Graco Ultra Clear 49MHZ Baby Monitor
by Graco Baby
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List Price: Category: Baby Product See more product details |
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Baby Products Reviews of Graco Ultra Clear 49MHZ Baby Monitor
Customer Review: Nothing to Write Home About
Summary: 1 Stars
My wife and I bought this monitor for our newborn son's bedroom, and we are highly disappointed for a few reasons:
1. Excessive Static: We live in a new 3-level home (lower/main/upper), and we found that both channels offered on this receiver have too much static. What's worse is that sometimes the static gets even louder and more annoying than the constant buzzing static we hear the rest of the time. The louder static usually comes from walking too closely to certain electrical fixtures, such as our fluorescent torchiere lamp. Other times, however, the louder static comes simply from the handset being in a bad location. We move it a couple of feet in a different direction, and the loud static becomes quiet static. Any way you cut it, there is too much static for our liking.
2. Battery Hogs: The one handset that works on batteries (the second handset arrived broken, and it works only with the A/C adapter plugged into the wall) uses them up way too quickly. With just a few days of usage (several hours of usage each day), the handset completely drains brand new Energizer batteries (4 AAA batteries required). I tried rechargeable batteries, and they lasted ONE DAY! With such poor battery life, this monitor should have come with an A/C adapter for BOTH handsets. Instead, it came with just one.
3. Broken on Arrival: Only one of our handsets worked on batteries when we first opened the box. Therefore, the other handset always needs to be plugged into the wall, which is highly inconvenient. That said, the mobile handset burns through batteries way too fast (see #2 above).
Even for the price, I think this monitor is a poor value. I would not recommend it to anybody. I have done a lot of research, and I have decided to return this monitor to Amazon and purchase the Sony 900MHz BabyCall Nursery Monitor with 2 Receivers. It gets excellent reviews. In addition, it has 27 channels (as opposed to 2), built-in rechargeable batteries in both handsets, and 2 A/C adapters as standard equipment.
Customer Review: I had no idea I could buy a little sleep on Amazon
Summary: 5 Stars
3/25/10 update below.
I've had this for three nights, and my only frustration is that I waited so long to get it.
I'm not using this for a baby. Mom is terminally ill, and I'm trying to take care of her. She falls and doesn't call me, so I've been getting up with every noise in the night to check on her. I've been averaging two hours of sleep per night. Please excuse me if my review is a little jumbled.
There are high-pitched screams and low-pitched moans and everything else in between coming from that room, and everything is crystal clear and well balanced. I can even hear her muttering in frustration. I thought the sound lights would be useless, but they're very helpful in getting a handle on volume levels when I've just been woken up and I'm still a bit confused. Even if I'm not sure what I just heard, one light is a pretty good indicator that nothing is seriously wrong. Every time I've seen five lights, I've gone in there to find a problem. Four lights mean I'm dreaming about Star Trek.
The parent units emit a very soft hum, which I'm beginning to find comforting. I know without looking that the unit is on, but the hum is not loud enough to be annoying.
I've got wireless gear all over this house, and there is no interference. I can take a parent unit all over the house and outside into the yard (in a concrete block home) and still get a good signal.
A couple of thoughts--not complaints, more like wishes for enhancements: it would be nice to be able to charge rechargeable batteries in the parent units. And it would be nice to have a separate on/off button instead of messing with the volume every time I turn it on. These are very trivial wishes and not worth deducting a star.
3/25/10 update: Both parent units started humming quite loudly, to the point of not being able to hear anything else. I switched them to another outlet and the humming stopped. I'm not sure why, but I thought that might be useful information to anyone else having that problem.
Customer Review: We use this for our fur-babies
Summary: 5 Stars
My husband and I don't have human children, but we have 2 shetland sheepdogs. They sleep in our den, 20 feet from our bedroom, so they don't pester us for breakfast at 3am. Our 2 year old boy has epilepsy and started a new medication that seems to work, but my hubby wondered if our little boy was having seizures during the night. If it was early enough in the night, our pup would have plenty of time to recover by morning, and we'd be none the wiser. There's 2 walls separating us from our pups so we wouldn't hear him if he had a seizure.
Hubby suggested getting a baby monitor, so I purchased this Graco Ultra Clear II. I chose it because of 1) the very reasonable price, and 2) there are AC adapters for both the baby unit and the parent units. Since we only use this during the night, baby unit gets plugged into the wall in the den, and the parent unit plugs into a wall in our bedroom and sits on my bedside table. I like that I don't have to use batteries if I don't want to. This baby monitor is very portable for those parents of human babies, however. :)
This unit works great, no hissing, white noise, or static. We bought it so that we'd hear our boy dog kicking and wheezing if he was having a seizure, and we test it every week to be sure we'd hear him, and it transmits great. So far, no seizures in the night! It's been a few months and this baby monitor is performing wonderfully. I'll update if there are any longevity issues that arise with this monitor.
We do live in a rural area, so I wasn't worried about interference from neighbors' baby monitors or other devices. We have a wireless modem and cell phones, and those don't interfere with this baby monitor.
Customer Review: So far, so good..... and pleased!
Summary: 5 Stars
I bought this monitor for use with my new grandson. Granted, he is only 2 months old, and have not had a lot of time to use it, but I have used it, and it's appears to be a very good monitor for the price. I don't have a problem with static. It has a volume control on each handset, so you can control "too much noise." It is very clear, so you will get extra noise if it is turned up too much. Just turn the volume down a little and you will be fine.
I especially like the fact that it has the lighted scale that runs across the top, to let you know new noise (baby noise), versus "just" noise. One light will appear when the baby is just slightly grunting, then the louder he/she gets, the more the lights appear. By the time it's all lighting up, you're already there! Bottom line on the volume, if you're sleeping in the other room, you will hear the baby on this monitor, without having to turn it up completely and won't have to hear extra noise "static." Which is not really static, but just a hum from the monitor, because it's set to high.
The only downside to this monitor, in my opinion, is that the adapters for the handsets are not designed to work with the main unit. The baby is not always in the exact same place when he falls asleep or is just in his swing. So I have to move the main unit to go where he goes, which would be easier if I could plug it into one of the handset adapters. The main unit also does not run on batteries if need be.
But all together, this is an excellent monitor, at a good price. You just have to get familiar with it's ablilty to pick up sound, and adjust the volume on the handsets accordingly.
Customer Review: Many great features, one annoying flaw: no battery backup in case of power outage
Summary: 3 Stars
Things I like about this monitor:
- Price is reasonable
- I've had no quality problems -- no problem hearing our daughter in the other room.
- Works much better than the Safety1st monitor I tried. That one had non-stop static.
- Fairly light and portable.
- I like that it runs on 49Mhz -- if you read any of the stuff online about electromagnetic fields, etc., the lower Mhz is supposed to be safer than the 700 or 900Mhz digital versions.
Here's the problem with this monitor, and if you know how to fix it, please respond in the comments section. The parents' unit is able to have batteries in order to make it portable. So your baby could be sleeping in one room, and you could be walking all over the house (or the yard) doing work. That's great.
However, wouldn't it also be great if those same batteries could be used as a battery backup in case of a power outage. Unfortunately, they can't. The way it should work is that if the power goes off, the parents' unit's batteries would kick in, and you'd hear a loud static noise of it having lost the signal from the now powerless baby unit. However, the act of having the power cord plugged into the parent's unit seems to disable any battery use.
So, if you lose power, both units go dark, and your baby is crying in the other room and you can't hear her, as happened to us last night. :-( It seems it would be so simple to wire the batteries much the way the batteries on an digital alarm clock serve as backup-- there, ready to take over, in case of a loss of power. Maybe Graco can fix this in the next version of this monitor.