The First Years Babypro Quick Serve Bottle Warmer, Colors May Vary
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Baby Products Reviews of The First Years Babypro Quick Serve Bottle Warmer, Colors May Vary
Customer Review: Worth buying, easy once you understand it
Summary: 4 Stars
We use this thing to heat up refridgerated breast milk, usually in the middle of the night. It works VERY WELL for us. I overall like it and consider it a good value.
But, this puppy is FAR from perfect. In fact, the written instructions were probably put together by the combination of a magic 8-ball, an engineer, and a middle-schooler. It has some of the info you need, and not in the right order, and not with easy to understand verbiage.
Here's the basics of how it works: It boils a very small amount of water very quickly and then steam-heats the milk. It usually starts boiling within 25 seconds of turning it on, and for me, it's a 2 minute process from start to finish. It automatically turns itself off when it runs out of water.
The detail:
1. Using the included measurement bottle (the clear thing pictured on the side of the warmer in the stock photo), you measure some amount of water and dump the water into the middle of the warmer.
2. You put in your milk container.
3. You turn it on.
4. You wait.
5. It will start to boil the water, steam heat the milk container, and when all of the water is boiled off, the unit turns off and you take out your perfectly heated milk.
Sounds easy, right? So why all the confusion? What is the frustration of these other reviewers you might ask? The answer, it's all physics.
The instructions include a little table (which although I have an engineering degree from a good school, I don't understand how the table works) that is supposed to tell you how much water to use for a given bottle shape and amount of liquid. As am example, if you have 4 ounces of breast milk, in a permanent plastic container, then you would fill the little clear jar to level 8 which is marked on the side of the jar. You follow the five steps above, and in theory, at the exact time it boils all the water away and turns itself off, your milk is exactly the right temp.
But here's the problem, or problems.
1. You may not have the same EXACT amount of milk each time, so the amount of water would vary
2. There will be small variations in the temperature of the milk, which impacts the time required to heat, and the amount of water needed
3. If you underestimate the amount of water needed, the unit will boil off all of the water, you will have cold milk, and you can't turn it back on for 10 minutes.
So why 4 stars for my review? Why do I like it? Cause I took a different approach. I did trial runs with refridgerated water (in place of milk), timed it, and periodically stuck my pinkie in the fake milk to see when it hit the right temp. So when I use the thing, I don't rely on having the right amount of water. Instead, I fill the water to the max, and then using a timer, take out my milk at a specified time. The time required will vary for you depending on how warm or cold the tap water is, the temp of your milk, and the amount of milk. So take my guide below as just an example.
For me:
2 ounces of milk is around 105 seconds
3 ounces of milk is around 125 seconds
(so far, these are the only two amounts I have needed or tried)
My steps:
1. I dump in the max amount of water
2. I put in my cold milk
3. I simultaneously turn the unit on and start a timer
4. At the right time, I pull out the milk (using an oven mitt-- no need to burn the hands with the steaming water)
5. I feed.
It's quick, easy, and I know what I'm doing for my needs. That's why I gave this thing 4 stars. Does the Babypro Bottle Warmer use a stupid method to figure out the right amount of time needed to warm milk? Probably. But the thing's cheap and it works. I give it 2 stars for design and ease (insert Borat "NOT" here) of instructions, and 5 stars for making my mid-mornings feedings easier.
Hope this helps.
Customer Review: Cheap & Effective - Must Have Item for A New Mom or Dad
Summary: 4 Stars
The First Years Babypro Bottle Warmer has been a savior for us and is our most-used "baby gadget" at home. I consider this a must-have item for new parents and wouldn't be without one.
The product has a number of strong points. The price is great. It works as advertised. It is easy to transport when your little one is spending the day w/ grandma & grandpa. It warms a bottle really quickly (which is probably the biggest selling point). Any parent can tell you how important this single feature is -- especially when your baby wakes up crying in the middle of the night and wants to eat *right now*. :) It is adaptable to a variety of sizes of bottles. It can also be used to warm baby food. It is fairly well designed as well -- allowing for the variety of bottle sizes, baby food, and it has a handy quick reference chart on the back w/ recommended water levels based on bottle size, etc. The beaker can be opened and poured into the warmer with only one hand (important when you are toting around a crying baby in the other).
I'm not sure this is a weak-point of the product, perhaps more an acknowledgment that warming a bottle isn't an exact science. The amount of water required to warm a bottle is going to vary based on the milk, temperature of the milk, indoor temperature of the room, etc... Therefore, you might find that it typically takes water filled to the "7" line in the beaker to heat a cold 4 oz bottle of milk -- and that works 90% of the time, but be prepared for different results sometimes. As a result, and this should be a no-brainer, but check the temperature of the milk before giving it to the baby.
The only thing I don't like about the product, at first, is the button on the front. I was expecting it to push in to start the warmer, but it actually pushes down. This actually turned out to be a good thing as it is easier to push it down one handed than push it in. So, what I thought was annoying at first, ended up being a good thing after I started using it.
Now, there are more expensive bottle warmers on the market. They are fancy semi-automated ones (you push some buttons on the front and it will figure out how much water to use to warm the bottle). In my opinion, these warmers are *not* worth the money. The only difference that I can see between those warmers and this one is that the semi-automated ones disperse the water in preset amounts based on the selections you choose. It saves you from having to measure water for each bottle. However, those warmers suffer from the same issue as this one -- there is a certain level of inconsistency guaranteed. The extra cost of those fancier models is not justified. In fact, I think those units would be annoying because they are limiting in terms of your choices for the amount of water to use. With a manual version, such as the one I'm reviewing, you can manually adjust the water level based on a variety of conditions which I think lends itself to better results.
I know some other reviewers get annoyed because they can't find the perfect water level. This is really only an issue when you first start using the unit. After that you will figure out how much water it takes to warm "x" ounces of milk, and then can make some educated guesses on how much more you will need as your baby starts to drink larger bottles. This has been a non-issue for us (and our baby just switched from 4 oz of milk to 5 oz of milk).
In closing, this is overall a really great purchase. Just don't expect it to be perfect and not require any thought on the part of the parent to operate. There is no such thing as an idiot-proof perfect warmer -- not even those fancy semi-automated ones.
Customer Review: Goldilocks would lose her patience...not always "just right"
Summary: 2 Stars
Heating breastmilk...who knew it would be such a science! The microwave will cause loss of nutrients and hot spots, and a pan of hot water will take an agonizingly long time when accompanied by a hungry, crying baby. Enter the Quick Serve Bottle Warmer, what I thought would be the most convenient method. It is...and well, it isn't.Yes, this warmer is convenient, as it can heat bottles in under the five minutes it advertises, especially if you are using disposable bags or drop-in liners. However, it can get these bags extremely hot, so you need to stand by the warmer and test the bottle periodically. Regular plastic bottles tend to take longer and don't heat up as well. The performance of the warmer is not consistent. It works well sometimes, but usually only if you pay close attention to it, testing the bottle as it warms. Goldilocks would lose her patience with this one, as it is hardly ever "just right".
Here's how it works: You fill the included blue vial to the first line for smaller bottles (4 oz.), the top line for bigger bottles (8 oz.). You dump the water (which is a tiny amount) directly into the chamber where the bottle will sit. Place the bottle in and press the button on the front. In about 30 seconds steam begins to form and in about two minutes (when the nearly all the water has been turned to steam) the unit automatically shuts off. This does not mean, however, that the bottle is done. It may need to sit there longer if you have more liquid or a larger bottle. And, with drop-ins, it may need to be removed from the warmer sooner.
Some problems with the warmer include:
- The blue filling vial. It is difficult to see the fill lines on it, especially at night. A clear fill cup with printed lines would be visually better. Moreover, the amount they suggest for smaller vs. bigger bottles doesn't necessarily fit your own bottles. You need to test it out and see what amount of water works best for you. And there's such a small amount of water that you're using that it is difficult to use the same exact amount each time.
- Smaller bottles. Steam quickly rises around smaller/thinner bottles, making them too hot to pick up and swirl to mix or to test the heat of the bottle.
- Wait 10 minutes to try again. The instructions state that the unit needs 10 minutes to cool down if you need to use it again. Well, I have gotten it to work again more quickly than that (sometimes immediately), although, I don't know if this is damaging the product in the long run. This is why it's better to put MORE water than you need into the unit and test the bottle as it warms. This way you're not stuck waiting for the unit to work again to heat up a cool bottle.
These caveats aside, this is a nice accessory for your nursery, especially for late-night feedings. No drowsy trips to the kitchen. Keep a cooler next to it with your bottle and you never need to stumble to a downstairs kitchen.
The bottom line: if you realize that heating bottles is not an exact science and that every bottle needs to be tested and adjusted, then you will do well with this warmer. If you think there is a magic alarm that will go off when the bottle hits the exact perfect temperature, well, I've got a bridge in Brooklyn for ya...
Customer Review: Good concept, horrible instructions, inconsistent results
Summary: 1 Stars
My only criticism of this product stems from the need to measure a small amount of water in order to heat the bottle, and the process this measurement entails.
A small plastic vial for measuring the water is included. In order to determine the amount of water to use, you consult one of two tables included in the instructions. On these tables, you find the bottle size that you are using in the top row, the amount of milk you wish to heat in the left column, and then (in theory) the amount of water you must add in the intersecting cell of the table.
Unfortunately, it only gives entries for 4oz. and 9oz. "wide mouth" bottles, and for 4oz. and 8oz. "standard" bottles, and for 2,4,6 and 8oz. amounts of milk. It gives no indication what the dimensions of a "standard" or "wide mouth" bottle are, so unless you know this ahead of time, you're in trouble. The amounts of water you need for each vary considerably. But this is only the beginning: it gets worse.
If you need to warm - for example - 3oz. in a 5oz. bottle, you are likely to be frustrated. (Yes, I have a 5oz. bottle, which evidently the designers of this thing didn't think existed, or didn't think to include in the table of instructions.) If you think you can simply interpolate between the 2oz. and 4oz. amounts, you're wrong. The vial is NOT graduated in uniform units, so 5.5 is *not* halfway between 4 and 7 on the vial. To further complicate things, some of the values specify "fill this amount twice". Since the units are not uniform, two fillings of 4 are not equal to one filling of 8. The units are not uniform, exponential, or any other reasonable scale I can think of.
In addition, if you don't plan on heating identical amounts every time, you must keep the handy reference table nearby whenever you want to use the thing. How convenient! Perhaps I will tape it to the inside of the kitchen cabinet - convenient and aesthetically pleasing, all at once!
The whole process seems extremely awkward. A better solution would have been to just add a fill line inside the unit, fill to the same amount for every bottle, get rid of the stupid vial, and add a thermocouple to sense when the whole thing is warm enough and automatically shut off.
The end result is that you end up guessing, and through a process of trial and error, establishing how much water is "enough". If I wanted to guess, I wouldn't have bought a special freakin' machine to heat the bottle, I would have just used hot water in a pan like they did in the olden days. Trial and error defeats the entire purpose for purchasing the thing in the first place.
Whoever designed this thing should be smacked with a radiator hose.
Customer Review: Yay! I finally got it to work for me!
Summary: 4 Stars
I'm quite convinced now that late pregnancy and early post-partum are probably the worst periods of time to try to figure out gadgets that don't have clear instructions. In my case, although there was a warning that a basket should always be used in the warmer, my brain erased that comment with the subsequent paragraph that said wide mouth bottles don't require the lift out basket. To be clearer, in both places it should say that the large basket is always required (otherwise you are heating the bottle directly on the plate and also in boiling water... both of which are no-nos.
The instructions are also too simplistic. The type of bottle one uses (shape, size, material) will very dramatically affect how the heat from the steam impacts the solution being heated. I would also imagine that some further tweaking will be required as the composition of breastmilk changes during the day and over the course of the post partum period.
For example, I used 9 oz MAM Ultivent (BPA free) translucent bottles that are wide at the bottom and narrow at the top. In my successful experiment with water chilled in the fridge to about 40 F, I needed to add 2x the max level in the provided measuring tube to get the water up to about 80 F. The unit was on for about 6 minutes until the water all vaporized. This is more than 2x the amount generally recommended in the instruction sheet and the sticker plastered to the side of the unit has even less detail.
Note that if you make the mistake of running the unit without any basket, some overheat sensor will trip before the water is completely used up after about a minute or so.
Given that there is unlikely any product out there which monitors the temp of the solution being heated (or is otherwise aware of what kind of bottle/solution combo is in place), trial and error and patience will be required with any such product. Life will probably be easier for formula babies since formula doesn't change over time!
Good luck!
p.s. a water softener with regular applications of rust-inhibitor solution, or the use of distilled water will probably reduce the amount of cleaning required. Using vinegar to remove mineral deposits is the age old standard for cleaning everything from pots and pans to humidifiers etc.