KITCHENMUH Electric Jar Opener Review: Tested on Stubborn Pickle Jars

Two jars sit on my counter most weeks, and for about thirty years both of them opened without an argument. One is dill pickles, which go into the potato salad I take to Sunday dinner. The other is spaghetti sauce, which I use whether it is Sunday or not. Then my thumbs stopped cooperating, and a jar of pickles turned into a fifteen minute negotiation involving a rubber pad, a sink of hot water and some unkind words.

I bought the KITCHENMUH electric jar opener in May of last year. It was the fourth thing I had bought for my hands and knees in about five months, after a mat, a knee wrap and a bottle of capsules. Eighteen months later it is still on the counter beside the bread box, and I still reach for it most days. That is more than I can say for a good many things I have bought.

How I've Used It

The opener lives between the bread box and the coffee maker, which puts it in my way, and I mean that as a compliment. I see it before I start grunting at a lid. If it had gone into a drawer I would have stopped using it by June, because the things in my drawers are mostly a museum of good intentions.

The way it works is the way the listing says it works, which is not always true of things I buy. You set it flat on top of the lid, you press the button, and the motor grips the lid and turns it. Then you lift the whole thing off and the jar is open. I do not twist. I do not brace my thumbs. I do not run anything under hot water unless I feel like it.

It worked the first day, which surprised me, because I had already decided it would not. I opened a jar of pickles for the potato salad on a Wednesday and stood there a second looking at my own hands like they belonged to somebody else.

A normal week for me is pickles, spaghetti sauce, jam and salsa. Sunday dinner is the big one. I cook for Paula and her husband, two to three hours on my feet, and the potato salad alone takes a jar of pickles and a jar of mayonnaise. That used to be the part of the day where my hands gave out before my knee did. Now it is the other way around, which is an improvement I will take.

Sunday starts around nine in the morning. I pull the jars out first, before anything else, and line them up on the counter between the stove and the sink. Pickles, mayonnaise, sometimes a jar of relish for the deviled eggs if I am feeling ambitious. That stretch of counter is a little over two feet of clear space and the opener takes up about seven and a quarter inches of it, so nothing has to be shuffled out of the way first. I open all of them at once, set the opener back by the bread box, and get on with the cooking.

What it does not do is cans. It does not do bottle caps off a beer or a bottle of vanilla. It opens screw-top lids in a certain size range and that is the whole job, and I would rather have a tool that does one job properly than a gadget that does four jobs badly and needs a manual.

What the KITCHENMUH Opener Actually Is

The facts, from the listing and from my own counter: it is a 3 watt electric opener, automatic, 7.28 by 4.33 by 2.75 inches overall, with the body about 2.83 inches wide and 4.33 inches high. The one thing in the box is the opener itself. It adjusts for screw-top lids from 1.2 to 3.5 inches in diameter.

That size range is doing a lot of work, so let me say it plainly. Take a ruler to your pantry before you buy anything. A standard supermarket pickle jar, a jar of pasta sauce, a jam jar, a jar of salsa, all of those landed inside the range for me. The gallon jars I used to wrestle with in the school kitchen would not have.

It sits flat on the lid. That is the part that matters. If you set it on at an angle it will not grip, and you will decide it is broken. I did that twice in the first week and once more about a month ago, so I am not going to pretend the thing is foolproof. Set it flat, press the button, let it turn.

There is a button. That is the entire interface, and at sixty-eight, with arthritis at the base of both thumbs, that is exactly what I want. I do not want a menu. I do not want to find my reading glasses to open a jar of jam.

Which Lids It Handles and Which It Does Not

Inside 1.2 to 3.5 inches it has opened everything I put under it. Pickles, pasta sauce, jam, salsa, mayonnaise, a jar of olives that had been in the back of the cabinet since who knows when.

I took a ruler to my pantry the week it arrived and wrote the sizes on a sticky note I pressed inside the cabinet door. My salsa jar measures a hair over three inches. The jam I buy is two and a half. The mayonnaise is close to three and a quarter, which is nearer the top of the range than I expected. The one that surprised me was a jar of bread and butter pickles from a farm stand, wider than the grocery brand, and it fit with about a quarter inch to spare. Anything that measured past three and a half, I set aside on the far end of the counter and dealt with separately.

Outside that range, no. The gallon pickle and mayonnaise jars I opened by hand for twenty-nine years at the elementary school had lids well past 3.5 inches, and I am not going to tell you this opener would have handled them, because it would not have. It is my thumbs at home it is helping. It is not a replacement for a cafeteria.

Small caps are out too. A bottle of vanilla extract, a bottle of soy sauce, anything with a cap narrower than 1.2 inches. The opener cannot get a grip on something that small, and it will sit there while you press the button and feel foolish.

Eighteen Months In

I have had the KITCHENMUH opener since May of last year, which is eighteen months as I write this, and it has not quit on me. The only change I have noticed is on the lids that are very tight or very smooth. Those sometimes take a second try. I lift it off, set it back down flat, press again, and the second attempt usually gets it.

There was one afternoon in July, a humid one, when a jar of strawberry jam would not budge and I stood there pressing that button four times before I set it down and reached for the rubber pad instead. The lid was smooth and the jar had come out of the refrigerator, so the glass was sweating and so was my hand. That is the sort of thing I mean by sometimes. It is not most days. It is a handful of times a year, and I have learned to keep the pad in the drawer rather than throw it out in a fit of housekeeping.

It has not scratched a lid that I can see, and I have not had a jar it simply refused. I wipe it with a damp cloth when it gets sticky and put it back beside the bread box. That is the whole maintenance routine, and I am a woman who has hand washed a knee wrap in a sink, so I know what a routine is.

What has changed is smaller than the ads promise and bigger than nothing. I stopped running lids under hot water. I stopped waiting for Paula to come on Sunday so she could open things for me. I stopped that little brace I did with my thumbs before I reached for a jar, the one where you tense up before you have even touched the lid.

What I Tried Before This

Before the opener I had a rubber gripper pad, the flat kind that comes in a two-pack, and I still have it in the drawer. It works on a fresh jar and it fails on a lid that has been sealed a while, and when it fails you feel it at the base of your thumb. I keep it for the bottle caps the opener cannot touch.

That pad is about six inches square and it worked fine when it was new, which was maybe four years ago. Rubber gets slick with age and with use. By last spring I was folding a dish towel under it for extra grip. Then I was carrying the whole arrangement to the sink and running water over it, and then I was standing there with a wet towel and a wet jar on a tile floor, which is not a picture I care to repeat at my age.

I also did the hot water trick, where you run the lid under the tap until the metal gives a little. It works. It also means standing at the sink holding a jar with wet hands, which is its own problem at my age, and I have a tile floor I would rather not fall on.

I looked at the under-cabinet openers before I bought this one, the kind you screw into the bottom of a cabinet. I decided against it. I did not want holes in my cabinets, and I wanted something I could carry from the counter to the table and back. That was a judgment call and I am not saying the mounted kind is wrong for everybody. I never owned one.

And on Sunday afternoons I handed jars to Paula. That is the one I am least proud of, because she never once made me feel bad about it, and that somehow made it worse.

The other things I bought that year did their own small jobs. The mat in front of the counter helped my feet first. The knee wrap steadied my right knee on the turn between the stove and the sink. The capsules, I could not tell you either way for the first eight weeks and I still cannot prove a thing. None of them opened a jar. This one does.

Eighteen months, four or five jars a week, and the only thing that really changed is that I stopped bracing my thumbs before I reached for a lid.

Who This Is For

If your hands have started negotiating with lids, this is the most useful small thing I have found. It is for the person who cooks at home, who buys pickles and sauce and jam in ordinary supermarket jars, and who is tired of planning a jar around somebody else's visit.

It is also for the grown kids reading this on a parent's behalf. If your mother has quietly stopped buying the brand she likes because the lid is hard, this is a smaller fix than rearranging your week around her pantry. And she may not tell you it has gotten hard, so you may have to ask.

Either way, if your hands have changed shape, or the pain is new, or a joint is hot and swollen, see your doctor before you buy anything at all. I am not a nurse and I am not going to pretend to be one. I managed a school cafeteria for twenty-nine years, which qualifies me to talk about jars and not much else.

Who Should Skip It

Skip it if your problem is cans and bottles. It opens screw-top lids and nothing else, and a cabinet full of canned goods will not care that you bought it.

Skip it if the jars you struggle with are the big ones, the gallon pickle and the gallon mayonnaise from a warehouse club, because those lids are past the size this will fit. Skip it if there is a lid under 1.2 inches you fight with every week, because this will not help you with it.

And skip it if you want it to fix your hands. It does not. I still have osteoarthritis in both thumbs and my right knee, five years on, and nothing I bought that year changed that. What I have is one less argument in the kitchen, which turns out to be worth something on a Sunday afternoon.