Hatch Baby Rest Sound Machine love it. We needed a night light for our 3-month-old’s nursery and this has fit the bill beautifully. To be clear, this machine works via Bluetooth, NOT via WiFi. This has advantages and disadvantages which I’ll mention below. Overall, though, there’s a lot to love about this machine and only a few small quibbles I have with it.
What’s great about this machine:
1) It looks stylish — modern yet neutral. And because the light can be just about any color, it can fit in with whatever color scheme your room is.
2) It’s easy to use. The downloadable phone app works for both Android and IOS and is very self-explanatory. Programs can be set to start and finish at any time each day (or set days of the week) and include settings for light color and brightness as well as your choice of sound (or silence) and the volume of the sound.
3) The sound machine function produces a wide range of soothing background sounds: “woodsy” noise (crickets), rain shower, white noise (like television static), singing birds, ocean waves, rippling water, a laundry machine, and three different sets of melodies. These sounds are surprisingly not nearly as annoying as I assumed they would be — most of them are actually quite nice.
4) The “Okay to get up” feature will be great when our little one becomes a toddler. Basically, just set a program for a particular color to turn on at a certain time in the morning so your toddler knows it’s “okay” to get out of bed for the day. I have no doubt this will come in handy!
A few things I’m not as wild about:
1) The volume of some of the sounds could stand to have a wider range, particularly on the lower end. For example, the white noise sound is quite loud, even on the lowest volume setting. We have it dialed all the way down and it’s passable but still almost too loud.
2) The ability to program sounds and lights is a great feature, but it would be nice to be able to start a program on demand instead of only at a pre-set time.
For example, we have our “overnight” program set to begin at 9 p.m. and end at 6:30 a.m., but sometimes our little one goes to bed a few minutes before or after 9:00. It would be nice to be able to start the overnight program with the push of a button at, say, 9:08 and have it still end at 6:30 a.m.
3) As I mentioned above, this machine is controllable via a phone app via Bluetooth, not WiFi. On the plus side, this means you don’t have to plug anything into your router, and the connection is very easy to make.
On the minus side, only one phone can control it at a given time. My wife and I both have the app on our phones, and if we are both close to the machine one of us might have to close the app for the other to use it. Also, because Bluetooth has a relatively short range, you may not be able to control this machine from more than a room or two away. Then again, this is a night light, not a baby monitor, so the “need” to connect to it from the other end of the house is not as great.
I’m very happy with this purchase and would certainly purchase it again!
*** UPDATE 12/18/2018 ***
We have been using this light for almost a year and a half, and we like it so much we purchased a second one to use for our son who was born a month ago. Although he isn’t sleeping in his own room yet, we have the Hatch set up in our bedroom so he has a night light. So, this is the first time we have used the phone app to control more than one device.
You can pair more than one device with your phone, but unfortunately switching between the devices in the app is a little cumbersome because you essentially have to “log out” of one device and “log on” to the other. It’s not difficult, but it seems like a lot of steps.
As I mentioned in my main review, I suspect this is because the pairing is via Bluetooth, not WiFi, which limits the complexity of the communication.
And as a reminder, only one person can be “logged in” to a device at a time, so if my wife wants to change the volume or the sound and I was the last person to make a change, she can’t do anything until I log out on my phone.
Fortunately this light will probably be used on a set schedule most of the time, so accessing it via the phone app is probably not something you will do very often once your have a set routine.
