Breast pumps...any recommendations or ones to avoid??

[cattyf]

If you have experience of using a breast pump could you recommend a good one (I realise personal experience is different for everyone but just looking for opinions). A friend recommended Medela but that's only one opinion!!

I have an Ameda lactaline (double electric). I thought it was really good - not far off my experience with the hospital pump. I was pumping a lot at the start as DS was born 8 weeks early. I continued to use it most days until he was over a year.

Google open and closed systems.

Personally I wouldn't get an open system.

Medela gets good press. Before you get one I would get the hang of hand expressing properly. I know several women who have done much better with hand expressing than pumping and it might save you some cash :-)

I have the Aveda one, it was £99 and was a godsend - personally I would recommend it as it was a good fit that worked really well. :)

I wouldn't recommend a manual one, didn't work for me. I had a mothercare own brand single one which was good although this time I am going to see about hiring a double one from the hospital if needed!

Meant to say the Mothercare one was electric/battery operated

I had a tommee tippee electric one and it was great (closed system). I couldn't get on with a manual one at all.

what do you need it for - occasional or daily pumping? I needed a heavy duty double electric one, as went back to work early. Had both Ameda Lactaline and Medela Freestyle, prefer the Medela. Very efficient.

If it's for more moderate use, a lot of people rave about Medela Swing.

I have the medela swing - it's fab. If you're going to be doing lots and lots of expressing which you might not know until after baby is here then I would recommend hiring a hospital grade pump directly from medela (about £40 a month I think) We were in hospital a fair bit with DS and I swear their pumping machine was responsible for my huge supply of milk!

I'd hold off buying anything until baby is here and you get a feel for feeding. Its best to establish your own supply with baby feeding (if possible of course) as its a supply and demand thing, if you express loads as well in the early days your body will think that baby needs that much milk and will keep producing it which can leave you engorged which can be painful.

Hand expressing is a personal thing, I found it effective and could get quite a lot out but found it painful after a while. Some people swear by it. It's a really personal thing.

Also, I think you'll be surprised about volumes of breast milk. I had in my head huge bottles full of milk when actually 50ml was a lot and would take a good 20 minutes to pump. In the middle of the night I could get around 100ml very quickly so it depends on your body really.

Breast shells are really good for collecting milk in the early days as I found my other nipple really leaked while feeding my son on the other side so popped one on and you can just decant into a bottle and it doesn't involve expressing.

Thank you, allow this advice is really useful! I didn't realise you could hire them so that's worth keeping in mind as an option. How old were your little ones when you first started to express and were they happy to take the bottle and breast? My own mum tells me I wouldn't ever take a bottle of expressed milk!

Avent hand pump works well. Boots own is useless.

I used a Lansinoh double electric pump to express to bottle feed twins for 9months so it saw a lot of use and was excellent value! The pump motor did give out in the end but I think i got my money's worth. I also had a Medela hand pump which was very good, the best of all the hand pumps I tried (quite a few during 9mths of expressing) and worth paying a bit more for. Hand expressing is also a useful skill to aquire - you can do it anywhere as long as you have a sterile container to put it in and it's free/no pump bits to break.

Hi Ladies,

Hi OP, sorry for hijacking your thread for another question.. But I've been wondering for a while now. I'm planning to pump as I will only have milk in one breast (if at all), as the other one had radiation treatment.

I'm thinking of giving the baby 1 meal a day of breast milk (just for the sake of antibodies really) and the rest formula. So can anyone tell me how long does breast milk last after expression? And also, if anyone knows how long alcohol stays in breast milk after say 2 glasses of wine..?? (I'm a wine & food blogger and knee on going back to tasting/moderate drinking after birth).

Suev14. Well, the biggest boost comes from giving the baby colostrum (which is the first few days). I don't see any reason you couldn't do that from one side (incidentally, lots of women happily feed long term from one breast. Not all women find it possible, but plenty do, if that's anything you want to look into).

Is there a reason if you do do one feed you'd want it to be expressed? Is that a worry about the baby taking to bfing if mostly ff? I just ask because, obviously, it's more unnecessary work if the baby would happily feed direct. You may have other reasons for preferring that though.

NHS linky on storage. Depends if frozen or fridge.

La Leche League linky on alcohol. Basically, you don't need to worry if you're drinking at reasonable levels. Of course, no one should be drunk in charge of a baby, and it ain't any fun being up in the night with a hangover, so you'll probably be drinking fairly moderately for a while anyway.

You might find that one feed a day does bring supply issues though. It may not be enough to maintain production past the initial, hormone driven, stages. You might want to start a thread on that if some bm is important to you.

Another vote for Medela Swing.

It took me a while to get the hang of it but once I did it was very efficient. I couldn't establish direct breastfeeding so mixed bottle fed from around 1 week until 3 months. Breast milk in the day and formula at night. Worked fine for us.

I switched to all formula when DS was around 3 months. Although I was able to express it was very time-consuming and after a while I started to feel quite unwell while expressing so decided I'd gone as far as I could with it.

Hi Penguin :) Well, with the recent history breast cancer my body has been through quite a bit in that area and it's also quite sensitive. I know from many women that babies don't only feed off the milk in the breast for the sake of food, but also enjoy the whole "package", the experience, and that makes them sometimes want to suckle just for sake of comfort, relaxation. And I simply know I won't be able to handle that, as sad as it may sound. I rather go through the trouble of expressing than having my baby get used to the breast and then not give it to her anytime she wants. I still do want to provide her with the antibodies she needs and therefore want to express.

As for the alcohol (thanks for the link btw, I will check it out!), I've always watched my units anyways, despite being a wine-geek, but will have to be waaaay below the 14 units a week while I express I guess. And I certainly don't want to pass on any alc to the baby via milk. Thus my question :)

Good point re supply shortage, I didn't think of that as I haven't looked into how the whole milk farm mechanism works. I somehow assumed it will produce as much as needed to top up the missing amounts automatically (that being after a few days once the body understands how much per day is needed)

I was always happy with the Medela swing for occasional pumping. I borrowed it from a friend who had bought but never used it.

A friend of mine had a few feeding issues and she got the ameda lactaline and loved it, it's the pump I've read the best reviews of too.

If I was going to buy one I'd get the latter for the double pumping capabilities.

Just be open-minded- I got on ok with the Swing (though found the whole automatic thing unsettlingly industrial somehow) but ultimately found the Avent manual pump fastest of all- was managing 8oz in 10mins at peak production (around 4-6 months). You can get new manual pumps quite cheaply often so it might be worth a try.
Re. bottles- my LO had a few at around 1-3 weeks then none until about 2 1/2 months and it was very tricky getting him to take them the second time. What worked was making the milk very warm! Lots of experimentation with position, temperature, types of bottle may be needed. Next time I would introduce one regularly at an earlier stage, but after having trouble establishing b'feeding I was very paranoid for a couple of months!

Suev14 - iirc you are quite early in yoru pregnancy? I think your best bet is probably to read up on the general physiology of breastfeeding and then start some threads of your own.

Supply is likely to be the biggest issue with your plan. Very few women can sustain a supply based on a single session expressing a day. If you take a look at some of the threads on exclusive expressing, it's a battle with multiple nighttime expressing sessions for lots of women. The body doesn't really know how to make 'one feed' from birth.

There are other options which might be more realistic if antibodies is your aim - for example feeding direct as much as you feel able in the early days but not stressing about long term supply.

On the alcohol. It isn't really about units per week

Thank you Penguin, I'll do some research. I'm 19 weeks today so relatively early for the bf plan indeed :). I know it's not about the weekly but about the daily units :)). Will read up some threads on here too, will probably get most my questions answered. I guess I had quite a romantic idea of how the body and the Mother Nature knows what to do ;)

It is not even daily. It is more how much and how long before feeding (it clears from milk just like blood).

Does the size of the breastshield make a big difference? I got the medela swing but it's crap. Comes with 24mm shield but think my boobs are too big .