I could never really see the point in buying a video monitor, as you wouldn't be able to see in the dark a baby's shallow breathing, but I really wanted a monitor with a sensor mat so I knew the baby was breathing ok. I found this one from the Tommee Tippee website just as they were discontinuing it for a newer model and paid around £50 for it, which was the cheapest I could find a sensor mat monitor for.

It comes in a box with a portable unit that can run either from AAA batteries or plugged in to the mains. A main unit with a flap that turns the unit on and off and the sensor mat. The main unit also has a handy night light and a switch that allows you to turn the alarm on or off for the mat. The portable unit flashes up red when the baby is crying or making alot of noise, it also has a 'sound seek' button which amplifies the sound. It has a volume button at the side and every time your baby moves and the mat picks the movement up a green light flashes on the unit.

The mat lies underneath the mattress, and we have used it in both the moses basket and the cot. The mat picks up the babys movements and a green light flashes on both the main unit and portable unit. If no movement is detected for 20 seconds a high pitched alarm sounds (and you in turn have a heart attack). It worked very well in the moses basket and has been a great peace of mind in the cot. The only problem we have encountered a few times is when my son was still small but big enough to wriggle around alot in his sleep he did wriggle completely out of range of the mat and the alarm did go off probably about once a fortnight for a couple of months.

The mat is about the size of an A4 piece of paper so when your baby wriggles alot it is harder to position to make sure it is always under a part of their body. We found that putting it quite central and at a diagonal angle under the mattress that it covered the area that our son slept on pretty well.

The portable unit is great as you can have it running on batteries or from the mains but we did find that the batteries ran down pretty quickly so we always use it on the mains. The monitor can be used just as a monitor and without the sensor mat by just unplugging the mat from the main unit. You can choose to turn the sound on the alarm on and off by a switch on the main unit, with the sound either on or off, if the alarm goes off the green flashing light on the portable unit changes to a red light to alert you if you don't have the sound turned on.

This monitor has given us fantastic peace of mind, without it we would have been constantly checking on our baby's breathing like the paranoid first time parents we were! It was a good price for a product that has lasted well and is now been used for our daughter in her cot.