans say they don’t get enough sleep. And studies make it clear that sleep deprivation is a disaster. It leads to car accidents and industrial accidents, and makes you more likely to develop hypertension, diabetes, obesity, and depression. Fun stuff.
How much sleep are you supposed to get? According to the National Institutes of Health, school-age children need at least 10 hours of sleep a night. Teenagers, 9 or 10. Adults, 7 or 8.
Here, all in one place, is the master list of what science has shown to help or harm your chances of getting decent rest.
• Consistent hours. Whenever possible, go to bed at the same time each night; wake the same time each morning.
• Food. A big meal right before bed will make it harder to fall asleep.
• Coffee, cola, nicotine. They’re all stimulants. Take them close to bedtime, and you’ll stay up.
• Alcohol. Alcohol may make you drowsy, but it also triggers alpha-wave activity in your brain, which disrupts the quality of your sleep.
• Heat. You sleep best in a cool room.
• Noise and light. If street noise or light keeps you up or wakes you early, it’s worth making some serious effort to seal off your eyes and ears. The cheap way: foam earplugs and eye masks. The better way: Make your bedchamber darker and quieter. Shades. Window noise-reduction treatment.
• Exercise. It might not seem to make sense—doesn’t exercise get you pumped up?—but exercise during the day makes it easier to fall asleep at night. (Unless it’s right before bed—then it does pump you up.)
• Hot bath. The bath itself relaxes you. Then, when you get out, your body temperature drops, which is an on-ramp to sleepiness.
• Naps. Short naps are fantastic for making up for lost sleep—but avoid taking them late in the day. You’ll use up your sleep juice and have trouble falling asleep again.
• Electronics. There’s a new threat to sleep. The latest studies have established that the blue light from the screens of smartphones, tablets, and laptops interferes with your brain’s production of melatonin, the hormone your brain associates with nighttime and sleep. If you have trouble falling asleep, eliminate screens near bedtime.
If you’ve violated some of those golden rules—or if you’re just super stressed lately—you may still have trouble getting to sleep. In that case, here’s one final golden rule:
Don’t lie awake for hours. If you haven’t gotten to sleep in 20 minutes, get up and do something else—something calm—until you feel sleepy or until you think it’s worth another shot. That’s because lying there awake gives you anxiety about lying awake, which makes you lie awake, which gives you anxiety. …
Your two secret bonus screwdrivers
Check in the tool drawer of a typical home, and you might well find a four-in-one screwdriver. That is, it comes with four different tips (bits) that snap into the shaft—a flat head, a Philips head, and so on—so that a single handle can manipulate four different kinds of screws.
What you may not realize is that your four-in-one screwdriver is actually six in one. The shaft itself has the same opening size as 1/4-inch and 5/16-inch nuts, meaning that you can use your screwdriver without a tip to unscrew them. You can also use the shaft without a tip to turn the most common hex-head (six-sided) screws.—David Caleb
How to deal with a stripped screw
You strip a screw whenever your screwdriver rips apart the slots in the screw head. Maybe the screw is stuck much tighter than you anticipated, or maybe you didn’t use enough pressure on the screwdriver. In any case, once the screw head is stripped, it’s hard to recover.
But not impossible. Here are the solutions, in order of difficulty:
• Put a wide rubber band between your screwdriver tip and the screw head. Push hard with the screwdriver. Often, the extra grip of the rubber band is just what you need.
• If you’ve stripped a Phillips-head screw, try using a regular (flat-head) screwdriver of the right size. Add the rubber band if necessary.
• With a hammer, gently tap the screwdriver into the screw. Often, this technique buries the screwdriver tip just deep enough into the screw head to give it grip.
• Use a screw extractor. It’s an inexpensive, specialized screwdriver (or screwdriver bit) with special threads on its very strong metal tip. They’re supposed to burrow into the screwdriver head, once again giving you enough grip to start turning.
If all else fails, you can always just bulldoze your building.
How to stop your garbage can from riding up with the bag
Do you use plastic bags to line your trash can? Do you have to hold the can down with your feet when you’re pulling the bag out? Are you ready to solve a First World problem?
The problem, of course, is suction. You’re trying to pull a full bag of trash out of a plastic garbage can, so you’re creating a vacuum beneath it, which makes the trash can want to stay married to the bag.
The solution is to make a couple of airholes in the side of the trash can. (Use a drill, or a knife, or heat up the tip of a Phillips-head screwdriver so that it melts its way through the plastic.)
Make the holes in the back (so you won’t have to see them) and partway up (so the trash can won’t leak if garbage juice drips to the bottom).
Americans can’t all agree on much, but this much is unanimous: That infernal hard, clear plastic packaging—sometimes called a “blister pack”—is darned hard to open. Those packages are designed to present their contents to shoppers, while simultaneously frustrating shoplifters. Only trouble is, they also frustrate you when you buy the thing and try to get it open. It’s useless and dangerous to open those blister packs with bare hands, scissors, or knives.
The best way to open them is with the Open X, a $10 tool designed expressly for opening those packages (myopenx.com).
But if you don’t have the patience or the 10 bucks, here’s the homemade version: You can open those packages with an ordinary can opener. Just use it to pierce the flat edge of the package and turn the handle, exactly as if you’re opening a can.
In theory, happiness is what we’re about, right? Every decision we make, at some level, boils down to trying to be happy.
But when researchers actually study happiness, they find some surprising quirks.
For example, you might suppose that great news like winning the lottery, dropping 20 pounds, or getting a new job would make you happy. And it does—briefly. But it’s only a spike. (If that sentence makes you less happy, then consider this: The opposite also is true. Bad external events make you unhappy—but that, too, is just a dip. Then you return to your usual self.)
If you need more convincing: A University of Massachusetts study found that people who’d been suddenly paralyzed in an accident were more hopeful in their outlooks than people who’d just won the lottery.
So what does bring happiness—from a brain-science perspective?
Lots of factors are beyond your control. Happy people are often optimistic, spiritual, extroverted, and compassionate, have a great sense of humor, and come from happy parents. Lots of their happiness, in other words, was just handed to them by their genes or upbringing.
But there are some happiness factors that you control—factors that produce long-term happiness. Here’s what the research has concluded on this front:
• Companionship. Overall, people who spend more time with friends and loved ones are happier than people who are solitary. Feeling isolated lets feelings of insecurity and self-doubt blossom.
• Control. Here’s one definition of depression: A sense that you have no control over your circumstances. In studies of nursing-home patients and prison inmates, having control over simple things such as furniture placement and selecting TV channels produced measurable improvements in morale and alertness.
When things are awful, it helps to find things you can control, even if they’re little things. Join a book club—your idea, your initiative. Purge your closet. Binge-watch a TV show all day Sunday. Do small things that you chose to do.
• New things. Trying new things has two effects. First, it releases dopamine (the “happy drug” in your brain).
Second, it makes your life seem longer! You know how coming home from a new place always seems to be faster than going there? Same idea. Time slows down during new experiences and accelerates during repetitions.
• Exercise. The science of this one is well established. Physical activity releases endorphins and serotonin in your brain—chemicals that make you feel good and love life.
• Sleep. Predictable, really. When you’re exhausted, it’s very hard to feel upbeat.
• Do-gooding. Volunteering, giving a gift, sending a note of praise to someone—all of these selfless gestures give you a connection to other people and make you feel good about yourself.
Finally, one more thing about built-in qualities like optimism, humor, and extroversion: Some studies indicate that people who fake these qualities often experience the same increased happiness as people who naturally exhibit them. (This example is from Psychology Today: “You’re in a testy mood, but when the phone rings, you feign cheer while talking to a friend. Strangely, after hanging up, you no longer feel so grumpy.”)
So when all else fails, pretend to be happy; after a while, it can become real.