I’m in charge of the Washing machine at Steady Towers and I’ve been thinking.
I don’t think I’ve ever used half of the functions it has. Never used the “Reduced Ironing” button, never had the need to do a pre-wash. Could count on one hand the number of 90, 60 degree or wool washes I’ve done.
So how about a washing machine that only has a 40 or at a push a 40 and 30 degree wash?
Sell it for £150 quid, gap in the market surely? I’m sure there will be reasons why . And do you have any Dragon’s Den type inventions you’d like to share?
Freezo-wave. Surely all it takes is to reverse everything the microwave does.
Ha ha, you think those buttons do anything? Actually a hot wash should be used for bed clothes and towels, gets rid of bugs. And what’s ironing?
I would like someone to invent a dishwasher that actually washes dirty dishes. Mine doesn’t.
Ooh,you should listen to last week’s Elis James and John Robins’ podcast about this. It’s all about cleaning the blades (or some such).
Is the water hard where you are, Dai? We trashed a washing machine in 23 months (bought from John Lewis with the free 2-year g’tee) and the bloke who came to look at it said “chuck a Calgon tablet in with every wash or the replacement will go the same way”. That one’s now into its 6th year without – touch wood – fault.
The dishwasher has been replaced every 3 years, though. The new one is the same model as the one it replaced, but it actually cleans. The old one had just slowly, gradually, got furred up with chalk. It isn’t so easy to add a descaler tablet to a dishwasher, except to install a whole-house water softner.
My invention – A button on TVs, Dvd players etc that makes the remote beep.
Sky Q does this
Freddy, that’s a brilliant idea! I’m all for cutting the extraneous complexity out of things, and washing machines are a prime candidate. Cars too.
My brainwave invention idea during lockdown is this…. and I’m almost too reluctant to share this as it is SUCH a good idea….
You know when you hand a cup of tea to someone? How do you do it? Think about it. You either have to hold the handle and offer it, forcing them to kind of gingerly hold the edges while they take it out of your hand and get round to the handle themselves… or YOU have to gingerly hold the hot edges while they grip the handle. There’s no easy way, is there?
Well, there should be. A MUG WITH TWO HANDLES. Voila. You hold one handle while you hand it over to someone and they grip the other handle.
I can hear a stampede to the patent office now….
What is the saucer for, then?
We don’t have saucers in my house. You must be an upper class fop. 🙂
Do you give the builders a saucer with their cuppa when they are round fixing the brickwork on your outhouse?
That’s why the tea-tray was invented though…
How middle class is this place???? Tea trays?? Whatever next!
I think we may have been there before.
A brick outhouse, dear boy? How provincial!
I would imagine a ‘reduced ironing’ setting on a washing machine would reduce the need for ironing as much as an ‘easy iron’ shirt, i.e. not at all.
But I agree, I use the 30°, 40° and occasionally quick wash settings, plus the spin mode when it’s not spun right first time around. No real need for anything else.
Couldn’t agree more about the need for machines for 30° and 40° washes only.
I almost always give my washing an additional spin after the cycle has completed. Dries quicker.
My tumble drier has two settings. Half Heat and Full Heat. I’ve never used the Half Heat setting.
Silly (damn stupid actually, and impossible) invention time:
In my heaveee pot-smoking youth, my smoking pals and I often fantasized about Disposable Lung Liners. Breathe a set of them in, prior to a heavy session with The ChuckleWeed, cough them out and dispose of them considerately afterwards.
And who on earth needs a wash that goes on for 2 and a half hours?
You’ve not met Mrs b then?
She won’t put the softener in the machine at the same time as the washing powder pod thing, so we have to have a 3 hour wash, then wait for a further 3 hours while she remembers she put the washer on, only to then have a 90 minute conditioner cycle, with multiple spins. We get one load done a day.
I, on the other hand, am easier to please…
I sneakily press the quick wash button which knocks 20 minutes off the cycle. She’s never noticed!
Fabric softener being a bit of a con mind.
Apparently it has a tendency to stick to certain items, towels in particular, and then goes hard when the fabric it is attached to dries. Hence why towels tend lose their softness after a while.
I make a point of avoiding the stuff.
Oh I hate fabric softener on towels… it just destroys their ability to absorb water!
And by the way I love old towels that have lost their softness. That’s when they are at their most absorbent and satisfying. Who needs a soft towel??
Me. Nice and soft and fluffy.
That’s why air dried towels are so stiff, then? She tumble dries ours. I know, I know…
You can still buy very basic toploader washing machines, with minimal functions. They are popular in off-grid homes, canal boats, caravans, etc.
You can also go down to the river with a couple of stones …
They’re still very popular in Oz for some reason, as easy to buy as front loaders. We have one, passed on from a dead uncle of Mrs thep’s. They use way more water, so you’d think…on the plus side, you can lift the lid and chuck in things you’ve forgotten.
Handy when you find that sock halfway down the stairs.
You need to wash your garments at 60 degrees to kill a pesky virus.
We’ve always washed towels and sheets at 60C, at least since Offspring The Elder had toddler Asthma.
I’ve lived in Singapore for 20 years. Most people have top load washing machines which take in cold water and have no in-built water heater.
When I first moved here, the idea of washing my laundry in cold water seemed very WRONG.
However, 20 years of perfectly clean laundry makes me wonder if it’s really necessary to wash clothes in hot water.
Ditto my best man, who has lived in Oz for nearly 25 years. When we visited, he warned us not to use the warm setting as the local Persil is designed to be used in cold water.
Strong powder + hot water = bleaching the colours.
You must live on the East side… over here on the West side of Singapore, our washing machine is front loading and has a heater (and lots of extraneous settings). We’ve also had clean laundry for the 27 years I’ve lived here 😉
My best man ‘invented’ the rotary washing line with an umbrella on top (for when it rains). I was then flicking through the Innovations catalogue and saw his ‘invention’ for sale inside.
I need one of those!
What would make it really nifty is a rain sensor controlling a self-opening brolly.
But surely the person carrying the umbrella is the rain sensor. ” oh look it’s raining I’d better put the umbrella up.”
Well, yes, but what if you are not a rotary washing line? Or near one.
Sorry fent I was half asleep and thought you were recommending a self opening brolly for the person to carry, not atop the clothes line. I’ll go back to sleep.
Same with tumble dryers. Mine has 4 sorts of dryness for cottons, 3 for synthetics, plus 7 ‘special’, including jeans (?), sports gear, wool refresh (?), bed linen. plus 3 buttons for delicate, sensitive and anti-crease, and a button to turn the annoying noises off. I use 1 – cupboard dry.
Tumble dryers. All of the ones I’ve ever used just make things very hot but still wet.
You must not have a proper exhaust vent to the outside of your house.
I have – ooh, get me – a condensing tumble drier (actually just a sort of block radiator thing) which turns the steam back into water and dumps it down the waster water drain.
And it uses a humidty sensor, not just a clockwork timer, to switch off when it is dry.
I am now fully a middle class ponce. My father would have hated what I have become.
Doesn’t everybody have one of these nowadays? Ours has a container that gradually fills up with water then you pull it out and empty it now and again. All sorts of warning lights tell you when you need to take action like defluffing. Works well.
Washing line in the summer. Clothes horse in the winter.
Who needs a tumble drier.
You don’t have a teenage daughter, do you? Mine can generate a load of washing every day if she puts her mind to it, yet every time I see her she is wearing pyjamas.
My smart idea a few years ago was a bar code reader in your kitchen where you scanned items as they got used, and it would produce a shopping list for you.
And then bloody Alexa, Amazon Pantry, and probably a 50p app on the iPhone ended my dreams of Dragons Den
When my son was small I proposed lead lined shoes for toddlers, so that you knew where your children would be where you placed them and they couldn’t run off.
That would enable them to walk over radioactive waste. You’d make a fortune in Chernobyl.
That’s ace Hubes…a Viz letter if ever I saw one.
FIREWALL
Here in California we get brush fires every summer, so I invented Firewall. You dig a trench around your house and bury several telescopic poles approx. 6 feet apart. The poles are heat activated and will spring up out of the ground when the brush fire approaches. In between the poles are flexible fence panels, made out of the same Bacofoil type material as the blankets that firefighters use when they’re trapped in a forest fire. Fire approaches – a wall pops up enveloping your house and preventing it from burning down. Or at least, slowing the process.
As an additional fire-fighting measure, those fortunate enough to have a swimming pool in their back garden can install a giant sprinkler system on the roof of their house which draws water from the pool and douses the roof ensuring that any stray embers are quickly extinguished.
Does anyone have Dragons Den’s phone number?
Nice. You could instal a sprinkler system on your roof anyway, couldn’t you, swimming pool or no swimming pool?
I guess you could, but the installation would be trickier and your water bill would be huge!
Only a big water bill if there was a wildfire and you had to use it. And still less money lost than having to rebuild your house and replace all it’s contents.
There’s too much choice these days. I thought of opening a fancy restaraunt. Menu: steak and chips with green beans and peppercorn sauce with melon slices for starters and vanilla ice cream for afters. Full stop.
I pictured people queueing along the street. Then, Covid.
That sounds like the Relais de Venise in Marylebone, London. They only do one main course – their entrecôte – plus a pudding. They’re pretty successful, too. Nice place.
There’s a fab, and popular, restaurant in Garda, Italy, which does sittings every couple of hours. They just ask you whether you want meat, fish or vegetarian and then just keep bringing you things as they are cooked. We were brave and went for fish, and I promptly ate things that I swear I will never eat again in my life. Raw prawns, big, chewy, squirty snails and some ghastly things with tentacles. Fun experience, but it will be meat next time, even though we just couldn’t identify one of the lumps of meat that someone with us was served.
Along similar lines, I always thought of opening a restaurant called ‘’Anywhere” with all the menu items being “anything”……
Based on the number of times my better half and kids respond to “where do you want to go for dinner?” and “what do you want for dinner?”, business will be booming. I’m looking at a franchise model.
Presumably it’ll be next door on restaurant row to “Don’t care” or “You decide”?
Similar to the product “aroundtuit”. Eventually everyone will get one…
Or, ‘I can’t decide, what are you having?’
“There are two specials this evening- Take it or leave it.”
Well played @pawsforthought
I made my own sunscreen applicator for those hard to reach places.
You know when you’re home alone and you want to catch some rays, how do you apply sunscreen to your back? It does that.
I call it The Bag For Life Sunscreen Applicator II
Version II has the print on the inside because as I discovered with version I the sunscreen removes the print and places it all over your back.
I really don’t understand why irons don’t have an automatic cut off if left on for more than say thirty minutes? I’d have thought in this age of saving energy etc it would be compulsory. After years of neglecting to sort out his issue in our house I decided to buy an automatic electrical timer which we now plug the iron into. It’s set at fifteen minutes after that it switches itself off. No more coming in from work to find the iron on and god knows how much wasted energy. It also worried me that it might cause a fire one day. I cannot understand why irons don’t have some sort of cut off mechanism.
Mine does, it switches to standby when when you leave it in the upright position for more than a couple of minutes*. Saying that, it is a fancy Teflon-coated** one which cost about £25 from John Lewis.
*Which is a bugger if you’re ironing when listening to vinyl, and change the record.
**It makes the handle really slippery. I’m here all week, etc.
That’s great news. I’m late to the party it would seem!
I’ve spent the last half hour scanning the instruction book, hoping for an explanation as to why the new phone is beeping every minute. I gave up and decided I’ll need a couple of free hours to read the whole thing.
I can’t be the only one regretting the passing of the basic telephone that came without all the unwanted extras.
I’m going to share with you what I do in such situations – Google it.
Did you sort it out @kalamo ?
I went out and when I returned I realised (eventually) that the silence had resumed. Though I’m still on high alert.
We’ve got an answering phone on our landline which is daft. When the person leaves a message you can’t actually hear them speak…it then beeps and you have to go and play the message. I have got the instructions somewhere but I’m sure google will do it too.
We only have a landline for the broadband. I don’t even know the number.
I used to use my landline for outgoing calls to numbers that weren’t included on my mobile tarriff. These days I don’t even need it for that, but it goes with the Broadband.
Only telesales people and scammers call me on the landline, plus the occasional wrong number.
Anyone I actually want to speak to will already have my mobile number.