Electric toothbrush recommendations?

[Clive Page]

My dentist suggested that I would be better off using an electric toothbrush, on the grounds that they clean better especially in the gap between gums and the teeth. Of course his practice then tried to sell me one, but I refused to buy right then as I have no idea what type or brands are best. Any suggestions out there? The prices seem to vary quite a bit, and prices of spare heads even more widely. So getting a good brand for which cheap generic spare heads are available looks sensible.

[Michael Chare]

I have a Braun Oral-B bought from Amazon. The one I have has a light that shows when I am pressing to hard. The later brushes are very slightly larger in diameter. It has a two minute timer with 30 second pauses. (Inside and outside, top and bottom teeth.)

The previous one I had was also a Braun, and was previously used by my wife. I had to buy a replacement when the battery failed. IIRC I started to use it after advice from my dentist. I have not used other brands. The TeePee sticks are also very good and can be bought on ebay.

[Reentrant]

+1 for Oral-B; we've had several over many years. Latest one has a Li-ion battery and is much better than earlier NiMH ones; both between charges and overall life. 8-pack replacement heads from Costco are the cheapest we've found. We once tried some cheap generic heads from Ebay but they were useless.

[Theo]

Braun Oral-B use NiMH batteries which cause the head to spin slower as they run down. This means only about the first 30% of runtime brushes properly, the rest giving a substandard brush.

Philips Sonicare use lithium ion batteries which apparently don't suffer from this problem (although I haven't tried them).

This is a problem if you can't keep the brush on the charger all the time because you don't have a suitable socket. I've ordered one of these:

use with a powerbank - not sure how well this is going to work, but worth a go for $4.

Look on ebay for 'compatible' heads.

Theo

[Scott]

Not any more. The new ones are fitted with lithium ion batteries, which are much better.

[Roger Hayter]

The inductive chargers are nice and hygeinic. I've never used any other kind but they seem to work alright. A cheap 10GBP Oral-B one from the supermarket seems functionally identical to the more expensive versions, except that it doesn't do so many of the annoying time markers (done by pauses in rotation).

[Broadback]

Lidl had them recently, at a very competitive price. Worth a try.

[alan_m]

Braun BUT not at a stupid price. Often there are offers on-line or in supermarket chains that reduce the price by 2/3rds.

Also there may be no practical difference between their base models and their multi-function brushes. Multi-function just means that the brush vibrates/rotates in a very slightly different way. I've always used my multi-function model in a single mode and can see no benefit from the other modes - it's all marketting hype.

[Bill]

In message [e-mail]>, Clive Page [e-mail] writes

Several years ago, when I was younger and thought I ought to learn about Linux, I followed the Slackware newsgroup. Slackware seemed to be the child of one specific person, and he developed some respiratory illness which slowed development.

He posted, speculating that he was worried that the illness was the result of inhaling a sort of miasma caused by the toxic spray resulting from brushing his teeth with an ultrasonic toothbrush.

This seemed feasible and has put me off electric toothbrushes ever since, but I have never heard of anything like this anywhere else.

Should one always breathe out while brushing?

[Brian Gaff]

Yes the point is as I pointed out to my dentist, having a light is not going to help me know, so she said you would probably be best using an ordinary brush then as you could not do much damage with that.Not sure this is completely true, but for years I've used ordinary brushes but for the inside of the bottom teeth they say I do a good job. Brian

[PeterC]

OraB, £9, runs for a month on Eneloop-Fujitsu Pro LSD NiMH cells. Lidl heads are cheaper than OralB but are bloody tight-fitting - in fact too tight to fit onto the Lidl-eqiv. unit at £4.50. The 4 heads supplied with the Lidl unit are a bit better. No 18 h. chrging for 30 min. runtime and my last one did just over 3 years.

[PeterC]

Oh - same here - appointment on Tuesday. £175 for the assessment, £2200 for the implant. LL7. BTW, the implants are made of microcrystalline zirconia; there's a new method that prints the implant, sinters it to dry and shrink it, and it's made of nanocrystalline zirconia. Impervious to water etc. (the current ones aren't) and so is effectively permanent, i.e. lasts longer than we do!

[Fredxx]

Given there is abrasive and Titanium oxide for whitening in toothpaste, who knows!

[Tim Lamb]

Has anyone spotted that the profit mode is in the replacement head market as with printer ink!

[Tim+]

Well certainly the OP has (and just about everyone else).

Tim

[newshound]

The time markers are good because they encourage you to do the full two minutes.

[DJC]

Just keep watch until one of the supermarkets has them on special offer when they can be less than £20. There weree some in Lidl last week, my last one came from Waitrose, the one before that from Morrisons. Same applies to the brushes.

>

[Mike Clarke]

+1

Most of the fancy features on the super expensive ones are just snake oil

[Roger Hayter]

YMMV a) I don't need encouraging, it takes me longer than 2min anyway; and, b) I have considerably fewer then the normal quota of teeth.

[Tim Streater]

My first OralB, bought in the late '80s or so, lasted 15 years. Then I got a ten quid one which lasted a year, so I replaced it with a £40 or so one, which lasted 12 years and has just been replaced at a similar price.

The timing glitches are useful, but I agree that any more features than that are a waste of money.