Roborock S6: the best robot vacuum for hard floors, long hair and messy kids

November 28, 2019 by M.B. Grant Leave a Comment

This summer, we bought a Roborock S6 robot vacuum to help keep up with the messes our baby and toddler make. We love our children very much, but damn – the daily struggle against crumbs and dirt was intense.

We did a lot of research and read tons of reviews before choosing the Roborock S6, an intelligent, app-powered autonomous floor vacuum (official site). We’ve had it for 4 months now and have definitely given it a workout.

In short, this vacuum is amazing. It has relieved us of a ton of sweeping and mopping duties and elevated the overall standard of cleanliness in our home by cleaning places we didn’t (or couldn’t) regularly clean and doing a better job of it.

Before we got it, everyone was telling us to just lower our standards (and then lower them again) but our floors were getting super gross and I was really tired of trying to keep up. Plus, I love a clean home, and I didn’t want to relax my standards – especially with a baby crawling on (and eating off of) the floor!

Thanks to the Roborock S6, we didn’t have to lower our standards at all. Quite the opposite, actually – my standards are now higher than they were before.

We named it Jeff.

Note: Like all products we review here on HomeUpgraded, our Roborock S6 vacuum is something we bought ourselves and have put through extensive use before writing about it. Everything in this article is our own research and opinions.

Roborock S6 features at a glance

The Roborock S6 vacuum is an app-controlled, Internet-enabled smart vacuum for hardwood, tile, and carpet. It is circle-shaped, so you might be wondering how it reaches into corners. The vacuum has a little spinning “arm” that collects dust and dirt from corners and edges – places my traditional upright vacuum cannot reach without an attachment.

It’s both a vacuum and a mop (you decide which mode it runs in) and you can operate it either from the smartphone app or via buttons on the vacuum itself. You can even use the app when you aren’t home. It docks and undocks all on its own, but you have to empty its dustbin yourself. The dustbin looks dinky compared to what we’re used to seeing on canister and upright vacs, but it’s large enough for a full sweep of our 2700 sq. ft home. We empty it between runs.

It takes about 110 minutes and most of a full battery to do our 2700 sq. ft. home, but we often target specific rooms with the app that lets you draw no-go zones and designate room boundaries.

See the Roborock S6 on Amazon.com

Why we love our Roborock S6

We had heard of the Roomba by iRobot, but we had also heard the complaints that the Roomba sorta of drunkenly zig-zags around your house in a crazy-making way and saw someone suggesting the Xiaomi Roborock S6 as an alternative because of its mapping and stricter line-by-line approach to cleaning rooms.

That’s how we got going down the research rabbit hole and ended up picking a vacuum that lacks the name recognition of Roomba but has nonetheless made us very, very happy we picked it.

✔ Our floors are cleaner than they’ve ever been – and that’s saying something, with two messy children, my own long hair, and plenty of foot-traffic around the house. I love walking barefoot around my house again. Honestly, this thing raised the bar on cleanliness since it goes under things and into places I only scrubbed occasionally. I’m actually a little embarrassed because I thought I was doing a good job, but this vacuum finds everything.

✔ Run the vacuum from anywhere. You don’t have to be home! You can start the vacuum from anywhere you have an Internet connection. I usually run it when I’m away from home because I don’t want to be in its way, but it’s not a huge nuisance if you do run it while home.

✔ It fits in corners and goes under furniture. Let’s be honest, I rarely moved furniture or push things out of the way for vacuuming. Fortunately, Jeff has no problem gliding under our king-size bed, dining room chairs, or our bathroom vanity.

✔ Does not suck up drapes. We have long drapes that end just above the floor in multiple rooms. I used to tie them up or drape them over nearby furniture but Jeff just eats around them.

✔ Works on hardwood, tile, and carpet. Our home is mostly hardwoods and tile, but we have a number of rugs of varying thicknesses and types. Jeff handles everything from our door mats to the oversize carpet samples we use in the children’s rooms. (We have not tried it on bath mats, we pick those up before running the vacuum.) It has not chewed any corners, left any rugs curled up, or otherwise bothered them. It mounts even our thickest rug (1/2″).

Jeff works on our low-pile rug, switching between tile and rug as he traverses the room.

✔ Easy to empty and easy to clean the brush. I’ll go into detail more on this later but basically emptying out my upright vacuum always squicked me out because I had to reach into it and pull the globs of dust and out of the canister with my hand. I’m happy to say that the dust and dirt just falls out of the Roborock’s bin, and the brush is easy to snap in and out of place for the occasional de-hairing.

✔ Goodbye, tedious chore. With two small kids, sweeping and vacuuming was consuming a small part of my life. I was vacuuming and sweeping after every meal and snack and I was just really tired of it.

How it works: using the Roborock S6

Preparing to vacuum

We pick up any toys, laundry, shoes, cables, etc. from around the floors and then start the vacuum using the app. We don’t move furniture for it, but if you do, it’ll figure out the room has changed and adapt to the new layout.

Note: You can also carry the vacuum to the room you want it to vacuum and push a button on the vacuum to run it.

Using the Roborock app

The app is easy to use and [as of October 2019] lets more than one person “own” the vacuum and manage it via their own smartphones. This lets both my husband and I start, stop, or view the vacuum’s current progress.

You don’t have to be on your home WiFi to use the app or control the robot. To start the vacuum, open the app and tap “Enter robot” to see the current map of your home.

Here, you can pick rooms to vacuum, have it clean the whole house, or define a box-shaped area for it to vacuum. You can set no-go zones (shown here as red boxes) and partition rooms. You can also access settings and drop a “pin” to tell the vacuum to vacuum a particular location.

Mapping

The robot generates and saves a map of your house the first time you run it. You can generate a new map at any time, and you can save up to 3 separate maps. You can divide spaces into separate rooms, set no-go zones, and more. A saved map retains its no-go zones. Saved maps are useful for bringing the robot to a different floor. You have to pick it up yourself and take it to the new floor, but it should figure it out from there. [Note: We live in a one-story home and have not tried this feature.]

I usually target a specific room to vacuum. This is because some of our rooms get dirty at like ten times the rate that other rooms do. The app makes it easy to pick a room and start the cleaning cycle. The robot leaves the dock on its own and heads to the room(s) you picked.

In this map, the Roborock S6 just returned to its dock (middle of the lilac-color room) after vacuuming our kitchen/dining/family room area. The red regions are “no go” zones I set up manually and saved. These are areas with lots of cables and hazards like toys.

The rooms don’t have to be adjacent to each other. When it’s finished, it plays a recorded announcement and returns to its dock.

The whole process is completely hands-free and can be monitored in real-time through the app.

3 side-by-side screenshots from the Roborock app, showing how the robot first traces the room and then fills it in, going line-by-line and pivoting around the legs of chairs and tables.

You can use the app from anywhere you have an Internet connection. Yes, this means you can run the vacuum while you’re at work or out running errands. I usually run it when I’m out with the kids so they don’t interfere with it. Coming home to a clean home is the best.

October 2019 update: They just updated the app to allow more than one person to operate and monitor the vacuum! This was, by far, the biggest problem with the app (the fact that only one person could “own” and manage the vacuum) so I look forward to sharing the responsibility of running Jeff with my husband, haha.

Vacuuming

It runs quietly enough that you can have a (somewhat loud) conversation in the same room as it, but it’s also loud enough that I wouldn’t run it while trying to watch a movie or while someone is sleeping. Ours goes cu-clunk, cu-clunk as it passes over the grout between our large kitchen floor tiles, and it becomes noticeably louder when it’s working on carpet, but overall I would describe it as less noisy and intrusive than our upright vacuum.

It’s definitely slower than I am with an upright, but it’s also way more thorough and goes places I don’t bother with.

When it’s done with the area(s) you assigned it to, it finds its dock and puts itself back on its charger. The whole process is very hands-off, but you do have to dump out the dust bin yourself.

The Roborock S6’s cleaning capabilities and maintenance are covered later in this review.

Jeff finds his dock, lines up, and scoots into position for charging.

Scheduling the robot vacuum with “Timer”

You can schedule the Roborock S6 to run at a set time, which is called “Timer” in the app, and you can also tell it when not to run with “Do Not Disturb”, but we have not used the scheduling feature because our floors are constantly covered in a smattering of toys that we have to manually pick up right before running the vacuum.

However, I will say this – everyone in the house is eager to pick up “for the robot”. Before we got this robot vacuum the floors only got picked up maybe once a week (by me, moments before I vacuumed the room myself). Now, since we run the robot vacuum basically every day and since not that much clutter has accumulated since the last time we ran him, the floors stay a lot less cluttered overall, and I no longer have to pick up so much clutter from the floors myself! HUGE WIN!

Cleaning capability

I am astonished at how much dust our Roborock S6 picks up in just one run. I’m actually a bit embarrassed, because I thought I was doing a good job with the sweeping and mopping.

Our home has these wedge-shaped HVAC registers that our traditional upright vacuum cannot without using an attachment. The Roborock handles these corners with ease.

My biggest resistance to getting a robot vacuum in the first place was I assumed it wasn’t as powerful as my upright vac, but we run it far more frequently and it’s way more thorough than I was and it reaches into little places I wasn’t, so maybe it wasn’t power that mattered so much but overall meticulousness. Either way, I have zero complaints about its power.

It picks up glitter, leaves, Cheerios, corn flakes, dried rice, dried Play-Doh and other annoying-to-sweep things so I’m very happy with its ability to keep up with our kids.

Meticulous vacuuming

The Roborock’s methodical, line-by-line approach to cleaning is what initially drew us to it. First, it outlines the room, then it goes “line by line” down the room, like an inkjet printer. (It uses its saved map as a “starting point”, but it doesn’t follow the map blindly – if your furniture has moved that’s fine, it’ll figure it out.)

We moved into this house in July and got Jeff a month later and as we set it up I thought, There’s no way the house can even be that dirty yet – but it came back from its maiden voyage packed with dust and dirt. I think I could sweep and mop before running the vacuum and it would find loads of things I missed.

Some of this is because Jeff goes places I don’t or can’t, such as under the bed and some of our furniture, but some of it is also because it goes slower and more methodically than a human. It also doesn’t seem to kick up much dust as it goes, so maybe that helps it capture more as well.

The Roborock S6 vacuums somewhere I rarely did – under our IKEA Hemnes. (It also has no problem navigating around larger random things left on the floor, even if they weren’t there during the initial mapping.)

Either way, it’s clear that the Roborock S6 does a way better job than I do with a traditional upright vacuum and mop.

Mopping mode

We use vacuum mode as our default and only switch to mopping on occasion. (If you’re wondering whether you even need vacuuming if your home has no carpet in it, yes you do. The vacuuming takes the place of sweeping in that case, and you definitely need to sweep before you mop.)

The mopping mode is for “light mopping”. I’m not sure how light is “light”, and we haven’t truly put it through its paces yet. (I’ll report back once we’re through a winter with this thing.)

The Roborock S6 comes with two reusable mop pads and several disposable mop pads.

Rugs and irregular objects

The Roborock S6 seems to have no problem going from our hard floors to our rugs. It doesn’t curl the edges or get trapped.

Our rugs include:

Rubber-border “utility” rugs by our service door and front door
Carpet sample style rugs in our children’s rooms and play areas
Vinyl anti-fatigue mat at the kitchen sink
Decorative rugs under the master bed and living room sofa

Clockwise starting at top left: our children’s thin play rug, our service door utility mat, the oversize carpet sample in our daughter’s room, and a decorative rug in our living room. The Roborock S6 navigates all of these with ease.

Here’s a weird place in our house that I didn’t like to vacuum myself – the baby jail on top of one of our rugs. It’s also crumb central. The vacuum had to switch between tile mode and rug mode as it worked its way around the baby jail, but it managed to get all of the crushed Cheerio dust that bedazzles this general area.

The baby jail has moved a few feet since Jeff last mapped it, but the Roborock S6 adapts on the fly.

Furniture

Tables and chairs – The Roborock S6 pivots around the legs of tables and chairs to get every last crumb from under the table. I just love not having to move the chairs to vacuum like I used to.

Beds – I didn’t fully appreciate the Roborock’s short stature until I realized it was going under our bed every time it vacuums our bedroom. Let’s just say I almost never vacuum under the bed. Now, the space under the bed is getting vacuumed all the time. I love it.

Kitchen cabinets – This is another place that tends to get really gross because it’s harder for me to clean it (or even see that it’s dirty). Jeff fits in the space under the cabinet faces and vacuums up every crumb from in front of the toe kick without scratching or damaging the wood.

Roborock S6 fits under our kitchen cabinet faces for extra cleaning goodness.

What about small stuff left on the floor?

I feel like the “hazardous item” size threshold is about that of a toddler sock. Anything smaller or shorter than a small sock and the Roborock S6 is either going to roll over it and try to suck it up or get trapped on it somehow.

Obviously, we haven’t tested this exhaustively (we don’t want to break our robot), but we have had a few mishaps…

Phone charge cable – I once found Jeff trapped, unable to leave our room because my phone’s charge cable had wrapped around the brush and was holding him in place. He kept trying to turn around, run the length of the cord back to its source and then try to leave again, but the cord kept him tethered. He was stuck in a loop trying to free himself.

Sound machine cable – We set Jeff loose in the baby’s room, forgetting about the white noise machine under her crib. The machine has a very fine, thin cord, which Jeff pulled it hard enough to unplug it from the wall and dragged it a few feet from its starting position. Fortunately, the cord itself was perfectly fine, despite being thin and delicate.

Toddler-size sock – Jeff pushed this small sock around a bit but did not consume it.

Puzzle piece – This foam puzzle piece gave Jeff some trouble. The vacuum mounted it and switched to carpet mode in effort to suck it up. We were present and able to pause the robot and pull it out. The puzzle piece and the robot were both fine.

Sheet of paper – A sheet of paper got wrinked as Jeff pushed it into the table legs but there no damage to the vacuum.

Crayons – Another time, we found a half-chewed crayon that was had gotten worn down by Jeff’s brushes. (The vacuum itself was fine, but the crayon looks pretty wild and seems to have some bristles stuck to it now). Crayons are definitely a hazard to the Roborock.

Jeff ate a crayon 🙁 Luckily, he was fine.

This is basically why we don’t use the Timer (schedule) feature – we need to manually clean up the floors before running our Roborock S6, because while it’s pretty good at avoiding hazards and hasn’t gotten into any real trouble yet, it’s not perfect, and our kids leave everything on the floor.

What’s in the box?

The Roborock S6 comes with its dock, power cable, instruction manual, two reusable mop pads, a small stack of disposable mop pads, and a replacement air filter.

Vacuum maintenance

Like any vacuum, the Roborock S6 needs periodic maintenance and part replacement. The app tracks the vacuum’s usage and suggests maintenance of various components every so often. Note that this isn’t based on the actual degradation of the components, just an assumption of their state after X hours of use.

We’ve run ours for a grand total of 33 hours so far, and we’ve got a long way to go before we need to replace anything. (I left the sensors one at 0% so you can see what it looks like when it gets to zero on something.)

The Roborock S6 app’s Maintenance page displays the remaining life of various vacuum parts.

Replacement parts and accessories are inexpensive. They’re typically sold as a bundle on Amazon. You get multiples of each part (two brushes, six spinning feet, four filters, etc.) in the bundle.

Roborock S6 replacement parts on Amazon.com

Emptying the dustbin

Emptying the canister on my upright vacuum was a disgusting experience: I often had to reach into the canister to loosen the jammed-up dust and hair wads using my fingers. (Barf.)

So far, the Roborock has not made me touch any of the crud it picks up. It falls out of the dustbin with a few knocks against the inside of our trash can.

I cannot believe how much crap this vacuum finds even though we run it every other day. We must have been living in absolute filth before we got this robot vacuum.

Cleaning the roller brush

We’ve only had to clean the main brush twice in 3 months of owning it so far and I’m not sure if that’s a normal cadence or exceptional or what. I have hair that reaches about halfway down my back and I’m losing it at a rate that indicates I should be bald by this time next year, so my hair tends to be a challenge for any vac we own.

Fortunately, my long hair doesn’t seem to jam the Roborock and since the brush can be lifted out of the vacuum it is easy to clean the roller (at least, compared to my upright vac where the roller is not removable, so I get down on the floor with some scissors to cut my hair off the roller).

Removing the main brush: push the two slider buttons toward each other.

Close up view of the main brush. You can remove the yellow cap to pull hair and string off the brush.

Washing the mopping pads

When it’s time to mop, you attach a mopping pad. There are disposable mop pads and reusable mop pads. We’ve only used the reusable mop pads so far. The mopping pads are supposedly machine washable but we have elected to hand wash ours.

Here’s a brand new pad vs. a pad after one mopping. You get two of these with the Roborock, so if you do a lot of mopping you could have one in use and one in the laundry.

Roborock S6 reusable mop pads – before and after one mopping session.

The bottom line

So that’s it – we love our robot vacuum! It took a daily chore I was sick of doing and turned it into something I could automate and have done when I wasn’t even home. Before we bought our Roborock vacuum were considering a cleaning service, but those run about $75/week where we live. We quickly “broke even” on this vacuum purchase, and it’s still going strong after 4 months of regular use (we run it about every other day). I’ll come back and post an update if the vacuum ever fails or requires a major repair, but so far we are thrilled with it.

Roborock S6 Robotic Vacuum Cleaner

Smart and efficient

Workhorse smart vacuum that keeps up with kids, long hair, and daily messes. Works on tiles, hardwood, and carpet, and manages the transitions with ease. Control it from anywhere with an easy to use app.

Buy the Roborock S6

Best lightweight double stroller for traveling with baby and toddler – the Joovy Caboose Ultralight Graphite

October 2, 2019 by M.B. Grant Leave a Comment

Hey! We are back after some lengthy summer travel to tell you about the awesome lightweight double stroller that hauled our toddler and baby through four packed airports, tons of city sights, a barely-paved walking trail, a sandy beach, countless restaurants and everything in between – the Joovy Caboose Ultralight Graphite (Amazon.com link).

Note: Like all products we review here on HomeUpgraded, our Joovy double is something we bought ourselves and have put through extensive use before writing about it. Everything in this article is our own research and opinions.

The Joovy Caboose Ultralight Graphite double stroller shown here in red with seated toddler and baby passengers. — Our toddler and baby, 2000 miles from home in the Joovy Caboose Ultralight Graphite

Joovy Caboose double stroller at a glance

The Joovy Caboose Ultralight Graphite is a lightweight (22 lbs), compact double stroller that seats two children. Our kids are two years apart and this stroller was perfect for us.

The forward-facing kid (our 10 month old baby, in our case) gets a snack tray and padded seat with a 5-point harness. The rear-facing kid (our almost-3-year-old toddler) can either sit on a padded seat with a 3-point seatbelt or stand on the platform.

Note: Our kid only likes to sit, but if your kid prefers to stand note that the padded seat slides out of the way to use the platform.

Manufacturer's photo of a preschool age child standing on the Joovy Caboose's riding platform. — Joovy’s product photo demonstrates the standing platform.

A double stroller that feels like a single

When I say compact, I mean, like, a lot of people were surprised to see we had two kids in this stroller. It’s just that small! The TSA agent who checked our IDs on the way to the security line glanced at the stroller and asked where our second child passenger was – this thing is that good at packing your kids in together.

The Joovy Caboose is only about as wide as the adult pushing it, which is great news any time you have to line up, go through a door, enter an elevator, or squeeze through a crowd. I would absolutely choose this “tandem” style over the wide kind that seats two kids side-by-side.

As a point of comparison, my singleton stroller is a three-year-old Graco Verb model that you can see in the photo below. The Verb is still my go-to if I only have one kid with me because its lack of a standing platform allows for a slightly longer stride (I’m 5’8″ and tend to power-walk), but the Joovy is a very close second in terms of maneuverability and mobility. Even with the weight of two kids in it, the Joovy is agile and takes corners well.

Side by side photo showing the Joovy Caboose Ultralight Graphite double stroller next to the Graco Verb single stroller. This image demonstrates that the two strollers are very similar in length and width. — My Joovy Caboose next to my Graco Verb single stroller. The Joovy has almost exactly the same size footprint as the stroller I use when I’m out with just one of the kids.

Other standout Joovy features

Manufacturer's photos of the Joovy Caboose Ultralight Graphite double stroller from the front and the back. Best double stroller for travel 2019. — But wait, there’s more! A cargo basket, an organizer for the parents’ belongings, and easy-to-operate brakes make the Joovy a winner.

The Joovy Caboose has a good-size cargo basket underneath the two seats, a detachable canopy that expands large enough to cover both kids, a stretchy cup-holder accessory that did a good job of holding my water bottle in place (no bouncing out on bumpy terrain), and an easy-to-operate brake that can be applied with either foot. The front seat can be made to recline, though it does not go flat. Furthermore, when the front seat is reclining, the other kid can still use the platform but loses access to their seat.

At 22 lbs the stroller is lightweight enough for anyone who can lift a baby to fold up and toss into a car. It is very compact when folded, but we had to remove the canopy (it snaps off easily) to fit the stroller into the 2018 Subaru Outback we borrowed for the trip.

Fortunately, there was still plenty of room in the hatch for all the other stuff we traveled with:

Best double stroller for travel in 2019 - the Joovy Caboose double stroller is shown here folded up and placed in the back of our car along with all the other stuff we traveled with. — We borrowed a 2018 Subaru Outback for the trip. Here is the Joovy folded up and packed into the trunk along with some full-size luggage, a duffel bag, and numerous other items. You can see the detached canopy on top of the pile at left.

Curiously, the Joovy Caboose fits fine in our own 2016 Subaru Forester – no canopy removal required.

Navigating the airport with two kids in the Joovy Caboose double stroller

We bought our Joovy Caboose stroller specifically for this trip. Early in our trip planning we realized that flying with two children under the age of 3 would be a lot easier if we could put both kids in one stroller and keep them both in it until the moment we boarded the aircraft.

You can totally do that, too – you can show up at the airport with a stroller and keep your kids in it through security and all the way to the aircraft itself. You leave the stroller (collapsed and locked) at the door to the aircraft as you board. This is called “gate checking” and it was free of charge. The stroller was waiting just outside the aircraft door when we arrived.

Side note: We flew on Alaska Airlines between two major United States airports. Be sure to check with your airline and airport because stroller and gate checking policies likely vary.

Another side note: we had car seats with us on this trip but we checked them as soon as we arrived at the airport. If you need a car seat on the plane, we recommend this excellent car seat travel cart. It turns your car seat into a wheeling, portable ride for your baby. When kiddo #1 was a baby we flew with her in her own seat (buckled into a car seat in the aircraft) and this travel cart system worked perfectly.

I cannot overstate how helpful it was to strap our kids into a stroller while navigating an airport.

With both kids strapped into the stroller, we (the adults) were free to print boarding passes, drop off checked luggage, and disrobe for security without having to manage our kids at the same time.

Top-down view of toddler and baby sitting down in the Joovy Caboose Ultralight Graphite double stroller. — We took the canopy off and checked it in our checked bag.

Did we really need a stroller for our walking, talking kid?

YES.

Our older kid is independent and energetic and was coming off a multi-month stroller boycott, so I was initially on the fence about buying a stroller with a seat for her. I really didn’t think she’d want to sit in it, and I thought we could make do with the singleton stroller for the baby and let out toddler walk through the airport, hand-in-hand with us (her parents).

That was crazy.

I was wrong to ever consider having her walk through the airport with us. I was overlooking so many distractions and hazards that I forgot even existed until I was actually at the airport. Everywhere we turned there were people running, giant airport trams beep beeping their way through crowds, luggage carts, people in scooters and other mobility devices with limited ability to stop on a dime, dogs, people not watching where they are going – yikes.

She might’ve been up to the walking, but she certainly wasn’t ready to stand calmly in an airport security line, get on/off an airport tram, walk all the way to a gate, wait her turn to get in an elevator, or stay a safe distance away from hazards like the luggage carousel.

For these reasons, I decided she needed to be in a stroller – but she didn’t have to be in it all the time, you know? She just needed to be in it at crucial moments, like going through security and while waiting for our shuttle.

This is why the hop-on-hop-off nature of the Joovy was absolutely perfect for our toddler. At 38 lbs, it’s no fun to lift her and place her in a stroller anymore but at almost 3 years old she was capable of exploring (within limits).

The Joovy Caboose made it easy for her to get in and out of her seat all by herself, but only after we unbuckled her so we still had control over when she was allowed to run free. This let her easily take breaks from the stroller to explore the airport, which kept her (and us) a lot happier than we would’ve been in a traditional stroller having to lift her in and out each time. I think had we brought a traditional stroller we’d have been a lot more reluctant to lift her out of it.

Our toddler daughter points at a large monitor displaying flight times and arrivals. — While the stroller was great for containing her when we needed her contained, it was also great for letting her get out on her own (after we unbuckled her).

Our baby was pretty happy to just ride in her front-facing seat the whole time. She doesn’t like “baby-wearing” devices of any kind so those were out of the question to begin with, but I’m glad we didn’t try to make one work. Having an adult’s body free to wear a backpack and a duffel proved helpful for lugging all the toys and snacks we needed for entertaining them on the flight.

Toddler and baby share a snack on the Joovy Caboose Ultralight Graphite double stroller's snack tray. — The Joovy’s snack tray was a star on this trip.

Airport security with the Joovy Caboose double stroller

Our airports (SEA-TAC in Seattle and O’Hare in Chicago) allowed us to take the stroller through the security. This was excellent and a huge contributor to our trip’s success. Our kids hate waiting in lines, but a steady stream of snacks kept them happy while we waited our turn at the security checkpoint.

When it was our turn to go through, we (the adults) unloaded our stuff onto the conveyor belt before taking the kids out of the stroller. We then folded and locked the Joovy stroller and sent it through the scanner on the conveyor belt as if it were a piece of luggage. Our toddler was able to walk through the scanner on her own, and I carried the baby through. This part was easy and drama-free.

On the other side of the scanner, where everything is a mad rush to re-assemble ourselves and get out of the way, the Joovy Caboose was easy to unlock with one hand and pop open. We put both kids back in it before putting our own clothes and shoes back on.

Our gate required a tram ride, so I was extra grateful to just keep my kids in the stroller for that. It was easy-on/easy-off thanks to the Joovy.

Gate checking the Joovy stroller

Our airline allowed us to keep our kids in the stroller up until the moment before we stepped into the aircraft. Once at the aircraft, we took the kids out of the stroller and bagged it up in one of these protective gate check bags and left it in the walkway with all the other mobility devices left by passengers.

Side note: Our aircraft boarded from a walkway, not the tarmac, so this may not work with smaller flights. We had flown this route on this airline before, so we knew what to expect in terms of boarding.

When we deplaned, the stroller was waiting in the walkway for us. We were pretty encumbered with carry-on bags and our two exhausted children by this point so it was a relief to find the stroller waiting exactly where we needed it.

More Joovy perks

We bought it for travel but quickly discovered that the Joovy is just an awesome, all-around “everyday” stroller, too.

Best double stroller for travel 2019 - this picture shows the Joovy Caboose Ultralight Graphite rolling over a weathered boardwalk. — Here’s the Joovy’s canopy acting as storage for a pair of sandals. The canopy can double as a storage shelf for small, lightweight items.

You can store stuff on the canopy! Sure, it’s not an “official” use of the canopy, but it’s broad and big and great for holding a few extra things.
Rolls great on all kinds of terrain – boardwalks, grass, dirt, gravel, slopes, and more. We took it everywhere with us from city sidewalks to walking trails, and the stroller did fine on everything.
It’s narrow enough to take into restaurants and stores – a few places let us bring the stroller right up to the table, but most wanted us to leave it somewhere up front. We didn’t have to fold it or leave it outside the establishment.
A carrier adapter is included for younger babies! Our baby was done with her carrier-style car seat by the time we got the Joovy, but had we bought it a bit sooner we’d have gotten a lot of use out of the included car-seat adapter (shown below).

Joovy Caboose includes a car seat adapter for smaller babies.

The bottom line

The Joovy Caboose is a great stroller for families with a baby and a toddler. We bought ours specifically to help us through a trip with multiple flights, but it quickly became our everyday kid hauler thanks to its compact size, light weight, comfy seating, and hop-on/hop-off capabilities for our toddler. We use it daily for walks around the block and anytime we need to take both kids somewhere.

Before picking this stroller, we spent a lot of time at local retailers trying out different tandem and side-by-side strollers. All of them were bulkier and heavier than the Joovy Caboose, and many of them were more expensive to boot! We think the Joovy Caboose Ultralight Graphite found the perfect balance between size, weight, overall usefulness, and value for our money.

If you’re on the fence about whether your older kid even needs to be in a stroller, I still think it’s worth it to give them a place to sit – waking up early, going to airports and travelling are overwhelming even for the most energetic kid.

I highly recommend the Joovy Caboose Ultralight Graphite double stroller and think it is the best double stroller for traveling with a baby and a toddler on the market today.

Joovy Caboose Ultralight Graphite

Compact double stroller for toddler and baby

This compact stroller-for-two carries a toddler and a baby with ease through airports, beaches, and walks around the neighborhood.

See the Joovy Caboose on Amazon.com

Google WiFi Review: Finally, strong signal everywhere in our thick-walled home

December 8, 2017 by M.B. Grant 1 Comment

Our Google WiFi rating: 5/5

Say goodbye to antennas and hello to strong, uninterrupted WiFi

The days of a lone router barfing WiFi signal in every direction from a corner of your house are over!

In a home full of smart bulbs, voice assistants, cameras, streaming TV, music and more, a strong WiFi network is the backbone. This month, we made the jump from 3-year old “antennas and a black box” router to Google WiFi, a mesh network system. Yes, it’s more expensive up front than renting a modem/router from your ISP, but it’s an investment that instantly paid off in terms of reduced frustration and faster response times on all our smart home systems and high tech toys.

What is mesh networking?

A mesh WiFi network is like a router + repeaters. The “mesh” part refers to how the signal is spread further and more evenly throughout a space. Your device is automatically and seamlessly “handed off” from one WiFi point to another, so you’re always connected to whichever one will give you the strongest signal.

It’s still a normal WiFi network – you can name it, put a password on it, secure it, and your devices won’t be able to tell the difference.

Mesh networking equipment for the home has exploded in popularity (and plummeted in price!) over the last couple of years. These systems include Google WiFi, Eero, Netgear Orbi, Linksys Velop, and more. Prices range from a couple hundred to over $500 for a starter kit, but the general idea is the same. One “node” or “point” acts as your router, the rest exist to spread the signal further.

WiFi points pick up WiFi signal from other nearby points and repeat it with minimal degradation to signal strength.

Mesh networking systems come with built-in QoS (quality of service – ie: sacrificing your PC’s download speed so your Netflix stream doesn’t buffer all night) and are designed for loads of devices making demands simultaneously. This innovation is well-timed, because home automation enthusiasts (like us) spent those same years packing their networks with Hue bulbs, smart speakers, voice-activated assistants, and streaming devices.

Why we switched to mesh

We just moved to a new house, an 1800-square-foot single-story house with the router at one end and all our computers and WiFi-hungry devices at the other end.

Network congestion and signal degradation with our not-that-old Netgear router made it so we couldn’t dim our lights if our Playstation was downloading updates, printer jobs randomly disappeared, our baby monitor camera took ages to connect to, and our voice-activated assistants (Echo and Google Home both) were having trouble communicating with WeMo and Hue.

Basically, our old router was no match for whatever our 1980’s-era walls are made of, and pretty much everything we own sits between our router and our WiFi devices.

It was time to get meshed up!

See the Google WiFi system on Amazon

What is Google WiFi?

Google WiFi is a replacement for your home network’s router. Pick one of these (they’re all the same) and use it in place of your router. Place the other two elsewhere in your home (more on that later) to extend the signal.

Open Google WiFi box with 3 WiFi points inside.

What’s inside the box: three identical Google WiFi points, cords, and simple setup instructions.

The “satellite” nodes only need a power cord, no additional wires, to repeat the signal. Instead of multiple side-by-side networks like you get with WiFi extenders and many modern routers that split the signal into two bands, the Google WiFi network has one name. Both the 2.4ghz and 5ghz band are combined under one name, and devices automatically connect to a suitable band.

TV screen, sound bar remote, and Google WiFi point sitting on our TV stand.

One of our Google WiFi points next to our TV and sound bar remote for scale.

Each additional node you add to your “mesh” carries the signal further. By default, a single WiFi point can carry the signal about 1000 feet.

If you’ve dealt with flaky WiFi repeaters in the past, these are effortless by comparison. There are no antennas to point and setup is fast since the “extenders” are designed to be a part of the network by default.

Who is Google WiFi for?

Homes with lots of “always on” devices such as Hue bulbs, Amazon Echo, smart thermostats, Google Home, etc.
Homes with Philips Hue bulbs can take advantage of the on.here feature for easy access to lightbulbs on/off and colors
Households streaming from multiple sources simultaneously
Online gamers
Parents who want to control when kids’ devices can access the Internet
Huge houses – even the starter kit with 3 WiFi points is supposed to cover a 3000-4500 square foot home

Google WiFi installation and setup

Google WiFi in its long box.

Unboxing Google WiFi

Inside the hotdog-shaped box are three WiFi nodes, three power cables, one Ethernet cable, and one page of instructions.

Google WiFi unboxed: three nodes, three power cables, one Ethernet cable

Google WiFi unboxed: 3 interchangeable WiFi points and all the cables you’ll need.

Installing Google WiFi

To complete setup, you’ll need to download the Google WiFi app, which available for iOS and Android (unfortunately, you must use the app to do the installation).

Installation took us about 40 minutes. That includes opening the box, taking photos, removing the old router, putting the Google WiFi in its place, placing the two additional WiFi points, and patting ourselves on the backs.

Installation was easy.

Any node can become the primary WiFi point (the one that replaces your old router). Take the Ethernet cable that runs from your modem to your router and plug it into the Google WiFi point instead. Plug in the power adapter.

My hand holding a Google WiFi point, with Ethernet cables and setup information displayed.

Setup network name and QR code are on the bottom of every WiFi point.

The power cables and adapters are one unit – alas, not USB (in case you have one of those nice USB power strips). However, the adapters are relatively slim and probably won’t hog too much space on your power strip.

Good news for crowded power strips: the Google WiFi point adapters are slim and relatively small.

There’s just one “outgoing” Ethernet port. We used it to connect to our Philips Hue Hub.

The rest of the installation takes place in the Google WiFi app, using a Bluetooth connection to the WiFi point. WiFi points are added by scanning their QR codes.

Scanning the WiFi point's QR code to add it to the network.

Scan the WiFi point’s QR code to add it to the network.

I was dreading a scenario in which we had to individually re-add every single Echo, Google Home, Philips Hue lightbulb, camera, etc. to our new Google WiFi network. That didn’t happen, because we used the same network name and password for our new network. Most of our devices hopped over on their own. The only devices that had to be manually re-connected to the network were the devices that had been set to only use the 5ghz band of the old network.

Physical design

The overall design and attention to detail on the WiFi point hardware itself is excellent.

The units feel durable, with a good weight to them. They have thin rubber “feet” in two arcs on the bottom to help them stay in place. The power cords are generous in length – maybe 5 feet each.

The light strip around the center can be dimmed or completely turned off. With the lights turned off, our toddler doesn’t seem to notice them (which is a relief – she was fascinated by our old router and all its blinking lights).

On the back/bottom is a cut-out for wires, so you don’t end up with wires sticking out in every direction from your primary WiFi point.

How we arranged our Google WiFi points

The conventional wisdom seems to be that the WiFi points should be in a straight line through your house. We found that impractical for our house’s design, so we put ours in a triangle shape instead.

Internet signal comes in near the garage and gets boosted all over the house by the three WiFi points

To give you a sense of how powerful a single point is, the Yi camera in the baby’s room keeps putting itself on the primary WiFi point in the living room. The primary point emits a strong enough 2.4ghz signal that the baby’s room WiFi point is unnecessary for the camera.

However, the Yi camera is a 2.4ghz device, not a 5ghz device. 5ghz is stronger, but doesn’t travel quite as far, so devices that can use the 5ghz network (such as our phones) still benefit from the node placed in the baby’s room.

Each point spreads its signal somewhere between 500 and 1000 feet, according to Google. Actual performance varies due to building materials, presence of walls, and other factors.

What’s improved now that we’re on Google WiFi

Here’s what got better for us:

Stronger signal in the master bedroom
Faster download/upload speeds in the master bedroom
No more micromanaging which devices are on which network bands (2.4ghz or 5ghz)
Instant connection to our Yi camera streams
Hue bulbs don’t become “unreachable” while downloading – with our Netgear router, we often lost connection to our Hue bulbs while downloading game updates
Devices no longer seem to be dropping off the network randomly
Music streaming no longer cuts out randomly (this was a problem with both Spotify and Amazon Music)
Better insight into which devices are using bandwidth, and how strong their signal is
“on.here” URL lets anyone on our network control our Hue lights, even if they don’t have the Hue app (great for when the baby’s grandparents are over)
5ghz band everywhere! It used to taper off right around where we have our TV and computers

In the near future we’ll be setting up Google WiFi at my parents’ house, which is considerably larger, with 2 stories plus a basement. We will update this review after we see how it performs in their home.

Check current Google WiFi price and stock on Amazon

The Google WiFi app is sweet, too

If you have an old-school router you’re probably used to going to 192.168.0.1 (or a branded URL or similar) to access your router, and then having to log in with credentials you forgot about 2 minutes after you set them up.

That’s all gone now – just open the Google WiFi app and there’s everything you need.

Open the Google WiFi app to view your WiFi points, connected devices, set a priority device, view network usage, and more.

On the left: more shortcuts to network features. On the right: setting one of our gaming consoles as a priority device.

It’s easy to add other people as “managers” (through their Google account), too, so you don’t end up in a situation where only one person can (or knows how to) get into the router.

Here are just a few of the things that are easy to do in the Google WiFi app:

Set a priority device for X hours
View all the connected devices, by name (which you can easily customize)
Pause WiFi access per device and/or by groups of devices
Set up a Guest WiFi network so your grubby guests can be quarantined
Perform a network test
See “patch notes” from recent updates to the app and firmware

This meets our needs fine. If there’s any feature we miss, it’s being able to micromanage QoS (quality of service) by setting certain devices as higher priority than others. (This was a feature we liked on our ASUS Wireless-AC1900, the router we set up at our weekend place and our parents’ homes.)

Google WiFi’s advanced networking features

Google WiFi strives to be “set it and forget it” but it’s still got many useful “advanced” features, including:

DNS – set to Google’s 8.8.8.8, your ISP’s DNS, or a custom DNS
WAN – chose from DHCP, Static IP, and PPPoE
LAN settings – set LAN address, subnet mask, DHCP address pool start IP and end IP
UPnP (Universal Plug n Play) – toggle on or off
IPv6 enable/disable
DCHP IP reservations
Port forwarding rules – add, delete
Device mode – switch to Bridge mode to resolve a Double NAT problem, with some caveats

Google WiFi app screenshot of the Advanced networking page

Google WiFi offers some advanced features for special situations

Device Sharing gives easy access to Philips Hue (and other systems)

The Google WiFi network comes with a neat feature called Device Sharing – just type on.here into your browser’s address bar on your phone or computer to get access to some home automation devices on your network.

Philips Hue is integrated with Google WiFi. You can turn lights on/off and change their color through this web portal, no additional credentials needed.

What doesn’t Google WiFi do?

Google WiFi is a powerful “set it and forget it” system, where features that we now expect (such as 2.4ghz and 5ghz bands) come standard, but with fewer micromanagement opportunities.

You no longer have to (get to?) pick between the 2.4ghz and 5.0ghz bands. Your devices will automatically choose which one to be on. If you want to be really strict about which device(s) go on which band, you won’t have that level of control with Google WiFi.

With Google WiFi, you can only set priority to one device – and it expires after 4 hours. We can’t set both our computers or PlayStations to be high priority devices at the same time. There’s no granular QoS exposed to the user.

On the bright side, since upgrading to Google WiFi we haven’t seen the QoS-related problems we were having with our Netgear router while simultaneously streaming music and downloading game updates.

A few more things: There’s no dynamic DNS or auto-renewing dynamic DNS with Google WiFi. There’s also no VPN (you’d have to get a separate piece of hardware to support VPN.)

The bottom line

The Google WiFi router-replacement system is excellent. We love it. It fixed our quality of service issues – no more Spotify cutting out, no more lost printer jobs – and brought WiFi to the far end of our house. Setup is a breeze and the WiFi points take up very little space. Best of all, we’ll never fiddle with router antennas again.

See the Google WiFi system on Amazon

Our 2nd bed from the Internet: cheaper than the competition and super comfortable

November 18, 2017 by M.B. Grant Leave a Comment

We’re back from hiatus! We’ve moved to a new home, in a new state, and we have a brand new bed from the Internet!

Just like our first bed from the Internet, the bed frame, mattress, and mattress toppers are all from Amazon.com.

Unlike the first bed, though, this time our bed is king size, with a memory foam topper and a new style of bed frame (this time with a headboard). After two months of sleeping on it, we are happy to recommend this awesome bed. Here’s the bed everyone in my family wants to lay on and never get off of.

Meet our (2nd) bed from the Internet:

(from top to bottom)

All told, we spent just under $800 on this bed, which includes everything you see below (bed frame, mattress, plush topper, memory foam, and waterproof mattress protector).

Here’s what it looks like with no covers – everything fits perfectly right up to the edge of the mattress. There are no gaps or misaligned layers. In 2 months, nothing has shifted.

About us

We’re both 5’8″, but I’m a squishy female with wider hips (I weigh about 185 lbs) and my partner is a lean male (he’s about 150 lbs). I prefer a soft bed, he prefers a firmer bed.

My most common complaint about beds is that I “bottom out” – my butt and/or hip bones dig into the mattress past whatever cushioning layer is present. I also dislike mattresses typically described as “firm”.

How the bed feels

I think we’ve managed to find the perfect bed: it’s soft and luxurious on top, but it’s still supportive. I love laying on it. This stuff is subjective but I’ll try to explain why I think this bed is so awesome, starting with the base and working our way up.

Zinus platform bed review

See the Zinus platform bed frame on Amazon.com

Aside from general sturdiness, our requirements for a bed frame were that it include a headboard and that it be a platform design (so that we didn’t need to buy a box spring). Prices on frames/headboards are all over the place, but we quickly ruled out the $800-$2000 bedframes/headboards at our local furniture based on price alone.

The Amazon search results for bed frames and platform beds were dominated by a company called Zinus. I didn’t like how squat and short the headboard was but I was unable to find a suitable taller headboard at our price point so we accepted its squatness and ordered it.

It arrives with all the parts packed inside the headboard itself. Simply unpack, follow the instructions, and the assembly process is about 30 minutes start to finish.

Here is our Zinus bedframe assembled. It is sturdy and it looks good.

I do wish the headboard was a couple inches taller but oh well, it wasn’t a dealbreaker and everything else about the Zinus bedframe is great.

When I was researching bed frames/headboards I initially did not like the Zinus bed frame because the headboard is so short. I found it hard to verify the height, and I wondered if my pillows would be fully contained within its height. As it turned out, there is about 15″ worth of height between my mattress (10″ mattress, 3″ pillow topper, 2″ memory foam layer) and the top of the headboard. My pillows are contained by it.

The sleeping surface of the mattress/topper/memory foam ends up about 25″ off the floor.

Support is an important thing to get right, as we discovered with our previous bed. We had our queen mattress on a frame that supported the mattress with rows of springs. This frame was fine for us until I got pregnant and gained 50 lbs. My weight approached 220 lbs near the end of my pregnancy, and at 220 lbs, I could feel the mattress and frame sagging too far down. We put the mattress on the floor and the problem was gone, which suggested to me that the frame wasn’t actually supporting us that well.

We had a hard time deciding on a bed frame so we ordered the mattress first and used it on the floor in the meantime. It felt quite good there, and it felt just as good once it was put on the Zinus’s slats.

10″ king size Signature Sleep Contour mattress review

See the Signature Sleep Contour mattress on Amazon.com

The first thing to know about ordering a mattress online is it’ll probably arrived rolled up, vacuum packed in a box. That’s how the Signature Sleep arrives at your front door. Oh, and the box is heavy.

The box is made of a very thick cardboard and was quite difficult to cut open and remove. On a scale of 1-5, 1 being a wet paper bag and 5 being Dwarven mithril, this box is a 10.

We knew from previous experience that once you cut the vacuum seal, the mattress is going to literally explode out of the packaging (or try to, anyway).This mattress enters the world with a BOOM.

We cut the packaging, which caused the mattress to instantly triple in size while still partially contained in the wrapping. Cue panicked rush to get all the plastic off so the mattress can take a more traditional mattress shape.

The mattress looks pretty bad at this point, uneven, curving toward the ceiling, lumpy. At this point, the mattress should be left undisturbed for 48 hours so it can slowly take its final form.

48 hours later, the mattress was puffy and laying flat on the floor.

There’s no denying it: this is a very low-priced mattress. Anyone feeling skeptical that this mattress feels good is right to feel that way.

When I got my first Signature Sleep Contour 2 years ago for our weekend place, I went into the whole experience with low expectations, but I was totally blown away. I came to prefer this inexpensive mattress over my apartment’s $1200 name-brand mattress.

Best of all: it’s surprisingly comfortable all by itself. I would describe it as a firm mattress, but that’s okay – we loaded it up with a pillow topper and a memory foam layer because we like our beds soft.

One thing that’s great about this particular mattress: you can flip it! We like to flip and rotate our mattress every 4-6 months (ish) to help prevent butt dents from forming.

3″ Lucid plush topper review

See the Lucid plush topper on Amazon.com

We put the 3″ Lucid plush topper directly on top of the mattress.

Manufacturer’s photo of the Lucid bed topper. It is plush and snuggly.

This is my third Lucid plush topper – I buy them for every bed I sleep on regularly. It’s like the pillow-top layer that mattress manufacturers sometimes add to beds, except you can remove it, fluff it, flip the mattress, wash it, etc.

My previous bed had this exact mattress topper on it for 2 years (in queen size) and I didn’t notice any flattening, which was a concern when I first bought it. I figured it would be a pancake in a month, but – impressively – it kept its thickness.

It doesn’t shift around, thanks to the elastic corner straps and its general weightiness.

It has no smell and never developed any bunching or unevenness, even after a trip through the washer. (I still have my queen-size Lucid topper – I use it to make our IKEA sofabed more comfortable for guests to sleep on).

Alveo Gel Memory Foam Mattress Topper review

See the Alveo gel memory foam topper on Amazon.com

We put our 2″ thick Alveo memory foam layer on top of our Lucid plush topper.

The Alveo memory foam topper features little “gel” dots to help keep it cool.

Memory foam is a polarizing thing, apparently. If you read the reviews on any memory foam topper or bed you’ll see people who hate it and people who love it. I wanted to try memory foam because so many of my friends recommended it, but no one could recommend a particular brand or manufacturer so I was on my own for that part.

Amazon has dozens of memory foam toppers on offer, but I went with Alveo because it was relatively lower priced and had no negative reviews at the time I bought it. Some common complaints about other memory foam toppers were complaints about crumbliness and odor.

My Alveo topper arrived in a somewhat smallish box, considering it is a king size topper:

Box was smaller than I expected (baby for scale).

Out it comes! Overall, it was very easy to open up and unpack. It weighs 23 lbs.

I didn’t know how fragile it would be, so I wanted it mostly “in place” before I broke the vacuum seal.

I broke the plastic seal, removed the packing, and let the Alveo topper fluff up. I didn’t lay on it for 2 days. The creases and dents you see here went completely away within the first day of “fluff up” time.

I think it has a pleasing “give” to it – when I’m laying in bed, I like to press my hands and feet into it just to feel its satisfying squish. It had only the faintest odor when it came out of its packaging, and no noticeable odor once the mattress protector and sheets were over it.

Some of the memory foam detractors complain of it “sleeping hot”, but I haven’t noticed any temperature problems. We got ours in September, during the last heatwave of the summer, and we both slept fine on it. (For whatever it’s worth, I think I tend to “run cold”.)

Memory foam is sold in layers of 2″ thick, 3″ thick, and sometimes 4″ thick. I had no good metric for which thickness to go with so I picked the cheapest option (2″) and I think that was a fine choice.

As it turns out, the memory foam is pretty tough and survived being moved to the master bedroom just fine. We didn’t drag it, we gently rolled/folded it up a bit and then carried it. It held up perfectly at the corners. Under normal use, it is the top layer and held in place by its own weight and by our SafeRest waterproof mattress protector.

Should the plush topper go on top or should the memory foam layer go on top? Surprisingly, I couldn’t find many people talking about this online, so we tried it both ways. We strongly preferred the memory foam layer on top. With the plush topper on top, the memory foam’s effect felt diffused, and the plush topper felt poorly supported.

SafeRest waterproof mattress protector review

See the SafeRest waterproof mattress protector on Amazon.com

We put the SafeRest mattress protector over everything else (and under the sheets).

This is my go-to mattress protector. I prefer it over other designs that are made of thicker/noisy plastic (this one feels like cloth with a thin waterproof membrane backing) and I like that it fits like a fitted sheet. It’s deep enough to fit over the 10″ mattress, 3″ plush topper, and 2″ memory foam without being too tight or too loose.

On my bed, the protector goes over everything but the sheets. The sheets go directly on top of the protector. Since it fits like a fitted sheet, the mattress is not fully encased in the protector (it’s “open” on the bottom side) but it also means I can easily remove the protector to wash it.

Sheets, pillows, comforter, etc.

Sheets: We got our sheets as a gift, they are Home brand Egyptian cotton from Meijer

Pillows: a mix of pillows we’ve had for a few years, most of them from Bed Bath and Beyond (the Isotonic Indulgence is my favorite)

Comforter: by Nate Berkus from Target

Nightstands: IKEA Hornsund (we left the feet off)

Why buy a bed online?

We started looking for a bed online because, basically, mattress stores are no fun.

We visited a couple stores before buying our Signature Sleep mattress from Amazon. We were actually hoping to lay down on a Casper or a Purple, but neither of those online mattress sellers had in-store models to try, and most of the “brand name” mattresses were outside our price range. The one mattress model we did like enough to consider buying from the store was discontinued, and the salespeople were overly pushy in trying to steer us toward a model that was nothing like it.

Buying a mattress online is great for reasons other than getting to skip the mattress store, too.

For one, you get the mattress in a portable box. If you’re getting the mattress delivered to one location before you have to move it somewhere else (such as a dorm, your new apartment that you don’t have keys to yet, your weekend place in the woods), it arrives in a (somewhat) portable rectangular box that may fit into your car (our queen size Signature Sleep fit into our Subaru Forester).

Our particular mattress is great because it’s just a bare-bones, quality mattress that you can customize to your liking with toppers. You can add as many bells and whistles as you want to (or none at all). Most, if not all, of the mattresses we found in physical stores were deluxe models with all the trimmings. There was no “basic” mattress, just expensive ones with lots of extras.

Generally speaking, the mattresses you find online are cheaper than the in-store models. Presumably there is less overhead involved with selling mattresses online (I imagine any markup is going into marketing right now). Even the “name brand” online mattresses are two-thirds to half the cost of the mattresses we found at our local mattress stores.

And, if you aren’t sure you know what you want – this “mix and match” approach to building a bed makes it easy to try different things. We weren’t sure if we were going to like sleeping on memory foam, but we figured we could send the topper back if we didn’t like it (rather than have it be a permanent, built-in part of our mattress like mattress store models).

The only major downside to buying online is it’s difficult to return a mattress purchased online. Since the mattress arrives rolled up and vacuum sealed, there’s no way for you to get it back in the box. You’d have contact Amazon or the manufacturer of the mattress for help with a return. (Some of the other online mattress retailers have their own promises regarding returns – it depends who you buy the mattress from.)

Why not buy a Casper, Purple, Leesa, etc.?

If you’ve searched for mattresses online you’ve undoubtedly already heard of Casper, Leesa, Tuft and Needle, Purple, etc. – they’re easy to find with a Google search and they’ll fill up your Facebook feed with ads for months.

We were tempted to try one of them, but we couldn’t figure out which one to place our bet on. Negative reviews seemed to complain of them being overly firm. Finally, after literally hours of watching reviews on YouTube and reading reviews on Amazon and blogs, we came to three conclusions:

they were all probably too firm
they all cost more money than we wanted to spend
they are all heavy (100+ lbs)

We were done with our bed by the time this article came out, but it confirmed another thing we were starting to suspect: some of the reviews we had been reading were not exactly “unbiased”.

The bottom line

We love our “internet bed” – and we recommend this way of buying and assembling a mattress to everyone who asks. It’s cost-effective and you can easily mix and match parts to build your dream bed in a way you can’t at a mattress store.

Here’s what we used to build our new bed, frame included, for well under $1000:

Review: Echo 2 is still the best at what it does, but there’s room for improvement

November 3, 2017 by M.B. Grant Leave a Comment

Last updated: 11/16/2017

Our Amazon Echo 2 rating:

The Echo 2 is still the best at what it does, but there’s little need to toss your gen. 1 for it

TL;DR: The new Echo is great, but if you’ve got a gen 1. Echo then there isn’t much reason to upgrade. There were some problems at launch with audio quality and Spotify Connect, but they seem to be resolved now.

11/16/2017 update [Spotify Connect problem resolved]: our Spotify Connect / Echo 2 connection problem appears to be resolved by updating to the version of the Spotify app released 2 days ago (11/14/2017). The original problem was that our new Echo 2 was not showing as a device that Spotify could connect to, even though our old Echo and our Tap (placed next to it) would show in the list of available devices. We could, however, give Alexa the command to play a playlist from Spotify – the problem seemed to be specific to seeing the Echo 2 device in the Spotify app.

11/10/2017 update [poor audio resolved]: Right after its October 31, 2017 launch, the Echo 2 suffered from audio quality problems that inspired a slew of negative reviews on Amazon.com. These problems were fixed with a software update that did result in a noticeable improvement in the Echo 2’s audio quality. The software version ending in 2320 was the “poor audio” version, and this version was replaced with 2420. It’s not a Bose or a Sonos, but it is a lot better since getting this update.

The software version ending in “2320” is the “bad audio” version. When it ends in 2420, you’ve got the update.

Our hands-on Echo 2 Review

Our new Echo 2 in Sandstone. We named it “Clothly”.

We’ve had nearly 2 weeks with our Echo 2 and we love it. The audio problems were resolved in an over-the-air patch that we got last weekend and the device works great otherwise. The microphone is noticeably more responsive (especially compared to the Dot, which seems to have a lot of trouble hearing us over background noise) and it’s really quite nice to look at. It takes up less space on my nightstand and blends in beautifully.

The Echo is still the industry standard for what a smart voice-activated assistant can be.

See the Echo 2 on Amazon.com

Echo 2 compared to the rest of the Echo family

From left to right: Echo 1st gen, Echo Tap, Echo 2, Echo Dot

The HomeUpgraded Echo family: the Echo 1st gen, the rechargeable battery-powered Echo Tap, the brand new Echo 2, and an Echo Dot.

There are basically two reasons to upgrade to an Echo 2 from a 1st gen. Echo:

You use your Echo as a music player and would like the improved audio of the Echo 2
You like the smaller form factor and new body designs

For me, the reason I ordered my Echo 2 was to get the better audio. I use my Echo overnight as a speaker to play soft music while I sleep, and during the day while I work from home. Some days, it’s on for a full 24 hours. The promise of improved audio was enough to get me to buy another one. (It helped that I wanted an Echo for our living room, too – our last room without an Alexa device in it.)

The Echo 2 can get as loud as its predecessor (which is quite loud), with richer bass and clearer quality in the “mid-range” of a song. I’d rank it above the Echo Tap (which I think suffers from an anemic bass response) and just below the lowest-end Bose in terms of richness, clarity, or bass.

In terms of audio quality, from best to worst:

Echo 2 – best audio of them all
Echo (1st generation)
Echo Tap – kind of weak on the bass and overall quality of sound, but it’s portable, so there’s that
Echo Dot – worst audio, but it’s not really marketed as a standalone speaker anyway

We have not tried the Echo Plus yet. Our understanding is it should be slightly better than the Echo 2, since it has the same Dolby speaker with a 0.8″ tweeter instead of the Echo 2’s 0.6″ tweeter.

What’s new with the Echo 2

Smaller body design

The Echo 2 is noticeably smaller and lighter weight than the 1st gen. Echo. It stands about 3″ shorter but is slightly larger in diameter.

The Echo 2’s physical durability is yet to be determined, but with a toddler running around we’ll probably find out soon enough. I once flipped my original Echo off my desk and it cartwheeled right into a wall, but survived with no physical damage (the wall lost some paint in the scuffle).

On the left: our first gen. Echo, purchased October 2015. On the right: our Echo 2, which arrived October 2017.

Lower price

At $99, it’s significantly cheaper than the original Echo, as well as Google Home and the Sonos One.

Updates to the Alexa service itself are free (and they happen passively, no need to initiate any actual update process on your end). If this is your first Echo, you’ve picked the best time to get on board.

3.5mm audio jack

The Echo 2 has an “AUX out” 3.5mm jack on the back near the bottom. This is a nice option to have, so that if you acquire a better speaker and want to hook it up to an Echo, you don’t have to buy an Echo Dot (you can use your Echo 2).

More microphones

The Echo 2 has 7 far-field voice recognition microphones. This helps it hear you over loud music or other noises in the room. I’ve found the Echo 2 to be much better at hearing me than my Echo Dots, and a little better than my 1st gen. Echo.

Interchangeable covers!

Now your Echo can be pretty! I can’t wait to see what the third-party Echo cover designers come up with. The cloth cover that came with my Echo 2 feels firm and snug.

Official shot of the “Sandstone” cloth variant, which is the one we got. It’s beautiful in person.

The Echo 2 is offered in six different body designs. I really like the Sandstone version, it blends into my nightstand decor much better than the large, black plastic original did. I also like that the speaker holes are invisible on the fabric-covered Echo 2 versions, making one solid, nice-looking body design. (The Echo 2 featured in this review is the Sandstone Fabric variant.)

For future reference, here’s how to change the Echo cover:

What’s missing from the Echo 2?

The 1st gen. Echo’s twist ring is gone.

I liked the twist ring because it was a quiet, easy way to adjust the volume in the dark. It wasn’t very granular, though, and I often found myself twisting it back and forth, trying to figure out if I’d twisted it “one” step or “two”.

The power cord only comes in black.

Unlike the white 1st gen. Echo (which some people call a 2nd generation Echo, but it’s not an Echo 2 – it’s just the white variant of the original Echo) which shipped with a white power cord, the Echo 2 power cord is black, no matter cover design you order.

Here’s the black cord and adapter that came with my “white” cloth Echo 2.

Is it worth upgrading to an Echo 2 from a 1st gen. Echo?

I wouldn’t recommend it unless you have $100 burning a hole in your pocket and a use for the old Echo (even if that use is eBaying it – there’s still a good market for used ones). It’s really quite similar. The noticeable changes are the smaller body and the audio improvements.

If you don’t have any Echo device and want one, though, the Echo 2 is a great choice.

So how do you get the best audio with an Echo right now?

If you really want good audio out of an Alexa-enabled device, though, we think you should hook an Echo Dot up to a high-quality speaker of your choosing.

Our top pick right now is the WiFi enabled Sonos PLAY:5 speaker. Yes, it’s expensive, but it works. It works with virtually any music service and it can mix/match songs across different services in its own Sonos app.

The audio quality is perfect. We used ours for months before we hooked an Echo Dot up to it, and it only made a good thing better. Alexa never sounded so good, and it’s great to issue voice-commands to our Sonos. It’s always “on”, too, so you don’t have to physically walk up to it and press the power button before you can send music to it. Spotify can see it as a speaker and stream to it painlessly.

We’re in the middle of moving house (again), but the Sonos is set up, even if it has to sit on a plastic bin.

We love our Sonos – it replaced our Dot + Bose SoundLink Mini II setup, which is more affordable and also offers excellent, room-filling audio, but it falls asleep after 30 minutes of no input. This means you have to walk over to the speaker and press its power button before you can stream music to it. The Dot cannot wake it up. We found this annoying and it’s what ultimately drove us to replace the speaker we had hooked up to our Dot.

They’ve added multi-room play to all Echoes

Some reviews suggest the multi-room play feature is unique to the Echo 2. That is inaccurate – many Echo devices support the new multi-room play feature. This guide from Amazon makes it clear which Echo devices support multi-room play and which services are supported.

At the time of this writing, the supported services are Amazon Music, Pandora, iHeartRadio, and TuneIn. It will not do do multi-room play with Apple Music, Spotify, or from a Bluetooth connection. This may change in the future. You have to do some setup to get it to work.

What could be improved in the Echo 2

We give the Echo 2 four stars out of five because we think there’s room for improvement, especially in regards to music-related features.

Volume should be more granular. Whether I adjust volume directly (using the Echo 2’s on-unit buttons) or use my phone’s volume up/down buttons, the volume goes up/down in big jumps. Since most of my listening is at a low volume, it feels like there’s really just three volume levels: off, too quiet, and too loud (and those are just the bottom 3 levels).

They should add an equalizer. I was surprised there wasn’t an equalizer in the original Echo – and I’m surprised they still haven’t added one for the Echo 2, which was advertised as being the better Echo for listening to music. On the bright side, Google Home just got an equalizer so maybe that will inspire Amazon to add one.

Spotify support is spotty. Since we use our Echoes primarily for listening to music and since we are firmly entrenched in the Spotify ecosystem, it’s hard to overlook these issues.

As of this writing there is:

No multi-room play with Spotify
A bug with Spotify app not being able to keep keep the Echo 2 in its list of available devices for Spotify Connect (11/16/2017 update: this might be fixed, Spotify issued an app update and now I see my Echo 2. I’ll remove this message once I’ve verified that the Echo 2 stays in the list for at least a few days.)
Only “my” Spotify app can Spotify Connect to the various Echoes we have around the house because the Echoes are linked to my Amazon account, even though my partner and I are in an Amazon household together and on the same Spotify family account. We do not have this problem with our Google Home Mini and Sonos WiFi speakers – both of our Spotify apps can see these devices.

The timer is oddly verbose. Set a timer and then ask Alexa how much time is left on the timer, and you get a long spiel that goes something like “You have one timer, a one minute timer, with about 50 seconds left.” It didn’t used to be this way, back when Alexa only supported one timer. Seems like a minor thing but at least we aren’t the only ones who feel this way.

Google’s got better voice-recognition (and a more natural voice). We added a Google Home and a Google Home Mini to our house this year and we think the Google devices are better at understanding a more conversational tone.

With Google, some commands can be chained which is neat (Try something like, “Hey Google, who is Barack Obama?”, then, “Hey Google, what year was he born in?” and it will understand the subject from the previous question. Then, ask “What else happened that year?” and Google Home will rattle off a bunch of events from 1961.)

Alexa’s voice recognition has trained us to speak to our Echoes in a very stilted, robotic way, but the Google Home seemed to have an easier time understanding our questions and requests. Requests include things like the aforementioned Wikipedia query, changing specific Hue lights in our home blue, dim the lights, and play a playlist with Spotify. (We think Google’s voice is more pleasing overall. And “Hey Google, laugh.” is a real treat.)

The bottom line

If you’ve always wanted an Echo, the Echo ecosystem is a great place to be – go for it. By updating the Echo product line, Amazon’s convinced us that they will continue to invest in Alexa and make periodic improvements to the Echo software. The Echo 2 is an improvement over the Echo 1 in nearly every way (the only thing we miss is the twist ring, but we can live without it).

Given the choice between the Echo 2 and the 1st gen. Echo, we would choose the Echo 2. In fact, we didn’t get the Echo Plus even though we’d love to get rid of some of the hubs we have laying around our home because we prefer the smaller, cloth-body look of the Echo 2.

Keep your expectations reasonable – for $100, it’s a great speaker, but if you want the very best audio with your Echo, this isn’t the device that’ll deliver it: what you want is an Echo Dot and a high quality speaker to plug it in to (we use a Sonos PLAY:5 with our Dot and recommend the entire Sonos line).

Nest Cam vs. Yi camera – Yi puts Nest to shame as the superior baby monitoring camera

October 15, 2017 by M.B. Grant Leave a Comment

We compare the pricey Nest Cam with paywall features to the inexpensive Yi camera that comes with everything included

Our Yi Dome Camera 1080p HD rating: 5/5

Yi camera: loads of bang for your buck

It all started when Mr. Homeupgraded’s brother got a Yi camera for watching his betta fish.

At the time, we had a Nest Cam pointed into our daughter’s crib for stealthy baby spying. But, after being on the receiving end of a bunch of high quality fish videos and snapshots, we realized that a Yi camera, which retails for about 1/3rd the price of a single Nest Cam, would make a much better baby monitor than Nest Cam.

Since we’re not rich (see: baby), we don’t shell out $10/month for Nest Aware, which is the only way to review footage from earlier or save clips from your Nest Cam.

However, Yi lets you do all that and more – for just the cost of the camera. It saves clips to an optional SD card (which you buy separately) so you can review clips and pick which ones you want to save to your phone. You can also share the stream, and it’s easy to take snapshots with a single button touch – all features that the Nest Cam either doesn’t have, or locks up behind Nest’s $10/month Nest Aware subscription. (Yi offers a cloud service, too, if you want off-site backup and more footage than you can fit onto the SD card.)

Basically, the fish had a better camera than our baby. There was only one thing left to do: we bought a Yi Dome Camera and put it to the test as our new baby spy cam.

TL;DR: The Yi camera put Nest to shame. I think I’m going to eBay my collection of Nest Cams and start over with Yi.

See the Yi camera on Amazon.com

Yi Dome Camera at a glance

1080p HD video (there’s also a cheaper 720p version with the same features)
Complete 360° coverage – 112° wide-angle lens, 345° horizontal & 115° vertical rotation range for that you can navigate manually (through the app) or set up to automatically scan the room – you can also get a Yi camera that doesn’t rotate or pan but the price is the same
High quality night vision (up to 3 meters in pitch dark) thanks to 8 built-in 940nm infrared LED beads, with no LED glare (some cameras have a brighter red ring of LEDs for night vision)
Crying baby sensor sends a “Crying baby” alert to your phone
2-way audio sounds about as good as being on speakerphone
Optional SD card storage – supports up to 32GB card (here’s ours) so you can save videos to the camera
Optional cloud service – for a monthly fee, store unlimited camera footage in Yi’s cloud

Yi Dome Camera unboxed

What’s in the box

Yi Dome Camera itself
White micro USB power cord, with micro usb on one end and usb on the other
USB adapter
Mounting base and screws for mounting the camera on a wall or ceiling
Setup instruction and a couple advertisements for other Yi products

The cord seems to be about 5′ long, which is great for running it behind the baby’s dresser.

Nest app vs. Yi app

Both apps look nice, but if you compare feature sets it’s no contest: Yi beats Nest, hands down.

On the left, you’ll see our Nest Cam app offers very little beyond viewing a live stream of footage. If you pay Nest’s $10/month subscription fee, you’d get little thumbnails representing stored video clips. If you don’t pay their fee, you get half a screen of wasted space and no way to look back in time.

On the right is the Yi Home app, with buttons for useful actions. You can toggle audio muting, record video from the live stream, turn the microphone on/off, take a snapshot that gets saved directly to your phone’s photos, and switch to full-screen mode. There’s the timeline you can navigate to see recent events, and those same events are saved in a list elsewhere in the app. You can adjust whether the camera streams in high definition or standard, and even view its transfer speed with your WiFi.

Here’s a little guide I made for the Yi control menu in the center of the screen. There are even more options, but these are the ones I use most of the time when checking on my baby.

Look at all the things Yi can do!

Yi gives you “premium” features for the cost of the camera – no monthly fee

These features are all available for free on a Yi camera.

There is no free Nest equivalent. Seriously, none – if you want to grab a pic of what you’re looking at through your Nest Cam, you have to take a screenshot with your phone. (And you probably have to turn on device rotation and actually turn your phone 90 degrees if you want the screenshot to be full-screen.)

If you want to see what happened an hour ago, you’re out of luck – unless you’re a Nest Aware subscriber. If you want to save video as something is happening live in front of your camera, there’s no way to do it – unless you’re a subscriber.

Basically, Nest charges $10/month for features you get for free with a Yi camera, and a Yi camera costs about 1/3rd what a Nest Cam does.

More things to love about Yi camera

There’s a full-screen mode in the Yi app and it’s accessed via button in the Yi app. You don’t have to turn off the portrait orientation lock on your phone itself. This makes it very fast to get into full-screen mode and take advantage of every inch of your phone’s screen.

Event timeline or continuous recording

The timeline of events makes it easy to review recent clips by dragging your finger around in the timeline. These events are also saved to the Alerts tab of the app, where you can review and download clips.

Alternatively, you can set the camera to constantly record. It records in a loop and automatically overwrites old footage to record new footage. I’m not sure yet how much footage it holds – I turned on continuous recording 5 days ago and it still hasn’t started overwriting old footage. With a 32GB SD card, it holds at least 5 days worth of footage.

My Yi camera is set to continuously record, which lets me scrub around the timeline to review the past 5+ days worth of footage.

Save clips is easy

If you’re reviewing footage and you see your kid doing something cute, it’s easy to drag the timeline to where you want the clip to begin and record off the recorded footage. The clip gets saved to your phone.

Compare this to Nest Cams, which are really only for live streaming unless you cough up a monthly $10 fee per camera for their cloud backup storage. It’d be nice if Nest would let me back up to an SD card or my local network storage, but no, it has to be their expensive cloud solution or nothing at all. :\

Yi cameras also offer live video recording. If you see something interesting happening, you can tap a button and start recording instantly. This video is saved to the camera’s SD card and your immediately downloaded to your phone.

Share your stream

It’s easy to share your camera’s stream with family or friends. Just have them create a Yi account and then invite them via email. (You can also revoke access just as easily.)

Alert log and crying baby alert

Crying Baby alert. It lags behind the actual cry by about a minute, but so far it has correctly identified cries (and only occasionally mistaken other noises for cries).

The notification comes with an awkwardly formatted timestamp. This cry happened at 12:24pm.

If you want to review all the recent crying baby alerts, they get saved into the Activity Alerts tab for quick review.

A variety of cloud backup options. If you need the extra peace of mind granted by uploading your footage to a cloud, then Yi’s cloud service has several options to pick from.

The most intriguing option is the uploading mode, where you can select to upload only motion detected videos for up to five devices or you can upload a 24/7 stream from one camera. If you have five Yi cameras, that’s a screaming deal compared to what it would cost to have Nest Aware on five Nest Cams. You also get the first month of Yi cloud for free.

Yi’s subscription plans are available in the app itself:

We don’t have the subscription, since we only use the camera to see if the baby’s awake or just making sounds in her sleep. We like to review footage from the past night, but we don’t have much need to monitor her crib 24/7 or make backups of her sleeping.

Yi vs. Nest hardware

Both our Nest Cams and our Yi camera are 1080p. The image quality is great in both daylight and nighttime.

There is, however, one very noticeable difference between the two cameras: the Nest has a ring of red LEDs around its lens when it’s in night vision mode, but the Yi camera does not have these red LEDs.

This is fantastic because our baby would stare at the Nest Cam in the dark, probably because the red ring catches her attention. We haven’t found her staring at the Yi camera in the dark. Whatever Yi did to avoid the red ring of LEDs in the dark, I’m glad they did it.

Also, you can even disable the Yi’s little blue “on” light (through the app) to make the camera completely invisible in the dark.

Things we don’t love

The Yi camera is awesome enough to reward it 5 stars, but there are just a couple things we hope they improve:

The camera can’t look “down” enough to see into a crib without some assistance. Even though the camera has a huge range of motion, it couldn’t look “down” enough to see into a crib that it’s about 2 feet away from. We had to slide something under our camera to get a good view of Peach’s crib. We will probably mount the camera on the wall, eventually, but for now… it’s gotta live on the dresser…with a book halfway under it.

The camera snapshot shown on the app’s main page is stale. It might be hours out of date when you open the app. (It seems to display whatever you were last looking at, or where you left the timeline.)

You have to tap the preview to get an updated image. I suspect this stale image problem is a bug that might get fixed in the future.

The bottom line

It’s like getting all the stuff Nest charges you a monthly fee for, for free – and that’s after you buy a camera that’s 1/3rd the price of a Nest Cam. Even if you need a cloud backup, Yi’s plans are more reasonably priced, especially for multiple devices.

We love the dome camera’s ability to pan the room, and at the time we got it, the dome camera was priced the same as the stationary Yi camera. Heck, you can even get a 4-pack of Yi cameras for less than the price of a single Nest Cam.

Best of all, we think it’s a fantastic baby monitor. The image quality is excellent – even in the dark and through her crib slats, we can tell which way she’s facing, if she’s still got her pacifier in, and listen for her breathing on the microphone. The cry alerts are useful, too.

If you need a great baby or home surveillance camera, get a Yi camera and a 32GB SD card. You won’t regret it.

Shop for the Yi camera on Amazon.com

Fisher Price 4-in-1 Step ‘n Play Piano is a musical baby toy that won’t drive you crazy

January 8, 2017 by M.B. Grant 1 Comment

Sometimes we take a break from home automation and speakers to tell you about a cool new thing in our baby’s life. Today, we’re looking at the Fisher-Price 4-in-1 Step ‘n Play Piano activity center.

5 / 5 stars

Now that our daughter (known as Peach on this blog) can hold her head up, she’s ready to sit in her Fisher Price 4-in-1 Step ‘n Play Piano! We love this musical activity center and best of all, she loves it, too.

The music is pleasing and there’s plenty to do, even with the audio turned off.

Peach is 3 months / 15 lbs in this photo. She’s exactly on the 50th percentile line at her pediatrician visits so she’s perfectly average in terms of size for her age.

Step ‘n Play Piano short demo videos

Here’s my hand pressing and spinning the “drums”, changing the play mode to “Long Play”, and hitting keys while my 3-month-old watches.

Here’s “Long Play” mode, a 10-minute loop of songs (3 songs have lyrics, the rest are just synth goodness). While in “Long play”, you can still hit the keys and hear an audio reaction.

Finally, here’s a quick demo of the individual keys:

Why we love the Step ‘n Play Piano

There’s a lot to love about this musical activity center!

Easy assembly

It took my partner about an hour to put it together (he surprised me with it when I woke up from a nap).

Mostly you just snap pieces together, but you’ll need a Philips screwdriver to open the battery compartment (and three AA batteries). The batteries install on the underside of the “drums” console.

If you get this before you give birth, go ahead an assemble it because even though “an hour” doesn’t sound like a time-consuming project, it will be when your baby is 8 weeks old and doesn’t sleep for more than 20 minutes and you will gaze longingly at its box, wishing it was assembled.

Use it early, use it for a long time

The “4-in-1” refers to this play center’s various configurations.

For your really little baby (like, 4 weeks – 12 weeks), you can use it like a tummy time mat. (Note that the mat itself doesn’t play notes – it’s the base of the play center that plays notes, and the mat just sits on top.)

Here’s a model baby showing us how it’s done.

Once your baby is comfortable sitting upright and holding up her own head (for us, that was around 8 weeks), she can graduate to the chair. At 3 months old, our Peach just kind of sits in the chair and looks around (she doesn’t pick up the toys yet) and every once in a while, she accidentally hits a note on the pad. Fun times, I tells ya.

Later, you can remove the chair entirely and let your kiddo stand in the middle where the chair used to be. Many reviewers say their 2 year olds play with the Step ‘n Play piano so we’re looking forward to a good 2+ years of use out of this thing (possibly longer if we have another baby). The design certainly seems rugged enough to hold up to some good hitting and banging, and it seems difficult to tip over, except by someone well over the intended age range.

Soft chair edge

The edge around the chair is firm but still pretty soft, which is great because at three months old, Peach is still prone to bashing her face into things. The chair spins easily, too.

We also have the Bright Starts Bounce Bounce Baby activity center and its chair has a harder edge and is more difficult to turn, so Peach can’t turn the chair around on her own in that one.

A great-sounding musical toy

All of this toy’s musical notes are electronically generated. There are some toys that click or clack but the notes and songs only play with three AA batteries loaded into the console.

Peach’s dad is very musically inclined so that’s a big part of why we wanted a musical toy for her in the first place. Specifically, we wanted a musical toy where the keys correspond to actual notes, not a full song that plays out. This is surprisingly hard to find, and it’s why we also bought a mini Casio keyboard to play with her instead of any of the numerous “baby keyboards” that play full songs when you hit the notes.

The big plastic keys (red, orange, yellow, green) and the touch-sensitive regions on the base (covered by the printed key mat) make up an F major chord (F A C F). In layman’s terms, this means they sound good when played together.

These “drums” play sounds, too.

Three play modes

[From the manual]

Short Play – Press or spin the turntables to hear drum riffs. Press the piano keys on the upper rail or step on the piano mat to hear musical ditties. Press the music notes for sound effects.

Long Play – Plays approximately 10 minutes of music! Step on the piano mat while music is playing for fun lights. Press the piano keys, spin or press the turntables or press the music notes to hear more sounds!

Baby Makes Music – Spin the turntable to play drum riffs or press for drum sounds! Press the piano keys on the upper rail or step on the piano mat to play piano sounds. Press the music notes for more musical sounds.

Acoustic toys, too

There’s also a bunch of “acoustic” toys that don’t correspond to any digital sound. The little slidey piece and the plastic ball on the guitar don’t generate notes, the mirror is just for looking into, and the rattle makes a nice acoustic rattle sound.

Clockwise, from upper left:

Shake the microphone (it’s a rattle)
Slide the plastic notes (they click)
Press the red, orange, yellow, and green keys to play notes or sound effects, depending on what mode the console is set to
Console (removable, contains batteries): press the yellow button, spin the red one, change the audio mode
Guitar: roll the ball, slide the slider
Mirror: a warping fun-house mirror
Plastic tabs: flip back and forth
Tambourine: another fun rattle toy

Middle:

The squishy seat sits in a larger plastic piece that glides along rails. There’s also a clear plastic tube full of little plastic balls to tumble, a snack tray, and some discs that slide along an elevated track.

The tambourine and “microphone” (it’s a rattle) detach from the base and click into the removable control console.

You can detach the rattle and tambourine like so:

And plug them into the battery-powered console, which is also removable:

Since we essentially live in two places, with regular trips to Grandma’s, this detachable portion is really cool. This is the same part that holds the batteries, and all the same songs play if you turn it on.

Just one drawback

It doesn’t disassemble easily, so don’t count on flattening it to put it away between play sessions. We keep it at our weekend place because there’s no room in our city apartment, but if it folded up we would totally bring it with us everywhere.

Other than that, though, this activity center is great – it’s a safe place to put baby down for a few minutes while you fold some laundry and it looks like it’ll be entertaining our little one well into her toddler years.

How to turn a Bose SoundLink Mini into a white noise machine

January 5, 2017 by M.B. Grant 1 Comment

Continuing our series of re-purposing Bose SoundLink speakers, today’s post is about how to use a Bluetooth speaker (such as the popular Bose SoundLink Mini) as a white noise machine!

If you have a Bluetooth speaker laying around and you want to use it as a white noise machine, read on!

Previously: How to use your Bose SoundLink Mini as a soundbar for your TV

This is the speaker I use as a white noise machine, but the techniques I describe in this article can work with virtually any speaker.

When our first baby was born 3 months ago, we quickly realized that white noise helped her (and us) fall asleep and stay that way in our small apartment where everyone can hear everyone else. I have several dedicated white noise machines (my favorite is the LectroFan Jr.) but I thought, why not turn the Bose SoundLink Mini into a white noise machine, too? It’s not like I’m using it for music while I’m trying to get myself or the baby to sleep.

Turns out, this was easy to do – and there’s quite a few ways to do it.

(Don’t feel like you have to do it this way or you have to have this exact equipment – I just didn’t want to be vague and refer to features that may or may not exist on specific Bluetooth speakers.)

What speakers does this work with?

I wrote these steps for the SoundLink Mini because that’s what I use, but there’s really nothing particularly special about it. If you have a speaker with AUX in or Bluetooth pairing capabilities, then one or more of the techniques in this article should work for you.

Since most people want to play white noise for hours on end (ie: overnight), you’ll want your phone plugged in to a power source if you’re streaming over Bluetooth or you’ll want to stream over WiFi so your phone’s audio isn’t tied up (explained more further down in this article). Also, if your speaker is portable and rechargeable, you’ll want keep the speaker plugged in or on its base so that it doesn’t die in the middle of the night.

Technique #1: Stream to the SoundLink over WiFi with an Echo Dot and Spotify Connect

I think this is the best approach. It’s “set it and forget it”, versatile, and easy to use. You don’t have to leave your phone near the speaker or tie up its audio output. However, this technique works only if you have access to a WiFi network, so it’s great for home but not so great for travel. You’ll need an Echo Dot to give the SoundLink WiFi capabilities, since the SoundLink speaker can’t connect to WiFi on its own.

This is my default setup for playing music and white noise over my SoundLink Mini.

What you need

Spotify Premium account with a playlist containing at least one “white noise” song
Amazon Echo Dot
3.5mm AUX cable
A speaker with an AUX input jack (SoundLink Mini and Amazon Tap both have this)

This setup looks complicated compared to the others, but it’s great because you can just stream from an online service (such as Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Music, etc) to your speaker without having to tie up your phone’s audio output, draining your phone battery on Bluetooth, having to keep your phone near the speaker, or having any issues with the Bluetooth connection cutting in and out.

To get a setup like mine:

Set up a Spotify playlist of one white noise “song” and set it to loop. This is my Spotify “white noise” playlist
Hook up an Amazon Echo Dot to your Bose SoundLink Mini (via an AUX cable) to give the SoundLink speaker WiFi capabilities. (If you’re trying to stream to a speaker that has built-in WiFi connectivity like a Sonos PLAY:1, you can skip the Echo Dot middleman part.)
Turn on the speaker
Set it to AUX input
Open the Spotify app and select the white noise playlist
Hit play and set the Device to your Echo Dot

The SoundLink does not have WiFi connectivity by itself; you have to hook it up to something like an Echo Dot to give it that power.

Advantages

Easy to set up and use
Streaming over WiFi doesn’t drain phone battery like Bluetooth would
Can still use phone for calls, watching junk on Facebook, recording videos of your pets or kids, etc while the white noise is going
No Bluetooth dropout from interference
Control volume from your phone (or any device with Spotify on your WiFi network)
Play/Pause from your phone (or any device with Spotify on your WiFi network)
Easily switch to music when you’re done with the white noise
Don’t have to keep phone near speaker
You get all the fun features of Amazon’s Alexa

Disadvantages

Requires an Echo Dot to make the Bose SoundLink Mini into a WiFi speaker
Not travel friendly: having to bring a Dot and pair it with WiFi in every hotel would be annoying
Streaming over WiFi isn’t 100% perfect – I still hear the occasional dropout, though far less on WiFi than over Bluetooth. Some days it goes for hours without a cutout, so it might just come down to connection quality.

This approach isn’t ideal for travel, since you’d have to bring your Echo Dot with and get everything on the WiFi network wherever you go (assuming there even is one).

Technique #2: Stream to the SoundLink over Bluetooth from your phone

This is an alternative way to turn your SoundLink into a white noise machine. If you don’t have (or want to buy) an Echo Dot, you can instead connect to the speaker over Bluetooth. The big disadvantages here are that your phone’s audio output is tied up (you can’t make a call or watch a video on Facebook, for example, without stopping the white noise) and streaming Bluetooth from your phone drains the phone’s battery. You also have to keep your phone near the speaker (or at least in the same room-ish).

To play white noise over Bluetooth:

Set up a Spotify playlist of one white noise “song” and set it to loop. This is my Spotify “white noise” playlist. (Or use whatever music service you like – I recommend something you can play from your phone’s local storage without WiFi so you’re not also draining your battery on Bluetooth streaming.)
Pair your device with the SoundLink mini
Let ‘er rip – white noise will play through the speaker until you tell it to stop

Personally, I find Bluetooth connections kind of unstable. They seem more prone to blips and brief interruptions, which is particularly annoying when you want a solid whooosh of white noise washing over you without pauses.

Advantages

Requires the fewest parts – assuming you already have a phone and a SoundLink, you have everything you need for this approach
Easy to use – just like how you already use the speaker for playing songs
Travel friendly

Disadvantages

Can’t play any other audio on your source device, since its audio is being piped to the SoundLink (so YouTube, Facebook videos, recording videos on your phone, and making phone calls are all out while the phone is busy playing white noise through the SoundLink)
Drains device battery streaming Bluetooth
Somewhat more prone to cutting out – not ideal for a white noise experience
Your phone has to stay in range of the SoundLink speaker

Technique #3: Connect via an AUX cable and play directly from your device to the SoundLink speaker

This is my favorite technique for turning a SoundLink into a white noise machine when I travel. The SoundLink travels pretty well so I often bring it with in my luggage. The AUX cable provides a much more stable connection to the speaker than Bluetooth does, in my experience. Once connected, set the SoundLink to AUX mode and play the white noise song like you would any song. Like the Bluetooth technique above, though, this technique also ties up audio on the phone.

Advantages

Strong connection unlikely to cut out
Easy to set up
Travel friendly

Disadvantages

Must keep phone close to speaker and connected from a wire – not great for in-bed phone web surfing
Drains device battery because it’s constantly playing music

Where to find a white noise “song” to play

You’ll need some kind of white noise audio source, whether it’s on your device (ie: saved to your phone) or on someone else’s server, such as Spotify’s. Honestly, finding a good song that would loop cleanly (no fades, no obvious markers of repetition inside the song) was the hardest part of this whole project.

Why I recommend Spotify

Spotify’s a great place to browse for white noise “songs” because you can find out if they loop or not without spending buck after buck or having to wade through reviews and guess. Spotify has a lot of white noise “songs” to choose from. Some are better than others – a lot of them have an audible fade out/fade in, which sucks and totally defeats the purpose.

After some trial and error, I found Pouring Rain – Loopable with no fade. This is my favorite “white noise” song on Spotify because it sounds great and I can’t hear it looping. I found this song inside a larger collection called White Noise Therapy, which has about a zillion similar “songs” to pick from so you can find your favorite (also good: Waterfalls and Dulled White Noise).

To get a single song to loop on Spotify, you have to make a playlist and put that one song in it. Set the playlist to loop with this arrow button:

Here’s the 1-song playlist I use for Pouring Rain (you may have to set it to loop yourself, I’m not sure if looping on/off is “saved” with a playlist). Since I have Spotify Premium, I downloaded the song locally to use it even when I don’t have a WiFi connection.

Note: I’ve never used Spotify without Premium so I don’t know what the non-Premium experience is like. Presumably, Premium means I can play it as much as I want and without ads, which is essential to having a nice, relaxing loop going.

Dig around in your favorite music streaming or music buying app and I’m sure you’ll find something you like.

Happy listening!

Review: Shush the world with these affordable white noise machines

January 1, 2017 by M.B. Grant Leave a Comment

I blame summer for my box fan addiction. My parents started it – rather than run the air conditioning, they’d stick a box fan in my bedroom window. The first night with the fan was noisy, but then I’d get used to it. Come September I’d turn the fan off and be instantly reminded of all the noise around me: cars starting, lawns getting mowed at 7am, the TV in the living room below me, someone snoring in the other bedroom. I started running the fan year-round. (The Lasko Wind Machine was my fan of choice for many years.)

A year ago, I finally decided to ~~get civilized~~ retire my box fan and invest in a white noise machine. No more big fan eating up precious space in my bedroom, no more blades to clean, no more clickety-click sound after a couple years, and – best of all – I could take the machine with me when I traveled.

My three white noise machines: a HoMedics Sound Spa, a LectroFan Jr., and a LectroFan (full model)

I’ve now got three white noise machines: a HoMedics Sound Spa (my first white noise machine), a Lectro Fan, and a Lectro Fan Jr. How do they stack up? Which white noise machine is best? Read on to find out!

Why use a noise machine?

During the week, we live in a city apartment. Our friends and family from suburbia are always like, isn’t it loud there? We don’t live over a nightclub or anything ridiculous, but there is a hotel across the street, and that street is a flat stretch of road that attracts loud cars with loud stereos. There’s a construction site adjacent to my building that fires up at 7:30 on the dot six days a week, and a whole lot of random neighbor noises.

But… it’s easy to forget all of that when my white noise machines are running.

Most people probably discover white noise machines while searching for help with insomnia or sleep quality, but they’re useful all day long. It might seem counter-intuitive that adding sound makes it easier to relax and sleep when all you want is some peace and quiet, but the brain is quick to adapt to the steady whooooosh.

The white noise becomes the “new quiet”and irritating noises fade away.

What’s great about a white noise machine:

It covers up intermittent sounds. Neighbors starting cars, snoring from the other room, electric heater cycling on/off, people in the unit above you stomping around – these things get lost in the white noise.
Better sleep. I definitely sleep deeper and wake fewer times with mine running (it also works on babies).
No fan blades to clean! Or I suppose you could just never clean them, and live with the knowledge that your dirty fan blades are disgusting. Or you could buy a new fan every so often, but those costs add up.
It’s compact and portable, so you can bring your whooosh with you and enjoy the same sound in every hotel bed and guest room you travel to.
Get some daytime peace and quiet. Even if you aren’t sleeping, a white noise machine is good at covering up conversations, TVs, music, etc. coming from nearby areas or adjacent rooms so you can work, read, or have a semi-private conversation with someone near you. My baby is napping on the other side of the room as I write this, unbothered by my quiet conversation and typing.

There are virtually no drawbacks. The only times I turn my white noise machine off are to watch TV in the same room, have ordinary-volume conversations, or for the benefit of my father, who has enough trouble hearing even without the white noise.

Overall best white noise machine: LectroFan Jr.

4.5 / 5 stars

The LectroFan Jr. is my favorite white noise machine. If you’re not sure which one to get, get this one. It’s the jack of all trades white noise machine, reasonably priced, and durable.

A fantastic white noise machine in a compact package.

It makes a pleasing white noise, gets more than loud enough, offers a variety of “whooshing” sound options, and can be found at a surprisingly reasonable price. It’s also small – a bit larger than the palm of my hand – so it travels well.

But wait! Isn’t this the “junior” version? What do you miss out on if you go with this model instead of the full version – the one simply called “LectroFan”?

LectroFan Jr. vs. LectroFan

Bizarrely, there’s a lot of misinformation about the LectroFan Jr. vs. the LectroFan out there on the interwebs and Amazon reviews. (I’m guessing most people don’t own both and are speculating as to what the differences are.)

So let’s set a few things straight:

neither one plays “ocean” or “nature” sounds
neither one has a battery
neither one offers a headphone jack

(If you do want these features, check out the LectroFan Micro which has a battery, ocean sound, and doubles as a Bluetooth speaker. If you want lots of nature sounds and a headphone jack, check out the Sound+Sleep.)

The LectroFan Jr and LectroFan have exactly the same body design and number of buttons.

They weigh the same, feel the same, smell the same, taste the same – and do pretty much the same thing except the LectroFan Jr. has 18 lullaby songs plus 12 fan / white noise sounds and the LectroFan has 20 fan / white noise sounds to pick from. Playing the lullabies is completely optional.

On the Jr. model, the horizontal button does lullaby songs (left) and white noise + fan sounds (right). On the LectroFan, the horizontal button does fans (left) and white noises (right).

LectroFan Jr. lullaby demo

LectroFan Jr. comes with 18 songs and you can set it to play all the songs in shuffled order or play one song on repeat. Here’s a 1-minute video previewing some of the LectroFan’s 18 lullabies (as best my iPhone can capture them).

If you leave it playing lullabies, it will play them in random order and then shuffle them once it’s played them all. You can use the 60 min timer with them (press the 60 min timer multiple times to “stack” the timers, creating a 2-, 3-, 4-, etc. hour-long timer). The machine remembers what lullaby you left it on, even after you turn it off and back on. Note that you can’t play lullabies and white noise at the same time from the same machine.

For whatever it’s worth, my 3 month old baby doesn’t particularly care for the lullabies (or lullabies in general), so I don’t know if the songs are that big a selling point.

But that’s okay – the songs are kind of a side dish to the meat function of this white noise machine, which is the fan and white noise sounds.

LectroFan Jr. fan and white noise sound demo

The LectroFan Jr. puts “fans” and “white noises” on the same button. That’s fine – most people can’t tell a “fan” from a “white noise” anyway, and it’s not some huge loss that you have to step through fans to get to white noises. The machine remembers what you left it on, even if you turn it off and unplug it, so it’s pretty much “set it and forget it” once you pick a favorite.

The first couple “fan noises” sound great to me and I just leave it on one of them all the time (maybe I’m just not much of a noise connoisseur). Some of the higher pitched fan noises are kind of annoying, to be honest. But with 12 to pick from, I’m sure there’s one for everyone.

The LectroFan (full model), by comparison, has 10 white noises and 10 fan sounds to pick from. But do you really need 8 extra? They’re even the same sounds across both models – it’s not like the Jr model got the recording of the squeaky fan and the full model got the good fan.

LectroFan Jr. color options

Here’s a fun extra: the Jr. comes in three color options. You can get it with a white, pink, or blue speaker grille (it’s hard plastic, not cloth).

They also make one that’s black with grey buttons, but only for the full model: here’s the LectroFan in black.

I bought all of mine in white because I’m boring.

LectroFan Jr. / LectroFan USB power adapter

Both the Jr. and not-Jr. have the exact same USB / AC adapter plug. You can power the white noise machine via USB (ie: plug it into your computer or laptop and it pulls power from there – seems useful for travel, maybe) or plug that USB plug into the AC adapter and power it from a wall outlet.

Here’s the other end of the power cord. Note that it’s removable, suggesting that you could replace the cord without replacing the entire unit, if needed.

To recap:

LectroFan Jr. Pros

Cheaper than the LectroFan with no real drawbacks
18 lullabies
3 colors: white, pink, blue
Compact design and it travels well
You can stack the 60 min timers to make a 1-, 2-, 3-, etc. hour timer
It remembers your sound choices when you turn it off and back on
No LEDs to cover up or be annoyed by
No discernible loop

LectroFan Jr. Cons

Can’t play lullabies and white noise at the same time
A couple of the higher-pitched white noise options are unpleasant to the point that I wonder why they even exist

LectroFan (full version)

4/ 5 stars

More sounds, no lullabies: the original LectroFan offers more sounds but is it worth the higher price?

Just like a Jr. but without the lullabies and 8 more noise options.

The LectroFan (full version) is pricier than the Jr. with 4 more “fan sounds” and 4 more “white noises”. As a slight convenience, the sideways button in the middle separates the “fans” (on left) from the “whites” (on right). Still, I’d argue that once you’ve found your favorite whoooooosh, you won’t be toggling it much (if ever).

The only reason to get the full version LectroFan is if you’re convinced you need 20 sounds to pick from instead of 12.

That’s not to say I don’t like it. The LectroFan is fantastic machine and I use mine every single night and often leave it running for days, so maybe I’m just cheesed that I found the LectroFan before I found the Jr.

When I bought my first one, I incorrectly assumed the Jr. wouldn’t be nearly as good a machine, but the Jr. model really does everything I need (generate white noise) at a significantly lower price.

LectroFan white noise machine demo

Watch me click through the various fan sounds and white noise options on the LectroFan!

LectroFan Pros

10 fan loops/ 10 white noise
There’s a black version!
Compact design and it travels well
You can stack the 60 min timers to make a 1-, 2-, 3-, etc. hour timer
It remembers your sound choices when you turn it off and back on
No LEDs to cover up or be annoyed by
No discernible loop

LectroFan Cons

Nothing special about it vs. the Jr. model

HoMedics Sound Spa Relaxation Machine

3 / 5 stars

It’s inexpensive, I’ll give it that.

The HoMedics Sound Spa was my very first white noise machine. It’s cheap (you can usually find it for under $25) but its cheap construction is readily apparent, especially once you’ve traveled with it a bit and it starts to wear out. The volume knob is fiddly – it works, but sometimes it defaults to REALLY LOUD until you spin it around, which seems to reset it.

“Rain” and “white noise” are my favorite settings on this machine, and I used them for months until one night I was laying awake and realized I could hear the rain sound looping. It’s a short loop, like 3 seconds long, which is ridiculous – and I can’t unhear the loop. Picking up on the repetitive sounds kind of ruined the machine for me but my infant daughter doesn’t seem to be bothered by it, so sometimes I use it for her.

The HoMedics Sound Spa is kind of junky and I don’t recommend it when you can get a sweet LectroFan Jr. for not much more.

But, if you really want a cheap rainstorm generator, this is the machine for you. After all, it took me a long time to identify the loop, and people I’ve pointed it out to don’t really pick up on the loop so maybe it’s not as apparent as I think it is. The white noise option is good, too, and doesn’t have as easily a discernible loop.

Here’s a demo of its various sounds, as best my iPhone can capture them (they sound better in person):

HoMedics Sound Spa Pros

Probably the cheapest sound machine on the market
5 realistic soundscapes (thunder, ocean, brook, etc) are great until you find the loop
Three timer options

HoMedics Sound Spa Cons

The sound loops are literally three seconds long and if you’re laying awake long enough, you can pick up on the loop pretty easily
Flimsy volume knob
Even on its lowest volume, it can be too loud – we sometimes throw a shirt over its speaker
Bright green LED has to be covered if you’re bothered by lights in the dark

If your budget is really tight and you really want the soundscapes, go for it – otherwise, you’ll probably be happier with a LectroFan Jr for whoooshy white noise or an Adaptive Sound Technologies – Sound+Sleep, which is pricier but higher quality and also does soundscapes.

More white noise machine options

There’s more than just LectroFans and Sound Spas out there. Here’s a quick rundown of some other white noise machines.

Marpac Dohm-DS All Natural Sound Machine

Marpac has a 50+ year history in sound machines

Unlike many sound machines (including the LectroFans), the Marpac Dohm-DS sound machine is mechanical. There’s an actual spinning fan inside and you can adjust its volume and pitch by turning the chassis. (And even though it’s a fan, it doesn’t generate a breeze. Such witchcraft.)

Marpac, the company behind it, has been making sound machines for over 50 years and this particular machine was chosen as the Official Sound Conditioner by the National Sleep Foundation.

Reviewers from around the web compare its sound to that of a bathroom fan or a computer tower fan. I don’t own this machine so I can’t comment on its sound myself, but here’s a video review that demos what it sounds like running:

The most common complaints I see about the Marpac Dohm-DS are about mechanical failure (the fan starts clicking or stops running altogether) and about the volume (hard to be more specific, though – one person’s jet engine is another’s too-quiet hum).

I debated this machine vs. the LectroFan for a while and ultimately went with the LectroFan because I’m somewhat susceptible to hearing the “mechanics” (clicking, whirring) of mechanical things and prefer an electronically generated sound.

Marpac Dohm-DS Pros

Mechanical fan sounds more realistic to some listeners
Hands-on control of pitch and volume
Small size, so it travels well
7.5 foot long cord
Three color options: white, black, tan

Marpac Dohm-DS Cons

Some users compare unfavorably to bad PC fans and the like
Mechanical fan can develop clicks or whines more readily than an electronic sound

Adaptive Sound Technologies – Sound+Sleep Sleep Therapy System

I don’t have one of these, but I wish I did! This is one deluxe noise machine.

The Sound+Sleep machine is made by ASTI, the same Silicon Valley-based startup that makes LectroFan. The big difference (aside from price) is the variety of “sound stories”, such as “meadow” or “ocean”. With this little machine, you can fall asleep to the sound of rain instead of just a white noise whoooosh.

If you want more than white noise, check out the Sound+Sleep’s 10 soundscapes

Adjustable richness adds layers, variety

Like LectroFan, this machine can be used to play white noise. However, the Sound+Sleep also plays a variety of “sound stories” such as ocean, meadow, rainfall, and more. Some are a little odd, like the train option. (I grew up near a train station and I can’t imagine who would want to listen to trains at night, but there you go.) You can hear samples here on Sound+Sleep’s website (with some dude yapping over them).

This chart from the manufacturer explains it:

Click to enlarge

Adaptive feature adjusts to your environment

The Sound+Sleep’s Adaptive feature uses the unit’s built-in microphone to listen to your environment and dynamically adjust the volume based on how noisy it perceives your environment to be. (Note that this isn’t like the technology inside noise-canceling headphones, it’s not working to “cancel out” audio from your environment, it’s just adjusting the volume to suit the environment you’re using it in.) You can toggle this feature on or off.

White noise machine with a headphone jack

Everyone’s asking for it – this machine’s got it. You can also use an aux cable to hook the Sound+Sleep up to the “line in” on an external audio system. This might be useful if you’ve got a sweet multi-speaker setup or just want to pipe the sound to both sides of your bed.

4 white noise options

For white noise, use the three richness settings of the “white noise” sound story and the lowest setting of the waterfall sound story.

Sound+Sleep Pros

10 unique “sound stories”
Richness feature adds optional additional sounds to the “stories”, such as seagulls to the ocean
No detectible looping – the soundscapes are 30+ mins long and “evolve”
3″ high fidelity speaker
4 timer options if you don’t want it to run all night
Adaptive feature (toggle on/off) to adjust volume to suit your environment
Headphone jack for private listening
Can connect to an external audio system’s “line in” using the headphone jack
Turn off LEDs by toggling Display button (so you don’t have to throw a towel over it at night)

Sound+Sleep Cons

One of the priciest sound machines out there
Not a lot of white noise variety – this machine is more of a sound machine than a white noise machine
LEDs come back on for 15 seconds if you adjust a setting while Display is turned off

They also make a “mini” version with fewer sound stories and an overall smaller body design.

LectroFan Micro

Finally, there’s the LectroFan Micro – an ultra portable version of the LectroFan that sacrifices very little and adds Bluetooth pairing capabilities.

The LectroFan Micro packs in 5 fan sounds, 4 white noise sounds, and 1 ocean sound.

Battery-powered white noise machine lasts through the night

Playing its own sounds, the battery lasts about 16 hours. Streaming music or sounds over Bluetooth, the battery lasts about 6 hours. (Or you can just keep it plugged in via its USB charge cord and run it indefinitely.)

Smallest white noise machine

It’s ridiculously tiny – like, I think makeup comes in bigger containers. Reviewers say it has a lot of oomph despite its small size, and the manufacturer says it gets just as loud as the full LectroFan models. I’ve never seen a smaller white noise machine.

Another interesting feature: the speaker can twist up and point anywhere you want.

You can angle the speaker!

LectroFan Micro vs. LectroFan Jr.

They’re similarly priced, so why not get the Micro instead of the Jr.?

Well, they’re not similarly priced once you account for the possibility of having to buy a longer USB charge cable and USB/AC adapter so you can run it overnight. I don’t like to fiddle with battery charging except for when I travel, so I’d want to just leave it plugged in 24/7.

The Micro adds Bluetooth speaker capabilities, but your mileage will vary on how useful that is to you. Personally, I already have a few Bluetooth speakers, so for me the Bluetooth functionality is not a huge selling point for day-to-day use. For travel, there’s some appeal in having a combo white noise machine / Bluetooth device, but I only travel a couple times a year and it’s not a big deal to go without a speaker. For home use, I’ve come to prefer WiFi enabled speakers over Bluetooth because I don’t like my phone’s audio capabilities being tied up the way they are when paired to Bluetooth.

The LectroFan Jr.’s buttons are simpler, easier to understand than the Micro’s. On the Micro, all the buttons serve multiple functions and they’re very small with tiny non-text labels. On the Jr., they’re plainly labeled and every button does just one thing. This sort of usability and accessibility is more important to some users than others, of course, but I think the Jr. comes out ahead in terms of how easy it is to operate the device.

The Micro does have something else the Jr. does not: an ocean sound!

LectroFan Micro Pros

10 built-in sounds: 5 fans, 4 white noises, 1 ocean
Seriously tiny
Battery powered for extra portability
Angle the speaker out towards you
Just as loud as full-size LectroFan models

LectroFan Micro Cons

No USB to AC wall adapter included, so you’ll have to use one you already have or buy one
Comes with a short USB cable – to keep it plugged in 24/7, you might have to get a longer one
No headphone jack, so you must use it with the speaker attached to it

The bottom line

If you’re not sure which white noise machine to get, go with the LectroFan Jr. It’s got “set it and forget it” simplicity and a sturdy, easy-to-use design.

If you’d rather fall asleep to the sound of ocean waves, skip the cheap HoMedics and go straight for the Sound+Sleep machine.

Happy sleeping!

Newborn sleep from birth to three months: what worked for us

December 24, 2016 by M.B. Grant 1 Comment

Our beloved daughter just turned three months old! She was born September 2016, at 40 weeks +4 days and 9 lbs 3 oz – full term and healthy. Everything’s been great… except sleep.

Sleep has never been easy with this baby. Hell, I wouldn’t even call it medium or hard difficulty – this baby is (was?) a sleep sadist. (We love her anyway.)

She had her day/nights flipped for nearly two months
She struggled with gastrointestinal distress that resulted in constant grunting and groaning (especially when laying down)
She cried whenever she wasn’t touching another human

We’re not “done” by any means yet, but the 3 month mark seems like a good point to reflect on what worked and what didn’t for us and offer hope to other parents (or at least our future selves if/when we have another baby).

This post is about what our newborn slept in (rocker, crib, etc) at each week, when she slept, what she was swaddled in, and the overall quality of (adult) sleep at the time. This post is over 2000 words long and detailed – exactly the thing I wanted to read when I was bleary-eyed and desperate for hope that my newborn would go the f#*! to sleep.

This is what worked for us: your baby may vary™.

0-2 days old: drowsy newborn don’t care where she sleeps

… but only for an hour at a time.

Peach came home from the hospital at about 30 hours old. She slept in short bursts – twenty minutes here, an hour at most – waking often to demand food and diaper changes.

Stupidly, we spent these days trying to sleep at night and be awake during the day like we always did before. 10pm rolled around, we put her in the crib and hopped into bed like we always did. Cue screaming, crying. The sleep deprivation quickly added up.

Here she is at 2 days old asleep in her Graco Travel Lite and swaddled in a Summer Infant SwaddlePod (and blanket). We got her swaddled and down… but it didn’t last long.

She went back to the hospital at 48 hours of age for a 2 night stay in the NICU to lower her bilirubin level. She was jaundiced and fighting off the effects of ABO blood type incompatibility (I’m O+, she’s A+). I pumped and we supplemented with formula and, curiously, she slept fairly well in the NICU. Her early-life difficulties with eating may have contributed to her poor sleep those first two nights home.

She came back home at 4 days old, healthy and normal, but the weekend she was in the NICU was our last two nights of sleep for a long time.

Days 4 – 9: the sleepless slog

Torture grade sleep deprivation. That’s what the first full week at home with our newborn felt like. 🙁

Of course, our initial plan was for Peach to sleep (swaddled and on her back) in her Graco Travel Lite Pack ‘n Play until she was too big for it, right next to our bed. We would sleep next to her in the big bed and we would be one, big, happy, well-rested family.

The AAP would smile in approval.

Notions we were quickly disabused of:

Newborn sleeps at night. Not ours. 12am-5am was her most wakeful period for nearly two months
Newborn sleeps quietly. Ours grunted and groaned so loud. The white noise machine and earplugs couldn’t drown it out and we gave up on sharing a bedroom. (She outgrew this gradually. Around week 9 I noticed she was mostly over it, and by week 12 she has all but stopped.)
Newborn sleeps on a flat surface. A flat surface was a great way to make our baby shriek.

Around 4 days of age, our newborn lost all tolerance for laying on a flat surface. Instant screaming any time we put her down in the Pack ‘n Play.

We tried everything. We put her down drowsy, put her down awake, put her down sound asleep. All the swaddling and white noise in the world couldn’t save us. We wasted a lot of time and energy trying to make her sleep at night (in her crib) and she just nope’d us at every turn. She also had some kind of horrible gastrointestinal distress that caused her to curl up her legs and grunt whenever she was put down.

I sat in my computer chair (we didn’t have a sofa yet) and held her for hours.

Sleeping in shifts

We gave up on the idea of having us both sleep at night, together. We started sleeping in rolling shifts – someone watched her for 6-8 hours, then we switched.

One of us sat awake with her in the living room meeting her demands for food, clean diapers, and a soft body to lay on. The other one slept in the bedroom with the door shut. We barely saw each other. Dirty dishes and laundry piled up to the ceiling. Meals were scarce. Day and night lost all meaning. Misery and desperation set in. It’s hard to overstate what an assault on comfort and sanity this first week was.

(We love our baby dearly, which is probably all that carried us through this challenging time.)

We Googled every aspect of newborn sleep and saw a lot of people saying the Fisher-Price Rock ‘n Play was the only thing their baby would sleep in. By this point I’d have paid a thousand bucks for a night’s sleep.

9 days old: the “bacon chair” saves us all

Our Fisher-Price Rock ‘n Play arrived on Peach’s 9th day.

We dubbed it “the bacon chair” for its vibration mode, indicated by a “wavy lines” icon that resembled bacon (or at least it did to us in our sleep-deprived state).

This Fisher-Price Deluxe Vibrating Rock ‘n Play Sleeper is our specific model and the one you’ll see in our photos, but Fisher-Price offers many Rock ‘n Play models, and stock and prices are constantly fluctuating (as we discovered when we bought our second rocker).

It rocks, it folds flat, it’s the only thing our newborn would sleep in!

AAP recommendations be damned, the first time we put her down in it she slept for 4 HOURS straight.

Sweet, delicious sleep.

She LOVED the vibration mode. We had plenty of opportunities to try it with and without “bacon mode” going, and as soon as we flicked it on, she settled.

Our first Rock ‘n Play runs on a single D battery at a time and the battery lasts forever. (Seriously – we got nearly two months out of the first battery, and we accidentally left it on overnight on multiple occasions.)

Curiously, our second Rock ‘n Play runs on a C battery and has an automatic timeout on its vibration mode. It runs maybe 20 or 30 mins before shutting itself off. The C battery died a lot faster than the D battery, despite the auto time-out.

10-14 days old: brief sleeps, no overnights

We still lived and slept in shifts, but the rocker gave the awake person a break from constant baby-holding. It was so easy compared to what had come before.

The AAP doesn’t recommend these inclined rockers for overnight sleep. They’re associated with flat heads and neck problems. But that’s not us – we didn’t achieve “overnight sleep” with this rocker, and we didn’t drop her in it recreationally.

All we got was the ability to put the baby down somewhere without her shrieking.

We made our peace with the risks vs. rewards of using the rocker by doing the following:

We limited Peach to 8 hours out of every 24 in the rocker, and they weren’t contiguous
We stayed next to her while she was in the rocker; the person watching her was either awake next to her or snoozing on the sofa next to her
We turned her head ourselves because left to her own devices, she’d have laid exclusively on the right side of her head
We still put Peach down on her flat Pack ‘n Play mattress a few times a day
No “awake” time in the rocker – the rocker was just for sleeping

This was the only bed where she could have some peace, too – she didn’t scream or struggle endlessly with gastrointestinal distress while she was in her rocker.

2 weeks – 4 weeks old: some chunky naps, but not at night

Around 2 weeks, Peach started sleeping in her rocker for a few hours at a time somewhat predictably. Not at like, a predictable time of day, but she started a cycle of diaper ➔ wide awake➔ feed until drowsy ➔ sleep for an hour or two. However, she was wide awake from 1am ’til about 5am, no matter what we did to encourage her to flip it around.

This is also when we got serious about swaddling. We had been half-assing the swaddling effort until now because it didn’t seem to make any difference, but when we switched to the Ergobaby Swaddler (she was outgrowing the S ummer Infant SwaddleMe Pod) she totally got with the program.

Erobaby Swaddler: part straightjacket, part pajamas – ALL SLEEP

My partner and I continued sleeping in shifts. However, since the baby could now sleep somewhat independently, it gave both of us many more opportunities to catch up on sleep. We actually got to see each other once in a while!

(Any scraps of “free time” went to keeping up with the chore load. Anyone who says “ignore the chores and sleep” must have a lot more clothing, towels, and dishes than we do because if we didn’t keep doing chores, we’d be eating over the sink naked.)

Here’s Peach at [almost exactly] 4 weeks old snubbing her Graco Travel Lite crib in favor of her rocker.

I found it isolating to live entirely on baby’s schedule and the accumulated effects of living this way started to get to me around the end of her second month. I often found my own waking hours at odds with daylight hours and store hours. I had no free time to sit at a computer or do anything that might be described as fun. We had just a few visitors during this first month, and I had to will myself awake for their visits during what would usually be my sleeping time.

It was hard.

One bright spot: my partner’s mother and brother came to stay with us for a couple days and took the night shift, which let us both get somewhat caught up on sleep.

To anyone wondering what you can do to help new parents: care for the baby while they sleep. BEST GIFT ON THE PLANET.

4-7 weeks old: found our stride… sort of

We carried on for the next several weeks swaddling at night, napping her during the day, and just generally doing whatever she needed when she demanded it. We still lived in shifts.

We found our stride in terms of balancing all the new household chores (so much nursing, laundry, bottles to wash, pumping supplies to clean, baby appointments to get to, meals to prepare…) and just basically endured this time with as much patience as we could muster.

Life was just a huge crush of chores and baby care at this time. Every few days we got out for a walk during daylight hours and it felt like the best thing ever.

7 weeks: the baby sleeps at night!

When Peach was nearing 7 weeks old, two things happened:

My partner (her father) went back to work 4 days a week
She slept at night!!

MIRACLE.

Okay, so it wasn’t all the way through (to this day, 3 months in, we’ve never had an “all the way through” night of sleep).

This glorious nighttime sleep happened where all her sleep was happening at this point in her life: her Fisher-Price Rock ‘n Play.

She fell asleep around midnight and stayed asleep until about 4am. I nursed her, she slept another hour or so, I nursed her again and then she slept some more. That’s it – not “through the night”, but the mere fact that she slept during nighttime hours (and I slept, too) meant that I was awake mostly during daylight hours for the first time in nearly two months. As with all things sleep-related with this baby, things got better, then went back a little, then got better again. Over time, the trend was towards better and better sleep every night and longer naps.

(The next night’s sleep was crap, but then the next one was okay, and it kind of went from there.)

9 weeks: she sleeps on her back in her Pack ‘n Play!

Driven mostly by concern that she was sleeping in the rocker too much, my partner put Peach down in the Pack ‘n Play one night on his watch and – amazingly – she slept flat on her back for most of the night. (She still woke twice for feeding, but she fell back asleep afterwards.) She was swaddled, gently placed on her back (butt first, then head), pacifier’d, and shhh’d.

She finally slept the way the AAP wants babies to sleep.

Sleeping on her back success kit:

Graco Travel Lite Crib with the default pad (covered in a pillowcase)
Ergobaby Swaddler
LectroFan white noise machine
MAM Newborn Start pacifier
12 hour diaper
a hat

Now, we’d tried all this stuff before – so I think the key to success here was her age. Her feedings had gotten bigger around this time (we had just gone up from 2oz bottles to bigger bottles holding 4-5oz) for her non-nursing feeds, we’d become better at burping her (or she got better at burping?), and she just got easier to put down for sleep.

Quick note on diapers:

We bought these “12 hour” Huggies diapers on accident. (We just meant to go up a size.) But once we overcame our sleepiness long enough to read the box, we realized these might be good for overnight use. They hold a literal ocean of pee and our baby doesn’t seem bothered by it. As far as we can tell, she stopped waking due to a wet diaper.

I wish we’d considered a different diaper brand earlier – if your newborn isn’t sleeping so well, try changing your brand or style of diaper.

10 weeks: back in the bedroom – and at night!

Emboldened by our success getting her to sleep on her back, we did something daring: we both slept in the bedroom (together! at night! in the same bed! not on the sofa!)

And… it worked! She slept fine without one of us on the sofa next to her. A 10 weeks old, we finally had a baby sleeping at night in her crib and waking just 2-3 times before morning.

The mornings are still a little rough – both of us would rather sleep a good 9 hours without any middle-of-the-night interruptions, but this is so much better than anything that had come before.

Oh, and we got a new swaddle:

Somewhere around 11 weeks it became apparent that she was busting out of her Ergobaby Swaddle, so we switched to the SwaddleMe Original Swaddle in Large size. It’s easy to put on and cute to look at. (Two swaddles is plenty, unless your baby is particularly leaky).

12 weeks: sleeping in the Pack ‘n Play, napping in the rocker

So here we are in late December with a baby that’s just over three months old.

Her routine is much more predictable, give or take a couple hours on any of these:

6:00am – awake for a big morning feeding and diaper change
8:00am-9:00am – sometimes she falls back asleep during this time
9:00am-12:00pm – awake time (I read to her, play with her, feed her, etc)
12:30pm-3:30pm – the big afternoon nap (this is when I eat, shower, move laundry, etc)
3:30-7:00pm – awake time, usually – unless the afternoon nap runs long
7:00-9:00pm – pre-bedtime nap
9:00pm – fussing and crying, feeding, putting her into her swaddle
10:00pm – 2:00am – first sleep of the night
2:00am – mid-sleep feeding (happens anywhere between 1:30am and 4:00am)
2:30-am – 6:00am – second sleep of the night (sometimes there’s a second waking in here somewhere)

She naps (unswaddled) in her Fisher-Price Rock ‘n Play and sleeps (swaddled) overnight in her Graco Pack ‘n Play + Dream on Me mattress if we’re at the apartment or overnight in her Graco Travel Lite Crib if we’re at the house or grandma’s house.

And that’s it! For now, anyway.

The Rock ‘n Play may not be meant for overnight sleep, but it sure helped bridge the gap from her birth to the time when she was finally able to sleep on a flat mattress like she’s supposed to.

I think a lot of her newfound ability to sleep at night is owed to her simply maturing a bit, so the first three months are definitely a time of survival and doing whatever you can to get some rest, wherever you can.

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