Vacuuming Tight Spaces, Cheap Deodorant, and Airline Fares

Readers offer their best tips for vacuuming, getting deodorant for half the price, and holding your airline tickets for 48 hours before you buy.

Every day we receive boatloads of great reader tips in our inbox, but for various reasons?maybe they're a bit too niche, maybe we couldn't find a good way to present it, or maybe we just couldn't fit it in?the tip didn't make the front page. From the Tips Box is where we round up some of our favorites for your buffet-style consumption. Got a tip of your own to share? Add it in the comments, email it to tips at lifehacker.com, or share it on our tips and expert pages.

Vacuum Tight Spaces with a Knife Sheath

Matt gets his vacuum to fit into small places with a simple tool:

Lint gathers in my dryer and the vents are too small for a standard attachment to fit through. I was cutting up some boxes recently and a light bulb went off in my head. [I used] a standard cleaning attachment that came with the vacuum and my box knife. The box knife has a thin sheath and my idea was to tape the sheath to the attachment. Voil?!

It's a bit hard to understand in one picture, so check out Matt's full blog post for more info.

Buy Quality Deodorant for Cheap by Avoiding the "Clinical" Label

Justagigilo85 finds a way to get his deodorant on the cheap:

The active ingredient in "clinical" (read: much more expensive) antiperspirant is aluminum zirconium tetrachlorohydrex gly at 20% strength. Similar non-"clinical" antiperspirants have this same ingredient at 19% and are half the price.

If you're sick of paying close to $10 for each stick of antiperspirant, try switching to something like Mitchum Advanced Control Antiperspirant. It costs about $3.5-$4 and has the same exact active ingredient and at the same strength. The Mitchum antiperspirant is the only one I've found in the northeast that has the same ingredient at the same strength. If anyone found another brand, please chime in!

As with lots of products, the key is to look at the active ingredients. Some cheap deodorants will have closer to 15% or even 8% of the active ingredient, but some might be closer to 19% or 20% at half the price. And, as always, some of the more expensive brands may have other ingredients that help stop perspiration, so don't write them off right away. Really, this really comes down to "do your homework." Photo by Rich Anderson.

Lock In Your Airfare for 48 Hours with Simple Tricks

Erica shares a way to keep that great airline price for a few days before you buy:

Almost all of the major U.S. airlines will allow you a full refund for 24 hours after you buy the ticket. . .The initial 24-hour grace period buys you about a whole day to take care of reservations, but you can buy up to almost an extra 24 hours on American and United if you play it right ? and without plunking down your credit card information.

American offers a free 24-hour hold when you're making your reservation on top of that. Once you finish making your itinerary, the payment page will offer you a chance to pay by credit card or put it on hold.

[On United], go through the normal online reservation process until you reach the payment page. Once you're there, select the right-hand most option "Cash" and select to pay at an "Airport Ticket Office." The website will then hold the flight until midnight the next day (with some good timing, you may even get 47 hours and 59 minutes!).

For more details and screenshots on how to go through the process, you can check out the original blog post on Map Happy.

Secure Loose Cables with Paper Clips

Javip shares yet another way to keep your cables in order:

I have a mess of cables under my desk (working for a startup)?basically the cables run the perimeter of the room. At some points they're secured with zip ties, but not under my desk. Before I just pulled them taut under my desk and carried on, but then on the weekends our cleaner would knock them loose. I then secured them with tape and the same thing.

Today, I secured them with cheap, colored paperclips. I just straightened the clip and wrapped it right around; because the paperclips are cheap and coated in plastic, they were easy to bend, too, and the fact they're colorful and bright make them look pretty neat.

This is useful if you have a lot of paper clips and don't have any zip ties leftover, I suppose. Don't forget that you can reuse many kinds of zip ties! Photo by Neil Turner.

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/JktFNDc9JgI/vacuuming-tight-spaces-cheap-deodorant-and-airline-fares

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