Every home needs a plug-in portable heater for when a little extra heat is needed in a room – or when a cold room needs quickly bringing up to a decent heat before the central heating can warm it up. Many people are justly worried about the cost of electricity and the impact using a portable heater will have on winter fuel bills – and rightly so – these kinds of heaters were never designed for a main source of heat. However, if you live alone and only live in one room at a time when not using the central heating and using a portable heating to heat the room you are in, may well be much more energy saving. Some portable heaters will quickly bring a room up to a pre-determined heat and then switch off until the temperature drops below that level again. It is better to get a 2KW heater at least – it has to be powerful enough to heat the room quickly, and make sure it has a thermostat so that it can maintain the room at the ideal temperature. This is obviously much easier if the room is well insulated and has double glazing.

There are many portable heaters available – small portable electric fan heaters from around £15 and of different styles.  Ceramic Heaters such as the  De’Longhi TCH7592ER – which is a stylish tower heater which can be set to oscillate is around £70 though an attractive traditional retro heater from the same company is cheaper at around £50. Just launched is the Dyson Hot fan Heater – typical of Dyson’s innovative technology it is, however, more costly at over £250.

OK So the Secateurs may be more for the garden – but many of us also keep our tools in the garage. Clever technology? There is so much clever technology in the design of Secateurs you never even knew about.

There are two major types of secateurs: Bypass Secateurs that work with the two blades coming together like a pair of scissors. Good for cutting delicate stems without mangling them. Then there are Anvil Secateurs which consist of one blade closing on a flat surface which are good for cutting woody stems.

Further types are as follows;

Ratchet secateurs

Good for feeble wristed people like myself these require little force because the clever ratchet mechanism allows build up of pressure by squeezing together and releasing the handles until the blades cut through the stem. These are a type of anvil secateurs.

Secateurs are made in different sizes with different types of grip. Slightly padded rubber grips prevent blistering if you are having a summer rose –fest or autumn cut-down, and though it might be sense to pick a smaller secateurs for a smaller hand, smaller secateurs are not as powerful. So that is when you might choose

Battery powered pruners (such as Bosch Ciso battery powered pruners from around £45)

Although the handle of battery-powered pruners holds a battery as well as a motor they are still quite light and easy to use. Great for pruning the roses and more and good for one-handed pruning or for those with a weak grip.

There are two major types of technology that are used for lawnmowers: cylinder mowers and rotary mowers. Grasscutting purists (like greenkeepers and lawn specialists) will always say that cylinder mowers are the most superior because of the finish they leave.

The cylinder mower consists of a cylinder with offset sharpened blades rotating to cut the grass when the mower moves forward. They cut the grass against a fixed bar set parallel to the ground. The blades can be adjusted to alter the cutting height. Cylinder mowers are not suitable for long grass where the lawns are only cut infrequently or bumpy lawns.

Push mowers: Low tech and the most environmentally friendly option, is the non-powered push mower. Though the “pusher” uses energy (and builds muscle) there is no CO2 produced, and are excellent and easy to use  for small lawns as they need no plugging in or filling up with petrol.

Rotary mowers are always powered and use a petrol engine of electric motor on top of the rotary blade housing. Rotary machines have a spinning blade held horizontally above the ground and the blade therefore “skims” the top off the grass to cut it. They do not give as good a finish as cylinder mowers/

Lawnmowers can be powered by 2 stroke or 3 stroke petrol engines or electricity though mains powered motors are limited by the cord and rotary mowers run by electricity have little torque for longer grass.

It’s not always easy to see why you would invest in a rather expensive steam generator iron when you can buy a much cheaper ordinary steam iron. Only those in revel in long and fraught ironing sessions where you struggle with crumpled stuff trying to get the creases out realise what a boon they can be. For those large numbers of us who love real cotton sheets ironing with an ordinary iron becomes a martyr’s task.

Steam sinks into the outside of the fabric being ironed allowing the creases to stretch and become flattened. The steam generator iron actually has a separate boiler producing pressurised steam, which when it is switched on is forced into the iron and thus penetrating much deeper into the fabric giving a better, quicker result. If you fold your sheet into 8 layers the steam will usually penetrate through all the layers (it does for me) so speeding up a task of drudgery. This super extra pressurised steam is reckoned to halve ironing time of an ordinary iron. The iron’s water reservoir is usually pretty large, but if you have a big family and a lot or ironing look for the largest as it is a pain to have to refill before you have finished.

There are a number of manufacturers making steam generator irons including the excellent Philips Steam Generator GC8323 at £185 (though there are less expensive models) and Morphy Richards Steam generator at around the same price with a number of more reasonable models.

The terms “Active and Passive refer to the kind of 2D glasses needed to view images in 3D on 3D TV sets. When 3D TV came on the market in 2010 TV sets were using active technology whilst passive technology came on the scene in 2011.

To see a 3D image in a flat 2D screen the human eyes have to be shown slightly different images to fool the brain into seeing depth. This is achieved by wearing glasses that do this (though not needed for the smaller screens of Nintendo 3DS). Active (shutter) glasses consist of small LCD screens that dim the left and then right “lenses” successively. This is controlled by an infrared signal emitted by the TV so each eye can then see the correct image. Active glasses are made of complicated electronics and are pretty expensive, and run on batteries and do tend to be heavy. On the other hand Passive Glasses are most like a pair of specially made polarised sunglasses. However, they differ from sunglasses (which are designed to block light to both eyes in the same was) in that polarised 3D glasses differentially block different kinds of light fractions from each eye. This then creates the depth illusion. This set up means that expensive electronics in the glasses are not needed and the TV set does not need an infrared emitter to make them work. This is why the glasses are cheaper, and are often given free with the sets.

However, the glasses are not chosen separately – there are sets that work with passive technology and those that work with active. The viewing experience is different and individuals will need to try each kind to know which is best for them.