I've always found brushing my teeth to be an extremely loathsome task. Ever since I was a small child, I struggled to find the motivation to stand there for multiple minutes, frantically scrubbing away at a part of my body that I quite frankly care very little about. In spite of this, I'm very lucky in the fact that I have never had a cavity or needing a filling - the dentist just always tells me to "brush more thoroughly".  I think this astonishingly clean (possibly a poor choice of word there) record - or perhaps the amount my dentist annoyed me - demotivated me even further.

However, this all changed this last Christmas day, when my wonderful father bestowed upon me the greatest of gifts: an electric toothbrush. To be honest, it was on offer at the dentists, so he bought one for every member of his family, but I appreciated it none-the-less. Here it (she? Is she weird here? Probably.) is, in its (her?) very neat charging dock:

Toothbrush

It comes with three different heads, and moves at two different speeds. All the bells and whistles, then.

This device has revolutionised my dental hygiene. At first it was just the pure novelty of the thing - it moves! It buzzes! It even times two minutes for you so you don't even have to think!

But now, it's just makes me happy because it's easy. I don't have to frantically scrub any more. Just a gentle movement across my teeth, and she (yes, I'm going for she) does the rest of the work. It saves so much energy!

But how much? How much energy does an electric toothbrush save per year?

  • Based on my weight of 11 and a bit stone, I burn 6 calories when brushing my teeth at full throttle for 2 minutes. Wow.
  • Doing nothing burns about 2 calories in 2 minutes. An electric toothbrush is so easy that it's basically like doing nothing, so we'll go with that.
  • Based on brushing your teeth twice a day for a year, this is a total saving of 2920 calories a year!

That's quite a lot, around a day's recommended food consumption for the average person. That's also 14.24 Tesco Jam Doughnuts (other supermarkets are available), which would cost about £1.85 at the time of writing (less if you take advantage of the 2 for £1 offer, but I want to make this look impressive).

So there we have it. Buy an electric toothbrush, and save £1.85 a year! Sounds good to me.