Sealing a bunch of food in a pressure cooker such means you can't really stir the contents, which can lead to a bit of scorching from time to time. This isn't a huge deal, but it can lead to some unsightly burned-on gunk. Luckily, it's pretty easy to get off, you just need to enlist a good friend.

Burgers are good, but burgers with bristles in them are decidedly not. It turns out that the small, coarse, poke-y bristles on BBQ bristle brushes can fall off the brush and get stuck in your food, potentially lodging themselves in your throat and tongue. This is, obviously, not ideal.

It’s so hard when your close friends can’t hang out at your house because your best friend, the cat, lives there. If you do decide to have allergic buds over, there are a few ways you can help mitigate their potential allergic reactions a bit.

Regular cleaning of your kitchen requires you to either ignore what’s going on underneath your fridge, or moving it so you can clean properly. Here’s how to do the latter, because eventually the former will catch up with you.

It's not uncommon to be under our doonas cursing the early morning starts, so the idea of washing that life-sustaining layer may seem outrageous. But you gotta — it’s dirty.

Cleaning pet hair off any surface is always a chore, but fabrics are very much the worst. Tempting as it may be, giving up and tossing a hair-coated blanket in with the rest of the wash will only transfer that hair to the rest of the load — and send the rest straight down your pipes. There’s a better way: Just throw super-hairy fabrics into the dryer before washing them.

I’m a fan of beer growlers. My husband and I have a few from our favourite breweries, and they take turns tagging along with us when we go out for dinner so we can bring some fresh draft beer home with us.

By now, we’re all pretty aware that cleaning your cast iron pan with soap and water is fine and good, as long as you dry and re-season it promptly. But soap and water doesn’t always cut it, and sometimes you need a little extra help getting gunk off your pan, which is when I turn to plain ol’ aluminium foil.

There are a lot of things you shouldn’t be putting in the dishwasher, if you’re lucky enough to have one. That means putting on the gloves and getting to scrubbing, yes, but there’s also a right and wrong way to hand wash most things.

This summer has been a mixed bag of humidity and drizzle: the perfect breeding ground for various types of mould. If you're currently battling surface fungus, this exhaustive infographic from NeoMam Studios explains how to eradicate the problem. Best of all, most of the solutions involve household items that you probably already own.

Marie Kondo has made tidying up your space the new hip thing to do.

Video: It may seem ironic, but showers are filthy.

Video: What exactly is “broom-swept” anyway?

They say you catch more flies with honey than vinegar, but apple cider vinegar is actually pretty good at attracting fruit flies. However, according to Food52, you can catch even more flies with an Aperol spritz.

We recently got new recycling bins at the Lifehacker office, and suddenly realised no one knew all the rules about recycling. Can you recycle plastic bags? Do you have to scrub out your containers? What about paper towels?

A wave of decluttering is sweeping the nation. St Vincent de Paul has reported a 38% increase in donated goods in some areas compared with the same time last year. However much of this is, frankly, junk. “Donating” broken, shabby or useless items only shifts the cost of sorting and sending it to landfill onto charities, which the National Association of Charitable Recyclers has reported collectively costs A$13 million a year.

Here’s how to make sure your Marie Kondo-inspired tidying spree doesn’t create a bigger mess for someone else to sort out.

We all have stuff that we need and want and love in our lives, and stuff that’s hanging around our homes because it’s junk that we haven’t yet realised is junk. For Marie Kondo, asking “Does this spark joy?” is the way to tell the difference. If that doesn’t work for you, try these questions instead.

“OK, Mum, my room is clean!”

Of my many flaws, one that should be easy to fix, is that I use too much of a product in single sitting: Lotion, shampoo, hot sauce—I always use a little bit more than I need to, thereby wasting some of it (excess lotion gets washed off), or having excessively spicy food.