The Summer Home Buys Genuinely Worth It This Year (And A Dyson Alternative You Need To Know About)

The Summer Home Buys Genuinely Worth It This Year (Including a Dyson Alternative)

Every spring, around the first proper warm weekend of the year, I do the same thing. I drag the same tired, ugly plastic fan out of the cupboard, plug it into the same socket behind the sofa, and remember instantly why I’d sworn last August I’d replace it before summer rolled around again this year. Like a lot of you, I went straight to tiktok to see what was trending. While I was at it, I went down a small rabbit hole of what’s genuinely worth buying for the house in 2026. The kind of things that make the hotter months in the UK that little bit more bearable. Here are my top finds that I think you should consider.

1. A Countertop Ice Maker

Funnily enough, I’m writing this on a bank holiday, the sun is shining and a few of my friends are coming over for a BBQ tomorrow. I’m sure you can relate, a few people in the kitchen, every glass needs ice, and the freezer tray has produced exactly four cubes and a smell you can’t identify. A countertop ice maker sounds like a faintly ridiculous appliance until you actually own one, and then you wonder how you spent every summer without it.

The ones I’ve been looking at sit on the worktop, run on a normal plug, and produce a fresh batch of bullet-shaped ice every ten minutes or so. Mine is on the list for this month. The kids have already worked out that “helping with the ice” is a job they can volunteer for, which I am choosing to interpret as character building.

2. A Proper Cold Press Juicer

I’m guilty of thinking that a cold press juicer is just some faddy thing that would live in the cupboard after three weeks. Then a friend lent me hers for a long weekend and I’ve been quietly obsessed since. Real cold-pressed juice tastes nothing like the cartons. It also goes through the absolute mountain of slightly-too-soft fruit that builds up in the bowl by Sunday, which is a small win I hadn’t factored in.

The newer models are also a fraction of the size of the chunky ones from a few years ago, which matters when your kitchen side is already hosting a kettle, a toaster, and roughly forty children’s water bottles.

3. The Affordable Dyson Fan Alternative That I Keep Seeing Everywhere

This is the one I was the most excited to share with you all, because I cannot scroll through Instagram for more than about ten minutes without seeing someone showing it off.

I’d been Googling “quiet bladeless fan”. Every search led me back to one obvious answer (Dyson) and one obvious problem / reason I never purchased (the outrageous price). Then there’s this other brand that’s been following me around the internet for weeks now, called Vortex Air. Bladeless, sleek, comes in a stack of colours that genuinely look like furniture rather than appliances. The reviews I was reading sounded like actual humans had written them. And the cherry on top was that it is cheaper (and just as aesthetic) then Dyson.

I was hesitant at first. The price gap was big enough that my instinct said there must be a catch somewhere.

Then a friend mentioned over coffee that she’d bought one a few months ago and was, in her words, “annoyingly smug” about it. Quiet enough that her toddler sleeps through, properly cool in her south-facing living room, and she’s already planning to use the heater function come autumn (No seriously, it’s a 2 in 1!).

I was still a bit on the fence, so I kept researching. I then found that Vortex Air has actually just landed in Tesco and Robert Dyas. Those aren’t platforms that take a punt on dodgy small electricals. Robert Dyas in particular has been selling reliable household kit since the 1870s, and Tesco’s buying team is famously fussy. Perhaps i’m a little old school, but now I have 100 percent trust in the brand.

The second was their Trustpilot page. Just shy of two thousand reviews and a solid 4-star rating, with a pattern in the positive ones that mattered to me. People praising how quiet it is, how good it looks in the room, and how responsive customer service is when something needs sorting. Not a brand pretending to be perfect, but one with enough volume of real feedback to actually get a sense of what you’re buying.

The model my friend went for is the Vortex Air Pro Plus, in a soft graphite finish she’s been showing off in her living room every time I’m round. It’s a slim 64cm tower, about the footprint of a tall table lamp, weighs under 4kg so she can move it between rooms one-handed, and runs whisper-quiet on its lowest setting. The bit I didn’t fully clock until she explained it. It’s also a heater. 1,650W of rapid warming for winter, low-wattage cooling for summer, all in the same column. So come October, she’s planning to quietly retire the chunky oil-filled radiator she drags out of the loft every autumn, which means one less seasonal appliance cluttering the house.

The kids can’t catch fingers in blades. There’s no grille to clean. There’s a remote, ten speed settings, a 1-9 hour timer, a 180° rotating head, and it’s A+ energy rated. It looks, genuinely, like something you’d choose for the room rather than something you’d tolerate in it.

Safe to say it’s now firmly on my list for this summer.

4. A Home Ice Cream Maker

Hear me out on this one. The kids are obsessed with ice cream, but does anyone else think that the prices are getting a bit ridiculous? I worked out that one tub of the decent stuff costs roughly the same as a punnet of strawberries plus a tin of condensed milk. An ice cream maker pays for itself pretty quick, it’s fun and you can have ice cream all year round in the comfort of your own home, now that’s something I can get onboard with!

The compressor models are pricier but you can run batch after batch without freezing the bowl overnight, which matters when you’ve got a birthday party landing in three days. The simpler bowl-style ones are perfectly good for occasional weekend use. Either way, the fact that you can produce strawberry and basil sorbet on a Tuesday afternoon for about £2 is, frankly, a small luxury that is well worth it in my opinion.

5. A Proper Garden Pergola or Shade Sail

This one’s the bigger commitment and may require some DIY. We bolted on a freestanding pergola two summers ago and it’s transformed the patio from “lovely for an hour at 4pm and then unusable” to somewhere we actually have lunch. The kids can be out playing without me reapplying suncream every twenty minutes, and I can sit with a coffee and a book without squinting at the page (not to mention watch tv without that annoying glare).

If a pergola feels like too much, a properly tensioned shade sail does about 80% of the same job for a tenth of the cost and a fraction of the install effort.

It’s also worth thinking about the windows too, actually. If your south-facing rooms turn into greenhouses by 2pm then a decent external blind or solar film makes a bigger difference to indoor temperature. This plus a bladeless fan is my biggest 2026 summer hack. Now bring on summer!

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