Features
This bottle warmer heats up bottles and baby food jars in 90 seconds. You adjust the heat for different size bottles and jars by the amount of water you put into the warming chamber. There is a small measuring cup that stores on the front. Once you’ve put the water into the warming chamber, you place the bottle inside, put the cover on if it fits around the bottle, and press the button on the front of the warmer. You’ll know the warmer is working when the light turns red. Soon you’ll hear steam hissing around the bottle, and in 90 seconds the machine will beep to let you know it’s finished. The bottle warmer is designed to hold both standard and wide-neck bottles as well as various sizes of baby food jars. There is a lift-out basket in the warming chamber so that you can easily reach smaller items without burning yourself when the machine is hot. A pacifier sterilizer basket is also included. You can load it with pacifiers or other small items, measure in the water, and the steam will quickly sterilize whatever is in the basket. The bottle warmer shuts off automatically when it is finished heating. You need to wait three minutes before using the warmer again.
Pros
The speed at which the Munchkin Deluxe High-Speed Bottle Warmer heats up bottles is definitely a standout feature. When the baby is hungry and it’s late at night, minutes seem like hours. Having the bottle heat up in just 90 seconds is very nice. This bottle warmer is extremely easy to use once you get past the initial learning curve. You do have to experiment a little with the measuring cup to determine how much water you need to add in the warming chamber in order to get the perfect temperature for baby’s bottle. Once you’ve mastered the measuring cup, you can almost operate this bottle warmer in your sleep. The measuring cup has a little storage spot on the front of the warmer. It’s small, and you know it would get lost at some point if it weren’t stuck to the front of the machine. It also has a flip-top lid for the measuring cup, which is nice since it keeps dust and crud out of it so you’re not adding other gunk to the warming chamber. That means less clean-up later. The size of this bottle warmer is perfect. It doesn’t take up very much counter space, but the inside is roomy enough to fit most commonly available bottles. Bottles from Born Free, Dr. Browns, Tommee Tippee, Avent, Lansinoh, and Medela all fit well in this warmer when tested. Even the small bottles that come with electric breast pumps heat up nicely in this warmer. The extra cover doesn’t fit over some of the larger wide-neck bottles, but the instruction booklet says you don’t need to put the cover on if it won’t fit loosely around the bottle, so that’s fine. The purpose of the cover seems to be to hold steam around smaller bottles, and the larger ones heat up quite well without it. The temperature is pretty consistent once you figure out how much water you need. Consistent temps on a bottle warmer are crucial when it comes to heating up expressed breast milk, and of course, it’s important not to get any of baby’s food too hot. The pacifier warming basket is a nice extra feature. You can fit two or three pacifiers in there at once. The sanitizing cycle takes about five minutes. During cold and flu season, it’s really convenient to have a fast way to kill germs! Having the sterilizer built into another appliance saves storage space, too.
Cons
While the heater shuts off automatically when the warming cycle is done, the machine is still quite hot for a while. That means you need to get baby’s bottle out of the warmer pretty quickly or it will continue to heat up. The warming chamber gets gunky in a hurry if you’re using tap water. Any minerals or extra stuff in your water will build up in the warming chamber. In less than a week, the inside of the warmer was orange, and pieces of burnt, rusty-looking stuff started to stick to the bottles warmed during the review process. The bottle warmer can be cleaned, though. It may need to be cleaned pretty often if your tap water has a lot of minerals or other stuff in it. Using bottled water might help if this is a problem for you.
