Appliances to beat the winter blues

July 2nd, 2013

Appliance Talk

When it’s winter and the weather is cold and miserable, the temptation to hibernate can be very strong.  Alas, human beings aren’t actually grizzly bears, and you can’t stay wrapped up under the doona for the entire season.

During winter, it’s easy to find yourself struggling to summon up the motivation to take care of all that regular maintenance and housework your home requires.  You might be able to put these jobs off for a short time, but it won’t be long before they transform from small, inconvenient jobs into towering nigh-impossible Herculean tasks.

However, armed with the right appliances, the winter blues don’t have to get the best of you.  After all, the more winter work you can manage now, the less spring cleaning you’ll have to do in a few months…

Healthy cooking with less work

When you’re feeling sluggish, it’s natural to succumb to the urge for comfort food.  Unfortunately, this is all too often an unhealthy option, which won’t do your body any good.

The right appliances in your kitchen can help you prepare healthier meals that don’t require slaving away over a hot stove when you’d rather be vegging out.

Labour-saving gadgets such as food processors can help to reduce the amount of prep time for cooking, allowing you to concentrate more on picking and choosing the healthiest recipes and ingredients available.

To give you similar results as your “guilty pleasure” fried favourites, but without the excess fat and grease that comes with them, opt for cooking with something like a Philips Viva AirFryer, or a Tefal Actifry, which uses just a spoonful of oil to do the same job as a deep fryer (which you can still use to cook healthy food, as long as you use it right)

Slow cookers are also winter favourites, as they allow you to put together your meal in the morning and let it stew (literally) until dinner time, when it’ll be ready to eat.

Let the appliances clean for you

Don’t want to wash dishes?  I can’t blame you.  It’s never exactly an exciting task at the best of times, and when things are cold and miserable, the drudgery of it all can get to you.

But if you use a dishwasher, all you need to do is arrange the dishes in order (do it properly), and the rest of the work is done for you, allowing you to get back under the electric blanket.

If you’re not clean on clearing your house of winter dust, then a robotic vacuum cleaner will do the job, and as shown above, prove entertaining for your pets that have become befuddled with cabin fever.

While there’s no true substitute for a bit of elbow grease (I wish you could buy that stuff in tins), you can make cleaning other surfaces a bit easier with a steam mop, which uses hot steam rather than soapy water to clean and disinfect the hard surfaces of your home, such as the tiles of your bathroom or kitchen.  If you’ve got carpet that needs a good freshing up, there are carpet cleaning appliances for that too – they can even take care of the mess left by drunken relatives!

Logjam-free laundry

The old laundry routine tends to suffer during the winter, as the weather often puts a stop to line-drying, leaving the clothes to build up into a veritable Mount Clothesmore.  While you can usually hang up clothes indoors, the cool, damp winter air means that nothing dries in a timely manner, leading to a roll-on of further delays.

You can often save yourself a fair bit of effort by using a dryer to get the job done.  A model with smart sensors that time the cycle to continue until the clothes are properly dry would be perfect for any household.

Of course, dryers do tend to use a lot of energy, which isn’t great for the planet and definitely won’t do your power bill and favours.  But if you opt for a heat pump dryer, any waste heat it generates will be recycled, allowing it to use less energy, making it one of the more energy-efficient designs out there.

If you can’t uses a dryer, you’ll have to hang up your clothes indoors somewhere – try to make sure this is a dry room (a dry, warm room if possible) to get the clothes dried quickly and inhibit the spread of mould and mildew (which can grow to epidemic proportions if not properly managed in the winter).  A heater or air conditioner can make your home cosy for easier drying, and a dehumidifier can dry the air if required (among other things).

Manage your time

Our primitive caveman brains are still wired up to work by day and rest by night, making it very easy to lose all sense of motivation as soon as the sun goes down, no matter how early that is.

Use appliances with an in-built timer to help get the maximum level of productivity out of each day, no matter how many hours of daylight it may contain.  A reverse-cycle air conditioner with a timer can start up when you’re on the way home from work, making your warmed house a welcome relief when you finally make it in through the door.  Several laundry and cooking appliances, including dishwashers, also use timers to fit their functions into your household schedule, with their digital clocks caring not one whit whether the sun is in the sky or not.

And if you need a bit more motivation to get up and keep going as you go about your household tasks, your very own espresso machine could be just what you need for that extra dose of will to live.

Have the right tools available

It’s all very well to talk about all of the wonderous things you could do in your home with just a few appliances, but if you don’t already have them handy at home, you’ll either have to leave the house in the cold and nasty weather, or cobble together some manner of home-made monstrosity using whatever’s handy (such as this Low Tech Washing Machine).

This is where Appliances Online comes in handy – if you don’t have the appliance you need for a job, we can provide it for you, dellivering it to your door, so you never have to leave your house and venture out into the cold.