Harrison Clark

Good rule of thumb is still three months but if you’re seeing fraying sooner it’s usually from scrubbing like a manual brush - light contact along the gumline and letting the motor do the work will slow wear a lot. If your brush has a pressure sensor or a sensitive mode and use it, and consider switching from gritty “whitening/charcoal” pastes to a standard fluoride paste since abrasives chew up bristles faster. After each use, pop the head off, rinse, flick off excess water, and let both the head and handle air-dry upright; replace a bit sooner after a cold or mouth infection.

Solid plan but then given the job uncertainty, I’d push the emergency fund to 4–6 months before ramping the down payment and keep only minimum payments on the loans - prepaying won’t lower the payment lenders use for your DTI, but bigger cash reserves help approval. Also earmark part of the house bucket for closing costs and moving and separate accounts and automatic transfers make it easier to stick to.

If it’s a Wi‑Fi model put it on a dedicated 2.4 GHz network with a unique name, turn off band steering, and pick a fixed clean channel (1, 6, or 11); also move any big cloud backups or streaming off nighttime hours. For RF models, keep it away from cordless phones, microwaves, and dimmers, and try disabling eco/VOX modes that can cause reconnect delays. One more easy win: some cameras brown out when night vision kicks in, so swap the charger/cable and elevate the unit away from metal or thick walls.

Check that the charger behaves normally with no battery, then meter the pack at the main terminals. Readings in the teens usually recover after a few short on and off tries while near zero means the pack is locked out, never jump or bypass, and if a known good pack still makes it blink the charger is likely bad.