Home > Consumer Reviews > EZ Wake Digital SunRise Alarm Clock - Sea Green

I bought this product to facilitate getting up on dark Michigan winter days. It is thoughtfully engineered, well constructed, and extremely easy to use. It is a pleasure to awaken gradually to a dawn that is programmable.

I wake up at 5:30 to go to the gym and this is so much better than being shocked awake by a beeping alarm and then blinding myself when I switch the lights on. The first time I used it my eyes just popped open 2 minutes before the clock was set to beep (as back up in case the "sunrise" doesn't do the trick!). My boyfriend also woke up just as easily, and he had only been in bed since midnight. We were both really impressed. The lamp brightens our large bedroom about as much as morning sunlight through drapes.

I've had this alarm for about 10 months now - I got it on sale for about $40. I'm a nursing student on a crazy sleep schedule and while this doesn't solve all my sleep problems, it does certain turn on and turn off as advertised with a gradual brightening or dimming, making waking up much easier and gentler if I'm deeply asleep. It's most vital during the fall/winter/spring months whenever my schedule requires me to get up before 6 AM. The gentle extra alarm is nice too, if I happen to sleep past the brightening light. In my old bedroom which was dark even at midday (about 10 feet away from a neighbor's house, with a 100-year-old tree blocking most sunlight) it was vital to helping me wake up regardless of the time of year. But the light it gave off was kind of weird, even though it was 60 watts, the same as my bedside lamp had been. And...it was ugly. Luckily, though, I figured out a way to "hack" the alarm mechanism to use it with any plug-in lamp. I put a socket widener in the base to enlarge the bulb size from a candleabra to a normal bulb, and then put a converter in that to turn the bulb socket into an outlet. Then I plugged in my old bedside lamp with a 60 watt incandescent bulb. It works PERFECTLY, and while the base unit is still ugly, it's less obvious than the weird-shaped "sun" device was. And - it was MUCH cheaper than other good dawn simulators out there!

Note: one reviewer talked about the lamp coming on "all of a sudden" and then having the alarm go off within seconds. That sounds like a malfunction, but I believe this is supposed to happen with the unit as a "Snooze" mechanism? Sometimes in my sleep I will dim the light when it starts to turn on; when I do this the buzzer will still go off at the appointed time, but the lamp will brighten within 20 seconds instead of over 30 minutes.

This product does not work at all as advertised. The light does not come on gradually, but appears all of a sudden at the set alarm time and then turns off moments later. This is usually not enough to wake someone up.

The plastic seems cheap and the light is not very bright, it might be an interesting novelty to try for $20 but at these prices, I was expecting something more "high end" and this product just seems cheaply designed and poorly manufactured.

But if I sleep behind the back of my fiancee I have too much shadow to wake up. It needs to be right at your face.