A couple of weeks ago I posted asking if anyone had had experience with dawn simulators or opinions of what model I should get. I went with the Philips HF3480 and this is my review.
Day 0: The lamp arrived from Amazon and I plugged it in and played with it a bit. Determined that it worked as advertised. Here’s a picture of it part-way through its 30 minute “sunrise” sequence:
So far so good. I went to bed looking forward to being woken by it.
Day 1: The light was meant to wake me for 8am. Starting around 4am, every time I rolled over or half-woke for any reason, I would think, “Is it happening yet?” and crack an eyelid to check. As you can imagine, this didn’t lead to a restful night’s sleep. And it turns I’d screwed something up in setting the alarm, so it never lit up, and I staggered out of bed around 9:30am bleary-eyed and annoyed.
Day 2: Made sure the alarm was set properly and snuggled down with a book to read before I went to sleep. The light at its brightest (setting 20) is too bright as a bedside lamp, so I dialled it down to 14. The problem with that is that the same setting is used as the maximum light in the morning, which means I woke to a dim, cozy light rather than a bright one. Not what I was aiming for.
Day 3: Working from home with a cold, so decided not to wake myself early. However, I did take the opportunity to read the manual, in the hope that it would explain how to use setting 14 for evenings and 20 for mornings. No luck; whatever you have it set to in its normal lamp mode is what it will use for the dawn simulation. However, I did discover that you can turn up the brightness while the light is off. Weird as it sounds, it just means that instead of just flipping the light off at night, I need to flip it off then spin the dial up to 20 before sleep. As long as I remember to do that, all will be well.
Day 4: A day off, and still feeling a little cruddy, so I set the dawn simulator to go off latish (9am) so I’d get a long night’s sleep. It worked as advertised, but when I woke to it I rolled over and hit the kill switch, and went back to sleep in the dark til noon.
Day 5: Feeling better, and I’d like to get to the local market at a reasonable hour. Set the dawn sim for 8am and — wow! — it worked, I woke up, and actually got up and did things (for values of “things” meaning “sitting round in my pyjamas reading email”). Can’t complain though; I wouldn’t normally be doing that at 8am on a weekend, or indeed any day.
Day 6: The end of daylight savings. Glad to have the extra hour, of course, not to mention the extra light in the mornings going forward. Set the dawn sim for 8am (i.e. 9am in old money) and actually woke a little before it (7:10). Rolled over and dozed for a bit longer, then woke easily and cheerily when the electronic birds started chirping at 8am. Hurrah!
Day 7: Monday morning. Once again, woke at 7-something, rolled over, dozed til 8am then got up pretty easily. Not much more to say, really. Hurrah! Tomorrow I’m going to set it for an earlier time, maybe 7:30 or even 7:00. I think we can call this a success, even though it took a while to get here.
One other point to note: this device does not come with international power plugs nor any of the indicators (such as a wall wart) that usually suggest it will work well in other countries. The label underneath says 120V-60Hz with no variations suggested.