Do you ever do experiments at home?

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Have you ever tested out some idea experimentally? Maybe you were told something or read about something and thought ‘Is that really true?’ and decided to test it out? I do every now and then when I really want to find out something. For example, some years ago water levels were running low and there was a big campaign by the water companies to get people to save water. One thing they really latched onto was persuading people to have showers instead of baths. Apparently this would save loads of water. The propaganda were everywhere. It was repeated on TV, posters were put up, adverts on the sides of buses… I wondered if it was really true because it didn’t seem likely to me. It was very easy to test though because we had a shower over the bath. All I had to do was put the plug in while I had a shower and I could soon see that it used far more water than a quick swish in the bath would have done. And yet the same message was promoted for years, until finally a couple of years ago they amended it to say that a 4-minute shower used less water than a bath. That’s quite a different scenario! A while ago I saw a Moroccan tagine cooking pot in a charity shop. I had fancied one for ages, and cookbooks always say that to make a proper tagine you have to use the real pot, but they are expensive to buy. So I bought this and decided to test it out. When I had friends coming round I prepared two batches of a lamb tagine recipe, both exactly the same. Then I cooked one in the ‘proper’ pot and the other in an ordinary earthenware casserole, and asked the consumers which they preferred. No-one could tell any difference between them (both delicious!) The genuine tagine looked very attractive on the table, but was a total pain to store in the cupboard, so back to the charity shop it went for someone else to try out; I decided I would be satisfied with a more space-saving and multi-purpose dish. Now I’m curious about drying laundry. My partner has what I consider an odd way of hanging things up to dry, especially towels, which he is convinced results in them drying faster. I think I am going to have to test this out! The snag is that I don’t have any two towels that are exactly the same, so I will probably have to buy two or three new towels just for the experiment. Then how would I ensure they are both equally damp? My best idea is to weigh them both, then weigh out a precise quantity of water, say 100 mL (which would weigh 100 g) and use that to wet them. I would have to somehow make sure they were both evenly damp, with no wet or dry patches. Then hang them up at the same time under the same conditions but in different ways, and after a set period, maybe half an hour, depending on how damp they were at the start, weigh each one again and see which has lost the most water. I wonder if he’s right? All rights reserved. © Text copyright Fleur 2026.