Product Reviews for the Winter Blues

Perk up the season with some essential stuff

by Mercia Tapping, President, AllergyBuyersClub.com

Have you been contending with the influx of muddy footprints, salt, snow from the outside? I have been aghast at the continuing winter trampling of my entry way in my house. I also have discovered that my cleaning lady now short-cuts the cleaning of my countertops because granite in my new kitchen hides the dirt. However, Ms. Neat and Clean over here runs her hand over the counter and says ugh! I also am gearing up to take some indoor photography in my house this Spring of some of our healthy home products and have mandated that window washing the inside windows is now a top priority.

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One of my cats now deposits himself on top of my new smooth stove top much to my horror. I understand why it is toasty warm at times but even I as a cat lover, I draw the line there. Fortunately, steam cleaning with a vapor steam cleaner such as the WhiteWing or Ladybug is a fast, ready and effective answer to these problems and it smells so good afterwards which helps with that stuffy, stale odor of winter.

Best humidifier - the Air-O-Swiss. As the winter progresses I have to say that I like the Air-O-Swiss more and more as a humidifier and will soon get around to moving it up to a five star rating.

The reason that I like it so much is that is does the job remarkably fast and when I want to sleep at night and the humidity registers 22% and my husband is fast behind me with a propensity to snore then that machine can bring the humidity to required levels up in no time flat. It also is silent and I have found that my tried and true Hamilton Beach Trueair humidifier which has given me several years of faithful service for an amazingly low price ($69.95) has started to sound just a tad noisier so that is my excuse for raiding our samples room at work. The Air-O-Swiss humidifier is priced at $135 and very easy to maintain and keep clean.

Our technical guru was doing some off-the-cuff training to a visiting manufacturer about furnace filters and raving about the superior filtration without excessive air flow reduction of the EnviroSept furnace filters. He said our tests gave it an efficiency of about 90%, which is far better than usual for products of this kind. However the bargain of the category belongs to the BoAir furnace filter priced at $79.95 and little impedance of air flow requires no replacement filters and will last for years.

I was asked the other day by a customer interested in a puffy comforter, "What is the best down comforter you have that is also very comfortable?" He was deciding between a Siberian Opulence and a Hypodown Empress. His complaint about comforters he had bought for a couple of hundred dollars over recent years is that the fill shifted around and he had bare spots. He also was having a hard time figuring out how to buy a duvet cover which actually fitted unless he went with a custom made cover. He hated having excess inches of duvet dripping around his comforter.

Here was my advice to him. If he wanted to solve the issue of the duvet and comforter being right sized for each other he could find the duvet first then since the Siberian Opulence is a custom order we could make it any size he liked. I recommend an extra couple of inches all around so that the comforter still has enough room to fluff up. I always tell people to spend their money on the fill power, in general the higher the better but the Siberian at 700 fill is lighter than the Hypodown at 800 fill because they come from different birds. All geese as I have said before are not made equal. He was most of all concerned about his problem with shifting and I told him that a baffle box design was the most robust and if he wanted to extend the life of his comforter he should keep it clean with a duvet cover and have it professionally cleaned at a specialty cleaner. The Empress is a very "puffy" design which is what he wanted and the high thread count of the covering minimizes little bits of down poking their heads through in years to come. Siberian Opulence comforter starts at $1059.95 and the Empress starts at $829.

A nice little vacuum cleaner you might have missed is the Eureka Sanitaire SC3686 vacuum with an optional turbo head which is both lightweight, easy to use and the price is right. I would not recommend this as the household primary vacuum cleaner but for lighter usage in smaller spaces it does a credible job. Apparently the average household has 1. 5 vacuum cleaners in the United States which says like cars we collect vacuum cleaners. Come to think of it, I own three myself if you include the hand held DirtTamer, contributing to pushing up the national average.

First Published: February, 2005
Updated: February 2007

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