As any parent will no doubt confirm, one of the things that comes with having children is the need to spend a lot more of your time cleaning. Kids make a lot of mess, and I've found myself spending a bunch more time washing clothes, cleaning floors and sterilizing baby bottles.
You would not believe how much time and effort goes into cleaning those bottles. Like kids themselves, it's shocking to see just how dirty they actually get — and I'm not just talking about the leftover formula they contain. After 9 months of deep cleaning milk bottles, inside and out, I finally caved and got hold of an appliance to do the job for me.
The machine in question is the MomCozy DeepClean Baby Bottle Washer (D8), and it's been such a help that I can't believe I was too cheap to buy something like this a year ago.
How the DeepClean Bottle Cleaner works
The Momcozy DeepClean Baby Bottle Cleaner is exactly what the name suggests. It's a countertop appliance that washes used baby bottles, removing all traces of leftover milk or formula, and then sterilizes them ready to be used later on. It retails for $359, and comes bundles with 60 detergent blocks and four limescale removal tablets.
The appliance has room for up to eight bottles at a time, with a two-tier rack system that lets you wash bottles and nipples simultaneously — aided by 64 water jets capable of spraying 154.4ºF water to help break through whatever leftovers are left on your baby's bottles after use.
The DeepClean also has a built-in 212º F sterilization mode, a 55-minute bottle drying cycle and an integrated fan (complete with HEPA filter) to keep the newly cleaned bottles sterile for up to 72 hours. The general idea is that you slot the bottles in, and let the appliance do all the hard work for you — something that I have grown incredibly grateful for.
Oh, and you don't have to worry about keeping the DeepClean itself clean, since it has a dedicated self-cleaning mode. This 30-minute process can even reduce any built-up limescale — provided that you use one of Momcozy's limescale removal tablets.
Oh, and you don't need to use Momcozy bottles to take advantage of the DeepClean, either. All my baby bottles come from different brands, and they fit into the cleaning rack without issue. However, some of the weird and wonderful shaped bottles you can buy may not slide in quite so smoothly.
It's not just for cleaning bottles
The main benefit is that the DeepClean is not just for washing and sterilizing milk bottles. It's also suitable for all kinds of baby accessories, including gravity bottles and breast pump parts. While Momcozy doesn't specifically approve this, I've also used the machine to clean things like pacifiers and those syringes you use to feed babies medicine without ill effect.
We don't use breast pumps anymore, but there was a point where my wife was using them pretty regularly — and a machine like the DeepClean could have saved us a lot of trouble.
The thing about breast pump parts is that you're not supposed to sterilize them in a microwave, as you can with milk bottles. That's in the manual, but the sleep deprived state new parents find themselves in may gloss over this fact and leave you with a bunch of melted chunks of plastic. That happened to us, and sourcing the appropriate replacement parts was a pretty miserable experience.
Worse is the fact that we had to source a very large pot that was big enough to boil the replacement parts over the stove. Oh and you need to continuously stir the part to stop the plastic melting against the hot metal. The process technically only takes five minutes, but the sheer size of those plastic pieces meant we had to repeat the process multiple times.
Or you can just stick them into a cleaner like the DeepClean and leave them for half an hour as a machine does all the hard work for you. It certainly would have saved us a lot of headaches during one of the most exhaustive periods of our lives.
You're saving more than just time too
The thing about using appliances is that they generally help save you time by doing all the hard work for you. The DeepClean Bottle Cleaner is effectively a miniature dishwasher, or something very close to it, which means it has slashed the amount of time it takes to actually clean my used milk bottles.
The old system of cleaning by hand meant that I had to rinse the bottles, clean them with (fragrance free) dish soap and a brush, rinsing out the suds and then sterilizing them in my 700W microwave for at least seven minutes. The DeepClean does all of that for you; the only thing I need to do to the bottles before cleaning is empty out any leftover formula. In fact, the most time-consuming part of the whole process is filling up the 96-ounce water tank.
The actual cleaning cycle takes at least 28 minutes for the low-powered mode, or 38 minutes for the more intensive clean. That's a lot longer than my old system of hand-washing bottles, but unless you need a clean bottle ASAP, it's not really a big deal. It's not as though you have to stand there and watch the entire cleaning cycle unfold.
Time is only part of the equation, and the 96-oz. water tank is a perfect example of this.
96 ounces feels like a lot of water, and I was admittedly shocked when I saw that almost the entire tank was used in the DeepClean's washing cycle — with the rest being saved to make sterilizing steam. But after that initial outrage, I started to wonder whether it was actually a lot of water.
Frankly, I had no idea how much water I use hand washing baby bottles, and had to find out. It turns out, even if I wash super-conservatively, I could use up around 35oz of water washing a single bottle. So, in the same way that running a full dishwasher might save more water than hand washing, it seems as though the DeepClean might actually reduce your water consumption. More so when you remember that it can clean up to eight bottles (and their respective nipples) at a time without any change in water consumption.
Energy is a little more complicated. Momcozy says that the DeepClean uses 500W of power during the water heating and sterilizing parts of the cycle, which seemed accurate when I tracked by energy usage. Meanwhile the actual cleaning takes up about 55W, and the dryer uses 200W. Meanwhile, my microwave uses around 1,600W, but also only runs for a third of the time.
I'm not good at physics or math, so I know I will mess up the calculations if I try and figure it out. Needless to say, the DeepClean is far from the biggest power draw in your kitchen, and it shouldn't affect your energy bills too much.
It's also worth noting that you should be using the DeepClean with Momcozy's detergent blocks. They cost $20 for 120, working out at around 16.7 cents per cycle. How much that compares to handwashing with dish soap is going to depend on what brand you buy and how much you actually use, but I'd wager that even the fanciest dish soap is going to come in cheaper.
There are some downsides
The first thing I actually noticed about the DeepClean unit is that it's big. 10.6 x 13.78 x 15.35 inches, to be exact, which means it takes up roughly 1.3 cubic feet of space on whichever counter top you've set aside. The only thing I have that comes close is my vertical air fryer, which is so tall it has to be tucked away in the corner.
Placement on the counter matters a lot as well, since the DeepClean doesn't have a tank to store used water. There's a hose at the back of the unit, and that means you need to make sure it drains somewhere appropriate — such as the sink or a bucket. Otherwise you're just going to end up with a very wet floor.
The $359 price tag is also a lot to take in, especially when a microwave bottle sterilizer can be bought for as little as $20. But I have to tell myself that you're buying convenience, and potentially lower bills, which could make that investment worth it — especially if you're still expecting or have a newborn. But if your kid is already moving onto solid food, it's a much tougher sell.
I have found a few other downsides to using the DeepClean at home, though some of these are more about what's going on in my brain than a flaw with the product itself. The big one is that I find it kind of gross to imagine dirty bottles left lying around, waiting for enough of their comrades to justify switching the DeepClean on.
Leftover milk in the height of the hottest summer most people can remember is not a very good mix, after all. Though I will be the first to admit that this is just something I personally need to wrap my head around, and retrain myself to think slightly differently in the face of new technology.
The fact you need to buy extra detergent tablets is also worth bearing in mind, since the DeepClean is not compatible with the usual soaps or detergents you'd use to hand wash dishes. They're not expensive, and you get 60 included with the DeepClean, but it means you will be on the hook to keep buying those blocks for the duration of the appliance's lifespan.
I'll admit I forgot to use the detergent blocks on more than one occasion with no apparent ill effect. But obviously you'll want to make sure your baby's bottles are actually clean, and the detergent is the best way to ensure that.
Limescale is also going to be an issue with any machine that requires water, especially if your local water is as hard as it is in my area. I can't think of a single part of my bathroom or kitchen sink that isn't coated with that pesky layer of white deposit. Momcozy recommends using distilled water, rather than tap water, but to that I say "who has the time for that?"
I've taken to using filtered water instead, and while not perfectly free of excess minerals, it generally extends the amount of time my water-based appliances have between descaling cycles. Momcozy does include descaling tablets in the box, which are compatible with the DeepClean's self-cleaning mode.
Finally, the system that keeps clean bottles sterile for up to 72 hours is all down to a built-in air circulation system. This requires power to run, around 190-200W based on my energy meter, and turning it off means Momcozy can't guarantee the bottles will remain sterile. Such a feature could potentially be useful, especially if you need to clean bottles before going away for the weekend, but it does feel a little like overkill. So if you're anything like me, you'll have the bottles out and packed away safely pretty soon after the cleaning cycle is over.
Verdict
I like using the Momcozy DeepClean Baby Bottle Washer, for the simple fact that it takes all the extra stress and hassle out of the whole bottle-cleaning process. All you need to do is fill the tank, slot the bottles in and turn the machine on. It's an extremely convenient tool to have, and it's something I wish I had back before my son started eating solid food and needed a bottle every couple of hours.
Having handwashed bottles for 9 months does mean that switching to an appliance does take an adjustment. My wife in particular is finding it hard to get out of the habit of washing milk bottles as soon as they're finished. Asking her not to clean up is like asking her not to breathe, so I'm not sure if she's actually used the DeepClean yet.
As for me, I'm coming around to the idea of being much lazier, and not scrubbing used bottles clean. Even if my math is totally wrong, and the DeepClean doesn't end up saving me money on my water or energy bills, I'm at least regaining a little bit more of my time — which is a luxury when you have young kids.
I just wish it wasn't quite so big, because it does take up a lot of space. But I guess that's the price you pay for cleaning up to eight bottles at once.
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