Five Tested Life Hacks to Change Your Life!

There are endless internet sites out there with lists of supposedly the best “life hacks” ever. For the uninitiated, a life hack is something that is designed to make your life easier in some way. It could be anything from freezing grapes to wiping your headlights with a dryer sheet to keep bugs from sticking. Many of these sound useful, but are they really? A blogger friend decided to test a few of the more popular ones out there to see if they were actually “life-changing.” Here are the results:

1. The Battery Bounce: According to this hack, if you drop a battery onto a tabletop from about 6 inches, you can tell if it’s good or not. If it gives a little bounce, then immediately falls over, it’s good. If it bounces around awhile, it’s bad or on its last legs. Result: The jury is out on this one. It seemed like the dead batteries bounced around more, but sometimes it was hard to tell. I wouldn’t necessarily depend on this tip to pick your batteries.

2. The Blender Clean: In this hack, you put some soap and warm water in your blender and simply mix it up for a clean blender. Result: This one really did work, and I’m surprised no one figured this out sooner. Now that many of us use small blender appliances like a Ninja® or Bullet®, this tip seems like a great recommendation as an easy way to clean them quickly and thoroughly without having to wait a day for the dishwasher to run.

3. Opening a Blister Pack: Plastic blister packs can be super difficult to open, even with industrial scissors or a chainsaw! This hack suggests using a manual can opener. Result: This sort of worked. It’s really designed for packaging where an item is fully enclosed in sealed plastic. It eventually opened the plastic, but it was not significantly easier than a good old fashioned box cutter.

4. Fill a Large Bucket with a Dustpan: In this hack, you prop a dustpan under a faucet in a small sink so that the water will flow through the handle into the bucket below. The idea is that you can fill a large bucket when you don’t have room under the faucet. Result: This tip could work, but it depends on a few things. First of all, you have to have a fairly good-sized dustpan with a hollow handle and no hanging hole, because having a large hole at the end for hanging makes it almost impossible to fill the bucket without getting water all over. Still, if you have the right equipment, it could really work quite well. Another hack recommended using a pool noodle to direct water into the pail. That might be easier.

5. Make Smaller Baggies: Say you just need some small baggies, like for snacks for kids, but don’t need a full-sized one (and don’t have any snack-sized on hand). This hack says to heat up a butter knife over a gas stove flame and use it to slice the bag in half. The hot knife will seal the edges. Result: This hack really worked! Instead of one wide baggie, we had two narrow ones. Two baggies for the price of one!

So, there you have it. Five different “lab” tested hacks to discover how well they work just so you won’t have to! There are many hacks like these on the internet, so maybe you should experiment for yourself and see if any of them truly do change your lives.

Author: Ellen Reed, 2021