What domestic appliances or other electrical items do you remember growing up?

[TheTecknician]

1970s. We had a Hoover Keymatic washing machine, a Hoover Senior vacuum cleaner and a Colston dishwasher. All three items must have been well built; there were nine of us in our house and all these were used daily without fail for at least a decade. The washing machine did up to three washes a day, the vac had a big house to do (the lamp on the front never worked) and the dishwasher was small enough to fit on the kitchen worktop. Tough stuff.

We also had an ITT-KB colour television and a Garrard Elizabethan record player. I have one of the latter which I've been meaning to have professionally restored for years!

I remember the Kenwood Chef being de rigeur for middle class kitchens in the 1980s, or at least something to aspire to.

Our original land-line telephone was a green GPO type 706 with a rotary dial. When it gave up after at least a decade BT replaced it with a slightly more modern type 746 in ivory.

Oooooh, I love threads like these! I'm nearly always reminded of something I'd forgotten about - or that other people had and I desperately wanted.

We had the twin tub out in the garage. I remember that my Mother hated it and would often go to the launderette rather than use it. We also had a manual mangle in the garden! I'm only in my mid-50s too.

The hoover was a monster. It was ex-hotel equipment and weighed more than a few small children. It lit up at the front which I think was supposed to distract you from the fact it had almost no cleaning power. Despite that my parents couldn't be parted from it until it actually died and then they got a Dyson and were astonished that it collected so much! They also had a shitty Ewbank, which was probably the most pointless piece of cleaning equipment I've ever come across. If you pushed it more than 4 times over the carpet, it would empty the 10 specs of dirt it had managed to collect all over the carpet again!

Black and white TV from Rumbelows with 4 giant buttons that you had to press very firmly to change the 3 channels that were available. We didn't have colour telly until the late 1970s and nothing that had a remote control until well into the 1980s.

My Mother had an ancient incredibly heavy pink Pifco hairdryer, which was totally shit. It used to gently puff air out and stank of burnt dust. The excitement when we finally got a Braun hairdryer that was capable of drying hair in the early 80s was significant.

Sunbeam mixer that had been a wedding present in the 60s and didn't finally die until the 1990s. My Mother still uses the mixing bowls from it.

We also had some terrifying portable electric bar heaters - only used in the direst of emergencies as they used too much electricity. They were literally naked heated bars that I imagine even in the 70s & 80s were condemned as totally unsafe.

We had a giant 'wireless' in the kitchen. No idea who made it but it was definitely retro, even back then. It took incredibly careful fiddling to pick up anything and woe betide anyone who jiggled it so that it detuned itself from Radio 2, particularly when Terry Wogan was on.

We also had a record player that we were absolutely forbidden to touch so I don't really remember much about it, other than it had a special table that it sat on, which stored records underneath.

Try blowing your curly hair straight with an orange 70s Braun hairdryer- so weak that the hand dryer at the baths did a better job.

For all those Ubank memories I can confirm (from a friend who is a housekeeper at Buck House) that certainly until HMQ died they were in regular use. One person was tasked with discreetly following the Queen all day and nipping into the room she’d just vacated, taking their shoes off, and carpet sweeping the room so that the pile was lifted. When it was my friend’s turn she got caught short as the Queen returned a minute later to make herself a gin and tonic.

Oh, and my grandparents had a bidet. I knew that you were supposed to sit on it, and it had a little fountain, but I never really understood why you would want to use it.

In passing, here are a few mysterious appliances which I have seen in other people's houses, in more recent years.

A huge black metal thing which looks like a medieval torture device; see the picture. I asked them what it was, as I had never seen one before.

A glass toilet cistern, with real fish in it, and when you flushed the toilet, the water level went down. Yes, really! It was carefully designed so that it didn't suck the fish out. I asked if the fish seemed to mind this; they said that the fish had lived longer than any others they had had.

And in my own house, in the bathroom, is a mysterious and ancient-looking device we have not bothered to remove: a wall-mounted fan heater, with bright lights built in. I don't know if it's meant to be used as a room heater, or a hair drier.

We had a rayburn and still had the bells in the kitchens for the various rooms in the house I lived in till I was about 6.

Then moved to a 1930s semi - and had a twin tub and an electric mangle.

I remember mum getting her first steam iron.

And my sister buying a kenwood chef food processor - we ate a lot of coleslaw after that!

And the magic of a toastie maker - that was just insanely good - must have been early 80s.

As a child of the '70s we had the usual array of kitchen appliances, though the large chest freezer that was a staple of many homes is something that seems to have died out. We didn't ever have a microwave, sodastream, sandwich toaster of deep fat fryer. These, I think, were seen as common. We did have a coffee maker though.

On the music front my parents were early-ish adopters of the CD, and by 1984 we had a CD player, I got a Sony Walkman and a 'ghetto blaster' around the same time. But before that a mono cassette player that was subsequently used to load games onto our ZX Spectrum - which arrived in Christmas 1983 from memory. For me and my brothers our 16th birthdays meant the arrival of our own 'midi' stack system - CD player, record deck, cassette player, tuner and the essential graphic equaliser. Wat exactly did that do?

Great excitement when we moved house in 1984/1985 when we went from one landline phone in the corner of the sitting room to several - one in the kitchen on the wall, one in the sitting room and one in the study. Much easier to have conversations with friends without fear of being overhead!! Cordless phones followed, but I can't remember when. Maybe not until the late '80s?

We had a home PC (actually a cast-off IBM PC from work) as well as the Spectrum in the study in 1985, and dad had a car phone in 1986. He still has the same number, with the addition of a few 7s. I went to Uni in 1989 and had an Amstrad PC and Epson dot matrix printer, a 14" colour TV, a VCR, a coffee maker, electric blanket and a Remington hairdryer. Not sure why the electric blanket - my mum must have thought that halls would be cold, as we never had them at home . We always had central heating. As it turned out the heating in my halls was like a furnace and I'd spend much of the winter with the window open trying to get rid of the heat!!

Some time after I left Uni the old Hoover Constellation floating vacuum cleaner that I remember we had had for ever was replaced by a Dyson. Very fancy, though I am not sure it actually hoovered any better...I hated using it on the odd occasion I went home.

To this day my parents don't have a microwave, but as they approach their '80s they are still broadly up to date tech wise. iPhone/iPads, more smart home tech in terms of heating / lighting than I have, and music streaming via Spotify in the house and cars. My dad loves a back-up though, and so as well as a laptop backed up to the cloud and a an SD drive they also have a generator and 5G mobile hotspot for data. None of which has ever been needed. I swear the main reason they still run 2 cars is so that they have a car to take the other one to the main dealer twice a year for a service :)

I was a child in the 60s. I remember a twin tub, a mangle and copper in the scullery, Carmen rollers, a Kenwood mixer.

We also had an Aga and an electric cooker for summer use, there was a fridge with freezer compartment, tv, old fashioned radio and a radiogram that was never used.

I nearly forgot our Kelvinator fridge with a tiny freezer compartment. That ran for years. And a funny looking pop up toaster. Dark greeny turquoise colour, only two slices and wobbly because of a missing foot. Like everything else, used every day and lasted well. Also, a succession of electric kettles from Russell Hobbs, Sona and Haden. My current kettle is a modernised version of the Russell Hobbs classic.😀

We had the shower attachment, with the rubber things which fitted over the bath taps, but it wasn't very effective.
A manual lawn mower, which was eventually replaced with electric.

Hoover keymatic washing machine was the first proper washing machine that mum had, before that she used a copper and mangle.

We had a orange Vax in the 80s which we still use now in the garage and shed

Did anyone have a Hostess Trolley? We didn't!

We had a hostess trolley!
Also when I was very small, a washing machine with a mangle attached above.
That was changed for a twin tub.

I didn't see a dishwasher until I bought my own in my first house

@ACatAsleepInYourHat

I was born in 1965. We were pretty much the same as you except we didn't have a washing machine until 1980 ish. We went to the launderette across the road.
I do remember the arrival of the colour TV in 1977.

We didn't have a hostess trolley, though my Grandma had a tea trolley. I do vaguely remember an electric warming plate thing that was rectangular with a steel top and that would hold a couple of serving dishes. Don't ever remember it being used - I suspect it was a wedding present that got 'lost' when we moved :)

Had a Sinclair ZX81 computer: that was my childhood introduction to coding. I see computers haven't been mentioned very much so far, in the exotic varieties they were in the 80s.

Here's another gadget I remember: a yogurt maker, which was a bit of a miser's dream, in that you could make six plain yogurts from one pot of plain yogurt. You filled six glasses with a spoon of yogurt, topped them up with milk, then put rubber lids on them. They were then heated very slowly overnight. The machine had no timer, but one lid had numbers on it, like a clock, and you put it in so that a number would appear by an arrow that said "ready by". Much cheaper and greener than yogurts in pots.

Yoghurt maker sounds slightly more useless than an ice cream maker!

My Mum had an early Sony boom box, ordered from a catalogue in about 1976. It was badged as a 'cassette-corder', as were all similar Sony models. Only mono but good for its time and could record directly from the radio too! The old Murphy MW/LW wireless was then relegated upstairs.

Yes, my dad used to make yoghurts. They were horrible. I have a memory of all the little lidded glass pots being lined up on the bathroom floor as they "fermented". Which seems most unhygienic, both from not being in a fridge and for being in the bathroom...guess they had lids on though

It wasn't our machine but we would occasionally hire a carpet shampooer from the local dry cleaner (Burwell, if anyone remembers them). It honestly looked like a cross between our Hoover Senior vac and the chair at our old dentist. Great big scary looking machine that might have been good at cleaning carpets. It wasn't pretty though!

Orange vax!

I have very fond memories of my mums Kenwood Chef. She got as a wedding present in the early 80s (from my grandmother) It made cakes weekly throughout my childhood. My grandmother lived using it when she visited.
When she retired not long before I got married, she got a Kenwood Major.. and I got the old Chef.
I taught my DDs to make cakes with it. It was 30 years old when it went with a bang in one of those baking sessions.

My mum got me my own for Christmas that year.
Now my teenagers regularly make cakes with it.

Generations of happy bakers.

Not an appliance but did everyone's dad keep screws, nails etc in old baby formula tins?

We had a word processor and a fax machine, as DM and DF ran a business from home in the 80s. Prior to the word processor DM had a manual type writer and now in her late 80s correctly places her hands on the home keys when using a computer keyboard. She also still uses shorthand when taking messages.

The pop-up phone index, does anyone remember those? Some designs had a dial on the front, with letters in the holes, so you turned it to the first letter of the person you wanted, then opened it, and it would open at the right page.