You're all set to leave for your well-deserved Christmas holiday when you realise you haven't prepped your home at all. Here's a list of all the energy vampires you should disable (or adjust) before you head out.

Great news for people who hate doing dishes: if you have a dishwasher, washing your dishes by hand is a colossal waste of water, energy, time, and money, and you can prove it with maths.

Stocking up on staples is a great way to stretch a budget and minimise waste, so a good chest freezer is a boon to the budget-minded home cook. Sadly, common misconceptions about their energy usage and footprint size discourage the people who would benefit the most from a chest freezer — apartment-dwellers with decrepit, barely-functional appliances — from buying one.

Video: “For my birthday I got a humidifier and a de-humidifier,” comedian Steven Wright used to say. “I put them in the same room and let them fight it out.”

This week we have a guy who's moving into his own place and taking the stuff he bought with him. The trouble is, his old roommates use some of those things and aren't being given much time to adapt. Is there a nice way to deal with a situation such as this?

A belated New York Times obituary pays tribute to inventor Frances Gabe, who designed, built, and lived in "the world's only self-cleaning home." Gabe comes across as a delightful and ingenious crank in a home full of "Honey I Shrunk the Kids" contraptions. Her big idea: Turn the average home into a giant dishwasher.

I grew up with a standard, cheap rice cooker that my mum bought at a grocery store. Shopping for my own cooker as an adult, I was surprised at how many options there are to choose from and how expensive those options can be. Cooking rice is a pretty straightforward task, so what's with the super expensive cookers? Here's what I found.

Hello, and welcome to What's Cooking?, the open thread where you get to share all of your brilliant thoughts, advice, recipes and opinions on all things food-related. Today I want to know about your favourite odd but necessary kitchen tools, even if they are -- gasp -- single-use.

For those of us who live in abodes with less-than-sprawling kitchens, counter space is a precious thing, and it can be hard to decide who gets to hang out in the open. Basically, your countertops are a work space, which means you need space to work, and having each and every appliance out can get kind of crowded.

It is with a heavy heart that I must inform you of a "smart salt shaker" called "The Smalt". Oddly, the shaking aspect of this shaker is still decidedly unplugged -- you still have do all the shaking; Smalt just "tracks" it for you. (And lights up. And plays music.) It is, essentially, the Juicero of seasoning.

Super-functional, utilitarian kitchens seem to be all the rage these days, with un-needed "single-function" appliances being shunned by the home cook. But "need" is a weird concept, and sometimes a seemingly silly culinary tool can make cooking and eating easier, tastier, and just a bit more whimsical. Here are some of my favourite kitchen items I didn't even know I needed (or maybe just wanted real bad).

A healthy refrigerator means healthy food, but if your produce looks a little droopy, and your cheese is growing mould a little too quickly, it may be time to get a new one.

Food processors are powerful kitchen appliances that can be used for a wide variety of meals, but they can also be tough to clean. And the lids can be especially troublesome because of all their nooks and crannies. This will make cleanup much easier.

If you want your vacuum cleaner to keep working as well as it did the day you bought it, you have to keep it clean. Doing these four simple things will make sure it keeps on sucking.

I’m 35 years old. Every morning I wake up and ask myself, ‘when will it happen?’

What’s the tipping point? When does it begin?

When do I start wearing the same clothes for the rest of my life? What’s the high watermark? When does the tide roll back? What is the element of my personality that will make my children despise me? When will technology stop feeling exciting and vibrant? When will technology begin to confuse and anger me?

I may have already hit that point.

You rely on your fridge, dishwasher, oven and laundry to work, and work well when you need them. The last thing you want is for them to fail, or cost you a ton of money to repair or replace. Here are five simple tips from US News Money to keep those appliances in good, working order for the long haul.

There are really two types of kitchen appliances: There are the true heroes of the kitchen -- the ones that make your cooking easier, faster and better -- and then there are the toys. I love my toys, but I could get by without them. I need my heroes though, and my the food processor is a multifunctional super hero. Here you'll find all you need to know to buy, use and clean yours.

Dishwashers can range in price from a couple of hundred bucks to well over a thousand dollars. Obviously, the more expensive the appliance, the more features it comes with. However, as Consumer Reports points out, some of these features just aren't worth it.

People fight over the best way to load the dishwasher. Forks with tines up or down, pots on the top or bottom -- luckily, it's all meaningless. Your specific model probably has a "right way", and it's buried in the back of its owner's manual.