Winter means, for more of us than not, spending a lot more time at home than we’d otherwise choose to spend. Vacations are a fine remedy, sure, but who has money to travel all season long? Make home a pleasant place to be, inside and outside, with these deals on equipment for your garage, backyard, and home, and you won’t want to leave.
WIRED tests products year-round and handpicked these deals based on the actual discounts, not just the discounts retailers claim to offer. Products that are sold out or no longer discounted as of publishing will be crossed out. We’ll update this guide through November. Be sure to check out our best early Black Friday Deals.
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Garage Deals
This is arguably the best value in a garage workbench out there right now. The solid-wood top is 1.25 inches thick (!), and the legs are adjustable in height. It’s capable of holding an astounding 3,000 pounds. One cool feature of the Husky workbench is that two of either the Husky 1-Door-2-Drawer Base Cabinet or the Husky 2-Door Base Cabinet will nest right underneath the workbench for extra, out-of-the-way storage, with the same impressive build quality and cohesive design.
Closed doors keep the dust off your equipment and the messy tangles of extension cords out of sight. This cabinet is made of 24-gauge steel and is powder coated in your choice of red or black. There’s also a 30-inch and 48-inch-wide versions if you have less or more room to place a cabinet. Mount a Husky Wall Cabinet for $150 ($50 off), which offers the same look and build quality, over a workbench if you need shelving but don’t have the floor space for a freestanding cabinet.
You won’t overload this shelving unit when each shelf is, when properly weight-distributed, capable of holding up to 2,500 pounds. That’s per shelf. Forget the “boltless” version of this shelving unit that Husky also makes. Bolts are not that scary to fasten during assembly, and they’ll hold the shelving unit together more sturdily.
Hand me a blank check and tell me to pick out the finest power tools at any hardware store, and I’ll beeline straight for either Milwaukee or DeWalt. There are plenty of fine brands out there, but these two seem to last just a bit longer without developing any annoying performance issues. You get your money’s worth with Milwaukee, that’s for sure. If you haven’t joined the cordless power tool revolution and need, well, nearly everything, this combo can’t be beat. You get a power drill, circular saw, grinder, and more. The two rechargeable batteries fit all the tools and come with a charger, so you can have one charging while using the other.
You should be airing up your tires every month, at the very least. For that, you’ll need an air compressor. While a tiny, portable unit can do the job (slowly), you can shave a lot of time off this crucial task with an air compressor that has a reserve tank of pressurized air all ready to go.
Everyone should have a vacuum capable of sucking up not just dry messes, but wet spills. Use it for keeping your garage routinely tidy and for cleaning out the interior of your car. Like most shop vacs, it comes with a wide assortment of attachable tools and nozzles to fit into every nook and cranny around shop furniture and inside of cars’ interiors. I’ve had good luck with the performance and long-term durability of several Ridgid wet/dry vacuums over the past decade, to the extent that nowadays they’re the only brand I shop for.
There are high-quality floor jacks made in the US (unlike this one), but you’ll pay a pretty penny for them. If you’re tight on cash, save your money on the jack and spend it on good-quality jack stands instead. Always rest the car on good, solid jack stands before going underneath it. Don’t just leave it up on the jack and slide under—jacks have been known to give out, and if that’s all that’s holding up the car, you’ll go splat. Keep a backup under the car, too, whether that’s the jack just slightly lowered so that it’s not bearing much of the car’s weight or even a stack of tires under the frame.
Home Deals
Photograph: Home Depot
For non-4K TVs, it doesn’t pay to spring for an expensive, 4K-capable streaming device. Save some coin and buy this 1080p-capable streaming system to gain access to Amazon Fire TV. It doesn’t support Dolby Atmos sound, but if your TV isn’t 4K then it’s likely to not support Dolby Atmos, anyway. Read our Best Streaming Devices guide for other options.
If your home is equipped with Google Assistant, then you may want to stick with the first-party solution and get this outdoor/indoor security camera from Google. It’s battery-operated, so no need to wrangle with wires. You can pop it off the magnetic mount to recharge it, and it tends to last a little more than a month. You get 1080p video, HDR support, and a 130-degree field of view. Read our Best Outdoor Security Cameras guide for more.
We called the Blink Mini cheap, compact, and versatile with good video quality in our Best Indoor Security Cams guide. You need to pay $3 a month for a subscription, and the motion detection can’t distinguish between humans and pets, but it does have two-way audio and integrates into the Amazon Alexa voice assistant.
The Nest Video Doorbell is our favorite video doorbell. Its performance is reliable, with swift alerts and notifications, and there’s HDR support so that your clips aren’t blown out by bright lights. It works without a subscription but you’ll want to subscribe to Nest Aware to get the most out of it. The battery tends to last a month before it needs recharging.
I wouldn’t go as far as to say that Werner is the only brand that makes a solid ladder, but I have stood on more of them than any other brand in my 30 years of, to put it broadly, doing stuff up high in the air. From painting walls to putting up insulation, I’ve never had a Werner ladder fail on me, and that level of trust is worth gold when you’re talking about ladders. This 4-foot step ladder is a little guy, perfect for keeping in the home for jobs that require you to reach the ceiling, without the bulk of a standard 8-foot ladder. It holds up to 250 pounds, and remember to never stand on the top “step.” Ladders aren’t built for that.
There are quite a few Nanoleaf smart light panels on sale, so if you don’t want the triangle shape, you can choose from Hexagons or Mini Triangles. This modular system lets you create a panel of lights in whatever design you’d like. Read our Best Nanoleaf Lights guide for more information.
This Eero mesh router 3-pack is for anyone who wants a no-frills system. It’s super easy to set up, and you can extend connectivity throughout the home with the two nodes. You can subscribe to an Eero Plus subscription to get features like parental controls and ad blocking, but it’s also not required. Read our Best Mesh Routers and Best Eero guides for more.
Backyard Deals
Photograph: Home Depot
Keep the peace between you and your neighbors by relegating the old, deafening gasoline-powered leaf blower to the history museums and switch to a quieter-if-not-silent electric blower. Its 450-CFM airflow is good enough for 120-mph gusts of wind to move those leaves into order. It comes with two batteries and a charger, and since it uses the same M18 battery as the tools in the Milwaukee power tool combo we linked above, you can swap these batteries freely among each other.
We named the Wi-Fi-equipped Ironwood 650 (7/10, WIRED Recommends) the best pellet grill/smoker in our Best Grills guide, thanks to—and I never thought I’d say this about a grill—its excellent app and precision cooking control while you lounge elsewhere, either inside the house or on the patio furniture. Not to mention, there’s an included recipe book of some incredible dishes. The “650” in the name refers to the 650 square inches of grill space, which should be enough to smoke three or four racks of ribs at a time, or six whole chickens.
Feast your eyes on the Rolls-Royce of grills, the Timberline (7/10, WIRED Recommends), which we called the best luxury grill in our Best Grills guide. If none but the absolute best will satisfy your need to grill enough catfish, baby back ribs, and acorn squash to feed a small army, the Timberline is large enough to swallow up an entire bag of pellets and smoke 50 pounds of meat all at once, and you can monitor its temperature all day from a distance through its Wi-Fi connection. You get access to the same excellent Traeger app, but WIRED senior product reviewer Scott Gilbertson found this grill’s Wi-Fi connection to be spotty at times.
