My Smart Home: I took a punt on some Amazon kitchen tech from brands I’d never heard of
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My dream toaster was £449. My actual budget sent me down an Amazon rabbit hole, where unfamiliar brands delivered some surprisingly satisfying kitchen upgrades.
You can tell you're getting on a bit when you get excited about buying a new toaster. But I've just splurged £50 on what should be one of the more mundane household appliances - with a real tech twist.
Because I should probably have more hobbies, I put a lot of thought into my bread-baking investment. It needed to accommodate four slices, it had to be nice to look at, and I wanted one with a countdown timer. Bonus points for a digital display of some sort.
In an ideal world, I'd have been buying the Balmuda toaster. It doesn't have any of those attributes but, I'm told, it makes the most amazing toast using a trick steaming system. However, despite repeated appeals to their better nature, the Lottery gods didn't smile on me and the £449 I'd need to buy one never appeared in my disposable income pot.
I flirted with the idea of a Ninja Foodi 3-in-1 Toaster, Grill & Panini Press, which did tick a lot of my boxes and I'm a fan of the brand, but I just couldn't bring myself to spend £119.99 on a two-slice toaster - regardless of all the other things it could do.
So I did what many of us do in my dilemma and browsed the bargains on Amazon. It quickly got a bit bewildering.
To cut a long story short, without spending much more than £50, I could buy the toaster of my dreams, as long as I could cope with a brand I'd never heard of before.
And, after much to-ing and fro-ing I settled on an Olvy 4 Slice Toaster with LCD Display & Countdown Timer – Extra Wide Slots for Thick Bread – 6 Browning Levels, Defrost & Reheat – 1500W. In black.
No, I have no idea who Olvy is either, but the toaster arrived swiftly and it's absolutely brilliant. It cost £50.99 which isn't exactly cheap, but it has a posh colour touch-screen, countless settings, and you can just tell it how brown you like your toast and let it get on with it.
This setting's a bit of a gimmick, truth be told, because it's just a preset for the timer, but I like it and it looks awesome. It's a tech-lover's dream.
In fact, I liked it so much, I bought my wife the Olvy egg cooker, because hers was on the brink of a fiery death, and it looks like a perfect pairing alongside the toaster. Not cheap at £29.99, but I just can't resist the colour touch-panel.
I'm often reminded just how well you can do buying unknown brands on Amazon, as long as you carefully read the reviews and go in with your eyes open.
With this in mind, I turned my attention to the horrible old tap we'd been suffering since we moved in to our new house. Amazon, once again, came up with the goods.
My wife and I are now the proud owner of a "Mynaiad" mixer tap with a pull-out sprayer and - the best thing I've ever seen on a kitchen tap - a glass rinser.
Fitting it was a faff, but in the end I only needed to change clothes twice, and I just can't believe the quality of this superb kitchen accessory.
It's so nicely made, everything is beautifully weighted, and if you've never had a glass rinser in your life, I guarantee my life is now better than yours. I use it all the time.
It's currently listed at £64.99, which is a decent price, but I managed to catch it on a short-lived deal for £50.99. And that's an absolute bargain.
It's going to take some time to recover from the financial shock of kitting out my kitchen with posh tech, so I now can't afford to buy anything to put on my toast, let alone the bread to put in the toaster, but at least my gadget kitchen is finally shaping up. I'm getting there, room by room.