Kitchen gadgets worth buying vs. a waste of money: our 30-day counter test

For 19 years I drove a van full of spare parts to people's kitchens. And in almost every one of those kitchens there was a drawer. You know the drawer. It sticks a little when you open it, and inside there's a garlic press, a melon baller, two corkscrews and something with a crank that nobody can name anymore.

Customers used to apologize for it. "I don't know why I bought that." I never judged, because I had one too. Mine had a quesadilla maker in it for six years.

So when I started testing appliances for this site instead of fixing them, I wanted to answer the drawer question properly. On May 4 my wife Carol and I put eleven popular kitchen gadgets on our counter. No scores on day one, because day one lies. Just a tally sheet taped to the fridge and a simple rule: a mark only counts if you reached for the gadget because you needed it, not because I was testing it. On June 4 we counted.

The eleven gadgets on the counter

We picked the things people actually buy, the ones that show up in gift guides, viral videos and "you need this" lists. All of them were bought at normal retail prices, and all of them are still on sale as I write this:

• An instant-read thermometer (ThermoWorks ThermoPop 2, about $35)
• A stick blender (a Braun MultiQuick, around $70 to $100 depending on the kit)
• A salad spinner (OXO Good Grips, about $30)
• An electric egg cooker (Dash Rapid Egg Cooker, about $20)
• A four-blade crank spiralizer, a mini waffle maker, an electric can opener
• A handheld milk frother, a pair of battery salt and pepper grinders with lights
• A 3-in-1 avocado tool and a herb stripper

Total spent: $288. Carol said that was a lot of money for an experiment. I said it was cheaper than her sister's air fryer that lives in the garage. We agreed to see who was right in a month.

Week one: the honeymoon

Every new gadget gets a honeymoon, and ours was a loud one. We spiralized zucchini twice. We made mini waffles on a Tuesday night for no reason. The grinders lit up blue every time Carol tipped them, and she tipped them a lot, sometimes over food that already had pepper on it.

By Sunday the tally sheet had 64 marks. I'd seen this in customers' kitchens for years, so it didn't impress me. The first week tells you which gadget is fun. It doesn't tell you which one will survive a Wednesday when you're tired and the sink is full.

That Wednesday showed up in week two.

Week two: the drawer opens

The spiralizer went first. It works fine, I want to be fair. But it has four blades, a suction base, a crank and a spike that holds the vegetable, and every piece needs a brush to get the zucchini strings out. The second zucchini night took 6 minutes to spiralize and 11 minutes to clean. Carol looked at the sink and said "never again." It never came out again.

"If I spend longer washing it than using it, it's out." Carol, day 11, holding the spiralizer blade like evidence

The avocado tool and the herb stripper followed. Both do one small job that a knife already does in about four seconds. And they both live in a drawer, which means they're never in your hand at the moment you need them. By Friday I was reaching past them for my paring knife without even thinking. Avocado also loves to dry into the little wire slicer, so if you don't rinse it right away you're scrubbing green cement.

The mini waffle maker lasted longer, mainly thanks to our granddaughter Maddie, who visited for a weekend and ate nine waffles shaped like a coaster. After she left, it went into the cupboard above the fridge, next to the slow cooker. In my experience, once a gadget needs a step stool, it's finished. Then, in week three, something actually broke.

Week three: the repair tech opens one up

On day 19 the handheld milk frother stopped spinning. It didn't slow down first, it just quit mid-latte. Old habits kicked in and it ended up on my workbench with the battery cover off and a precision screwdriver in my hand.

I found exactly what I expected. A tiny DC motor, a thin metal shaft to the whisk, and no rubber seal where the shaft leaves the body. Every time you rinse the whisk under the tap, a little water runs down the shaft and into the motor. Nineteen days of cappuccinos and the front bearing was rusty and gritty. The motor wasn't bad. The design let water in.

This was the most common failure I saw in small kitchen appliances, by a long way. Hand blenders, frothers, cheap juicers, electric whisks. The good news is it takes ten seconds to check before you buy, even in the store.

The electric can opener didn't break, it just lost. It needed two hands to line up the can, it stalled on wide cans of tomatoes and it was slower than the $12 manual opener in our drawer. The glowing grinders went quiet too, once Carol noticed they had eaten a full set of AAA batteries in 16 days. Nobody wants to buy batteries for pepper. So by the last week, the counter had a lot more room on it.

The tally sheet after 30 days

Here's the honest count. Week one is the honeymoon, week four is real life. The column I'd look at is the change between the two.

Look at the four winners. Their numbers went up in week four, not down. That's the one signal I trust now. A gadget that earns its place gets used more once you learn its tricks. A gadget that's just fun gets used less every week until it disappears. Of the $288 we spent, $164 went on things we use and $124 on things we don't.

So what did the four keepers have in common? It wasn't price, and it wasn't features.

The four we kept, and why they won

The instant-read thermometer was the quiet champion. The ThermoPop 2 reads in about 2 to 3 seconds, lives in the drawer next to the stove and ended the "is the chicken done?" debate in our house for good. Nine uses in the last week, including a pork tenderloin I would have overcooked by at least 8 degrees going by feel. If you cook meat more than twice a week, the Thermapen ONE (around $109) is faster and sturdier, but the $35 one does 90 percent of the job.

The stick blender replaced our big blender for soups, sauces and Carol's morning smoothies. The blade shaft clicks off and goes in the dishwasher, and yes, I checked: the shaft has a proper seal. One pot, one shaft, done. Our countertop blender has been in the pantry since week two, which Carol calls "the blender's retirement."

The salad spinner is the most boring thing on this list and we used it five times a week. Dry lettuce means dressing that sticks instead of pooling at the bottom of the bowl. It also dries herbs, washed berries and, once, a pair of Maddie's doll clothes. Three pieces to wash, all dishwasher-safe.

The egg cooker was my surprise. I expected to hate a $20 plastic dome. But it makes up to six eggs exactly the way you like while you do something else, it shuts off by itself and buzzes. Carol now makes a week of hard-boiled eggs on Sunday in 14 minutes with zero pot to scrub. The only catch: you have to poke a hole in each egg with the pin in the measuring cup, and you will poke your finger once. I did.

Here's the pattern. All four save real time on something we do several times a week. All four have three or fewer parts to clean. And all four live somewhere we reach every day. That turned into a checklist.

A repair tech's checklist before you buy any gadget

A month of tally marks, plus 19 years of house calls, boiled down to five questions. They would have saved us $124 on this batch alone.

1. Does a knife, a pot or a fork already do this in under ten seconds? If yes, skip it. That rules out most avocado, herb, banana and strawberry tools.
2. How many pieces will you wash? One to three is fine. Four or more and it had better do something you can't do any other way.
3. Where will it live? Name the exact spot before you buy. If the answer is "the cupboard above the fridge," don't.
4. Is there a seal where the moving part meets the body? For anything with a motor that touches food or water, this decides whether it lasts a month or five years.
5. What does it run on? Replaceable AA or AAA batteries add a running cost and a chore. USB-C rechargeable or a cord is better for anything you use daily.

That's the same attitude we bring to every product on our test bench: weeks of real use before a verdict, never a first impression. It's all laid out on our how we test page. And the checklist also answers a few gadgets we didn't put on the counter this time.

What about the gadgets everyone asks about?

Readers keep sending me the same three questions, so here's the repairman's short answer on each.

Air fryers are the exception that proves the rule. They're big, but people who own one tend to use it several times a week, and that week-four number is what counts. The part that wears out is the nonstick coating on the basket, usually because someone scrubbed it with steel wool. Use a soft sponge and it lasts.

Bread machines were the gadget I saw most often in the back of pantries. When they did break, it was usually the drive belt or the seal under the paddle, both cheap to fix. Most people just stopped baking after the first month.

Garlic presses split people down the middle. A good heavy one works and goes in the dishwasher. A cheap one bends, wastes half the clove and needs a toothpick to clean. If you already hate mincing, buy a sturdy one. If you don't mind a knife, skip it.

Our full scores on the gadgets that do earn a spot, with every con we found, are in our reviews. And that leaves only one thing to settle: the bet with Carol.

So who won the bet?

Carol did, sort of. She said half of it would be wasted money, and it was, almost to the dollar. I said a good gadget pays for itself, and the four keepers did. We called it a draw and took the donation box to the thrift store together.

The drawer is thinner now. The avocado tool is still in it, because Carol thinks it's cute. Some fights you let go.

If you're shopping for your bedroom next rather than your kitchen, my colleague Rhonda ran the same kind of long, honest test on cooling pillows and bedroom tricks over 45 hot nights. Her notes on why heat wakes you at 3 a.m. are worth a read before you buy anything that promises to "stay cold all night."

Questions readers asked us