If you get one of these, wear an apron or raincoat.
I’m Dan and I’ve been designing kitchen gadgets
for 40 years.
I’m gonna test some cleaning gadgets
and see if I can find a way to improve them.
So what I would do is make this tight,
I think this needs to come out.
I would flare out here.
These are the products I’m going to test, dish squeegee,
blade brush, ShamWow, suction brush cleaner, whisk wiper.
[upbeat staccato music]
Dish Squeegee.
It’s purpose in life is to scrape scraps off
of your dirty dishes.
Try saying that fast.
Now, before you clean your dishes, you need to eat.
Let’s try that first.
Pasta gets a five outta five.
So, I left enough to put the dish squeegee to the test.
Start to scrape.
It is squeegeeing okay.
I would’ve hoped I got a little bit more off
but I guess we’ll have to live with that.
Let’s see how the dish squeegee compares
to a silicone spatula that you may already
have in your kitchen.
And I guess to do that comparison,
I’m gonna have to eat another bowl of spaghetti.
[upbeat music]
In terms of effectiveness
I would give the dish squeegee a three outta five.
I think a silicon spatula may already be doing the same job.
And you may already have one of these.
It’s time for the lefthanded oil test.
The idea behind that is to put my non-dominant hand
at a disadvantage.
To make sure I cover the entire experience
I’m gonna eat another bowl of pasta
with a slippery left hand.
Okay. Let’s try using the dish squeegee
with a slippery non-dominant hand.
So I can feel that I’m a little out of control
and I’m just not getting into the the curvature of the bowl
like I would want to.
So yeah, I think it leaves a bit to be desired.
In terms of usability, I would give the dish squeegee
a two out of five.
The curvatures are not right for a bowl
and the flexibility is not quite right.
Okay, let’s talk about a redesign.
And there are several things I would do.
One thought is this needs to have a bit more thickness,
there’s just too much pinching going on,
especially when your hand the slippery or soapy.
I don’t know if you could see that,
that this bulges out.
I would actually make this concave
so your fingers can nest in there.
The radii here looks about the same,
so what I would do is make this tight.
So you can get into pots and pans that have a tight radii.
I would make this probably more curvy
because you would be able to turn this upside down
and scrape this way as well.
In making this bulge a little more
we have that much rubber silicone to scrape.
And I also think that I would change the radii here
so that we can get into some bowls
that may have tighter corners.
And maybe change the radius here,
and that gives a lot of flexibility for getting into corners
or getting into the edges and getting into bowls.
So I would change this shape rather radically.
Again without doing that,
I think you’re just as good off with the spatulas
that you may already have at home.
In terms of a buy rating, I would give the dish squeegee
a one out of five, maybe a one and a half.
I don’t think it cleaned completely,
because of that it’s disappointing.
Sorry, I just can’t squeegee you into my life.
Blade brush.
Its purpose in life is to clean your utensils
by sliding it along its teeth.
Let’s see how effective it is.
I think I’ll start with the knife,
and I am going to go back and forth.
Now my hand is protected, but I’m still a little concerned.
I’m not able to squeeze down on this.
And I feel like I really wanna squeeze tighter.
Oh, look, I missed the part there.
And in order to get that, I feel like I have
to point the blade towards me.
And I’m not that thrilled about that.
So it’s clean.
Just took a little bit of time.
All right, so let’s try the fork.
I feel like I wanna grab a brush,
and let’s try a spoon.
Yeah. Now the spoon is especially ineffective.
Also does quite a bit of splattering.
If you get one of these wear an apron or raincoat.
It’s okay, it just seemed like it took more work
than it was worth.
Let’s try that again.
Let’s see how the blade brush compares with a brush.
[upbeat music]
In terms of effectiveness on a scale one to five,
I would have to give the blade brush a two at best.
It just wasn’t performing the way
just a handheld brush would perform.
So it’s time to try again.
With the left handed oil test.
Plan is let’s oil up my non-dominant hand.
I could feel already a little sense of danger
just in getting slippery, left hand, close to the blade.
I wasn’t a big fan before,
less of a fan now of the blade brush.
I feel like the action is gonna be back and forth like this,
and doing that I get more splatter naturally.
I don’t have to do that but doing this in one direction,
just seems a little odd.
I’m just not sure it’s doing what I expected it to do.
Not loving it,
In terms of usability I’m gonna give this bad boy
a one outta five.
As you’re sliding a blade across,
that blade is gonna wanna cut skin
just as well as wants to cut anything else.
Let’s see how I would redesign this.
And I think in this case I would consider redesigning
just about everything on here.
This really needs to provide a lot more protection
if you’re sliding a sharp blade across it.
So, I would flare out here a lot more
than it currently does
because right now I’m getting some overlap here
and I don’t want a blade anywhere near there.
This really needs to come up a whole lot higher.
The other thing I would look at is these bristles
are just not effective when they’re facing down.
I would make sure that the bristles extend
beyond the edges so that you can get into crevices.
Last thing I would do
maybe this is no surprise is I would make this flex.
I think we can get away with some flexible plastic.
Pretty much what that does is cover every aspect
of the blade brush.
And I think it would increase effectiveness,
but also increase safety.
In terms of a buy rating on a one to five scale,
I think I would give this a one out of five.
I don’t think you’re gonna be happy with it.
And I don’t want you to be cleaning up blood
along with your barbecue sauce.
I will not be seeing you near my sink anytime soon.
ShamWow.
It’s purpose in life it’s to soak up more liquid
than you can possibly imagine.
Let’s see how effective it is.
According to the infomercials,
ShamWow holds 20 times its weight in liquid.
First thing to do is weigh ShamWow
and it is 90 grams.
Because of that,
it should hold 20 times its weight in water.
That would be 1800 grams of water.
Put it back in the pie plate
and let’s pick it up.
I’m not gonna drain it too much,
back in the bowl and our weight is 814.
Not too sure about that claim.
I wasn’t wowed.
They claim it can soak up an entire pie pan.
Wow. And let’s do it.
It’s holding a lot of liquid,
but I wouldn’t say it’s pie plate full.
Let’s say you’ve been drinking an excessive amount of wine
and
oops you spilled it.
It let’s put sham well to the test.
That worked.
I think the spill is pretty much cleaned up.
See if we could squeeze some back in.
Why waste it?
Wow.
Let’s see how ShamWow compares to using
some plain old paper towels.
I’m even more tipsy.
Oops.
[upbeat music]
In terms of effectiveness, I would give ShamWow
a five outta five.
I think it’s soaked up lots and lots and lots of water.
Although I think they over promised a bit
with 20 times its weight, but still it does what it does.
And I think it’s effective as a soaker.
ShamWow is not gonna work any differently
if I have a slippery non-dominant hand.
So I think for now we’re gonna skip that lefthanded oil test
and just move on to a usability rating.
In terms of usability
on a scale of one to five, I would also give it a five.
There’s nothing surprising about it.
It is what it is.
Okay. Let’s talk about some design improvements for ShamWow.
ShamWow comes in one big sheet.
That’s folded into eight sections.
I think what I would do to improve ShamWow,
is give it one of those little loops
that you have on the rest of your clothing,
because if it’s gonna hold 20 times its weight in water
you’ve gotta dry it somehow.
So you may wanna hang it up.
ShamWow- new and improved.
Wow.
For a by rating for ShamWow let’s go two and a half.
I’m just wondering whether or not you already
have stuff in the house that would suffice.
Am I really wowed?
Probably not.
Although I did say wow a lot.
Suction brush cleaner.
This is designed to stay put while you’re clean the
inside and outside of a glass.
Let’s test its effectiveness.
First the wine glass.
And before cleaning your wine glass
you need to drink the wine.
I keep it bit in and let’s give it a go.
It’s a little more pressure than I feel comfortable with.
I think this glass can take it though.
And I think we’ve got that covered.
And with a coffee cup, the manufacturers do mention
that this is good for coffee cups.
I’m just not buying that claim.
Let’s see how the suction brush cleaner compares
to using a standard old bottle brush.
[upbeat music]
In terms of effectiveness I would give
the suction brush cleaner one out of five.
I’m sorry.
So, let’s test its usability
with a slippery non-dominant hand.
Let’s go down and give it a push.
And I’m not really getting to the sides of the glass
unless I really do some jiggling.
It’s just something that I didn’t notice before,
but I think you would notice,
depending on what’s in the glass that you’re cleaning,
let’s try this glass.
So also is a bit hard to push the bristles are maybe stiffer
than they need to be.
Uh oh! Hey look at that, design defect.
We’ve just lost some points.
Boy, this really fell apart, literally.
On a scale of one to five for usability
it is down to a one.
I have a feeling that people who designed this,
where not lefthanded.
That hurts but that’s what you deserve.
Let’s talk about a redesign.
There’s several things I would consider,
if the side of the sink needs to be dry,
otherwise this is just gonna be slipping all over the place.
The shape of the bristles.
Once they’re in place
and notice they are angled up a little bit,
actually by the time they get down here
they’re actually just horizontal.
First of all, I think this needs to be a little bit longer.
So I would come up here with the bristles and instead
of making this shape of the bristles, a semicircle,
I would come out to the corners.
So make the shape, the, you know, effective shape
of those bristles,
a little more rectangular at the top.
As you try to push the glass in,
you’re really fighting the shape of those bristles.
So I would go horizontal immediately and a lot softer.
The other thing obviously that I would wanna change
is the way this locks together.
So right now this is a screw mechanism.
I would do something to lock this
and I’m not quite sure what.
But I think there needs to be some sort of tab or something
that needs to click into a hole
or something that would stop this from unscrewing itself
when you’re going in the counterclockwise direction.
My buy rating for the suction brush cleaner
on a scale of one to five, is you guessed it one.
I don’t think it’s ready for the real world.
It would be a better idea to wait for generation two.
Whisk Wiper.
Its purpose in life is to wipe your whisk.
Obviously,
a whisk can be used for many things in the kitchen.
Today we are going to be making cake.
Let’s see how effective it is.
A very important first step is to place this piece first,
otherwise you’re gonna be in some trouble.
So let’s push this on.
I am going to pour and whisk at the same time.
We are a little bit gooey on the whisk.
If I pull this off what I expect to happen
would be a super clean whisk.
It’s taking a little bit of work to do it,
taking a little bit of pressure and it it’s pretty clean.
I would still need to run that under the sink.
You could use this to scrape the batter into the pan.
I’m pretty underwhelmed right now.
This has not whisked me away.
So the cake is baked and frosted
and let’s see how the cake turned out.
Excellent whisking on this one.
Let’s see how the whisk wiper compares
to using a standard whisk and a plain old scraper.
[upbeat music]
Let’s see how the whisk wiper cake taste compared
to this one made with a regular old whisk
and a spatula you may already have in your kitchen.
I knew it was gonna taste the same,
I just wanted to eat more cake.
In terms of effectiveness, on a scale of one to five,
I would give the whisk wiper whisk a one.
It didn’t clean the whisk any better.
Even if it cleaned this whisk completely,
who’s gonna clean this?
You’re gonna need a whisk wiper wiper.
Let’s test its usability.
It is time for the left handed oil test.
As usual, I’m gonna oil up both hands.
This takes a little bit of force.
It’s a little-
It’s a little tougher than you may think,
up here actually all the way down.
It’s same amount of force.
And I’m going to whisk with my left hand.
I’ve got a slippery hand and a shiny round object
which just doesn’t wanna be in control it all.
It just wants to slip right outta my hands.
The whisk wiper takes the most force.
I’m gonna hold the whisk with my right hand
and move the wiper and takes a little bit
of work to do that.
Have a bunch of batter on the whisk wiper itself.
And it still is a little bit messy.
So it doesn’t do a perfect job of cleaning completely.
This still needs to end up under the sink.
And see, because this is so round,
and the diameter is not big enough and there’s no flat area.
I am really not cleaning out this bowl.
I think at this point I would go find a standard spatula.
My hands are a mess.
And so is the table a bit.
For usability I would give it a two out of five.
It wasn’t that easy to handle.
Even the cake couldn’t convince me.
Let’s talk about a redesign.
And I think there are a couple of opportunities here
to improve this.
I would give this, let’s just for a quick answer,
let’s give it like a bowling pin shape,
sort of a bowling pin shape,
like a little bit of a belly down here
that would allow you to get your fingers around this
but also get a palm underneath if you need it.
I would also look in cross section as to whether
this cross section of the handle should be round
or itself be a bit of an oval.
Ovals can be easier to spin in your hand
assuming you need to spin it.
For this piece itself I think there’s a lot of opportunity
to make this easier to handle and maneuver.
Don’t wanna make it too big.
But I think this needs to come out
as more of something that you can grab
because it does take some force to push it in
and it takes some force to pull it out.
And I think it needs some shape to it like a thumb indent.
I would consider doing something like that
so that it rises up a bit, gives it a little bit of a fin.
Something to grab onto, the bottom can still be flat
because that is gonna end up being the scraper.
And then from this angle, I would flatten the side.
I would really make this a more flexible silicone rubber
but give it a flat surface that will conform to a bowl.
So you can much more effectively scrape the bowl.
In terms of a buy rating, on a scale of one to five,
I would give this a one.
I don’t think you need it.
I think you’re just asking for actually
more work than less work.
You didn’t help me get up to my cake any faster.
You actually slowed me up a little bit.
You have got to go.
So I’ve gotta say here’s a quick summary.
I wasn’t that jazzed with what we saw today
with these cleaning products.
I think maybe the best of the bunch may be ShamWow,
but you may already have some things
in your kitchen that are gonna replace
or to do just as well.
Again, sometimes the people who design these things
don’t really cook or spend any time at all in the kitchen.
If you are on dish duty, you may not wanna buy any of these.
