Sleep Station Plus Projection & Weather Clock review
With the Sleep Station Plus you can monitor your baby’s room temperature with this and rather easily know if you need to go down and adjust anything by taking the remote sensor and placing it somewhere near the crib.
Or alternately you can monitor outside temperatures as the thing was intended.
I’ll tell you why I’m doing this review here – occasionally in the course of reviewing things I’ll get a good product that just doesn’t fit into any category quite properly to write about. This was one such product where I thought it might fit either here or at my other blogging gig, but not quite. As such here’s a review of the actual device and an unbranded link to the manufacturer’s website.
The Sleep Station Plus does something I thought initially was neat but then quickly realized doesn’t work if you’re light sensitive – it will project the time and temperature onto the ceiling so there’s no need to look toward the clock. Interesting, but thankfully easy to disable. You can also angle it to go on a wall, if you want, but you might need to turn the clock around a bit.
The projection does make a damned good overhead nightlight though and we use one of the previous models currently in Maggie’s room to illuminate without requiring nightlights to be installed in outlets that are simply not in the right places.
On top of being a cool clock, you can also play music and charge your phone through a retractable headphone cable and a USB port respectively. The USB power is not listed in the documentation, but the power adapter that comes with the clock radio is a 2 amp charger, so you can expect that it probably tops out at somewhere below that. Enough to charge a phone but probably not a tablet.
The Sleep Station Plus’s power adapter is is also external, and made in the travel-charger style, which seems a bit odd for a device that’s going to be in one place for most of its existence. The adapter takes up about two plug spaces when put on a strip, so I’m not particularly thrilled with that design.
You require a couple of AAA batteries in order to get the external temperature monitor to work. Previous versions only required one, but this version seems to be quite a bit more powerful and fast at getting the temperature in, so there’s that. As far as I can tell there is no notice on the packaging that says you need to go and purchase two AAA batteries so if you pick this up in real life make sure to grab a set.
I’m currently running with the remote sensor about 25 feet away and it appears to be within two degrees of what the temperature actually is, so it’s a pretty useful thing if you don’t want to walk into baby’s room while sleeping to check, or if you just want to know what the temp is outside and are too lazy to go and check it.
It also has a temperature sensor in the clock so you can see what the temp is in your room.
It’s got OK speakers for an alarm clock, a digital FM tuner (I do not see any way to get AM on this,) and can do an easy wake up by slowly increasing the alarm volume insuring a non-jarring wakeup. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a way to disable the gradual wake, so your ninja significant other can whack it before you might hear it.
It’s an OK clock, OK set of speakers, reasonable in all respects and has a pricepoint that is about $10-15 more than I would expect to pay for it. While I dig what it can do, most of its functionality is a duplicate of my phone and the rest (ceiling display,) I’ve probably disabled.
The Sleep Station plus is available from the manufacturer for $49.99.
