I've been thinking of several little small gadgets or swaps that I've been wanting to share that I use that make life a little more convenient and save money. They're sort of random, but somewhat related, but hopefully you'll find one that's helpful!
It's gotten cold here lately which made me think of my heated mattress pad. I've had it for years and originally found it on clearance at Walmart. It goes underneath your sheet and mattress protector, it's washable, and has dual controls. I love that you can turn it on and it keeps your bed nice and toasty for 10 hours and automatically shuts off. At night, you're not walking around your house, or at least I hope you're not! So why keep the heat up high in the entire house overnight when you're only in your bed? And it works really well too. They generally have about 5-10 different temperature settings, although I usually can't take anything over 1 or 2. But you can adjust the heat to whatever works best for you. I'm including a few links below to different ones, but both the Amazon and Walmart links are for the Sunbeam brand that I have.
The second thing I wanted to share was
discounted refrigerator filters. Sleeping in a heated bed makes you wake up feeling like an overcooked turkey if you're not properly hydrated. Don't ask me how I know! But drinking more water has also been a goal of mine for a while, and I don't really like buying bottled water. I tried drinking tap water, but...not so great either. I considered a tap filter, and a refillable fridge pitcher, but ultimately settled on using my refrigerator filter. It promises 300gals of filtered water per cartridge. But the manufacturer ones cost nearly $50 each. So my search led me to Clear Choice brand water filters. I could get three for roughly the cost of ONE of the brand name ones. And I am coming up on six months of using the Clear Choice brand and it has been great. (I'm linking to the brand on
Amazon, but of course you have to look for the model compatible to your actual fridge. Another source to purchase them is
DiscountFilters.com.
This is the exact one I needed for my fridge.)
Finally to help with efficiency, we've also installed this Honeywell programmable thermostats, because while I don't mind dropping the temperature in the house overnight, remembering to actually DO it every night can be cumbersome. Now with the programmable one, I set it to drop to 62 degrees overnight, and then to heat up the house about thirty minutes before we start getting up, because no one wants to wake up to a cold house! And I realize I'm probably a little behind the latest technology, because there's also smart thermostats like the Nest or Ecobee, and even Honeywell too. They cost a bit more, but they're great options too because they can learn your patterns or be voice/phone controlled. As we've updated our heating and cooling systems, we changed out our original thermostats, and having them be programmable has been nice.
So those are just a few money saving home hacks that I use. What items have you found to save money or make things a little easier?
