Why the breaker trips on the morning you have guests The pattern is always the same. The kitchen has run fine for a year. Then one morning the griddle is on, someone starts the deep fryer for hash browns, the…
Three numbers decide whether an appliance fits, and only one is on the box Product pages give you a footprint. A small kitchen needs three numbers, and the other two are usually missing. The first is the frontage the machine…
What a lease actually restricts, and what it does not Most residential leases say some version of the same three things. Do not make holes in the walls. Do not alter the plumbing. Do not alter the electrical. Everything else…
The constraint in a first apartment is counter length, not budget Most advice about kitting out a first apartment starts with a shopping list. That is the wrong end of the problem. A rented one bedroom typically gives you somewhere…
Noise complaints about appliances are usually complaints about the wrong thing. People blame the motor when the culprit is the countertop it is standing on, or blame a compressor when the sound is a fan, or buy a quieter model…
The purchase is a single event. The consumable is a subscription you did not knowingly sign up for. Plenty of kitchen appliances are cheap to buy and expensive to feed, and the feeding requirement is rarely stated on the front…
Nonstick coatings fail for predictable reasons, and almost none of them are manufacturing defects. They fail because someone reached for a metal utensil, because a basket went into a dishwasher the manufacturer never approved it for, because a pan was…
Two identical kettles bought on the same day can reach very different ends. One is still working in five years. The other is slow, noisy and finally dead, and nothing was wrong with it except the water that went through…
A modern television is never really off. Pressing the power button on the remote puts the panel to sleep and leaves a small computer running behind it, listening for the next command, holding a network connection, and in some configurations…
Every appliance on this site carries a power figure somewhere in its listing, and most of the time that figure gets read as though it were a bill. It is not. A wattage rating describes a ceiling: the most the…