Philips Avent Manual Comfort Breast Pump Review

Having already owned an electric breast pump, we wanted something for the times when we are out and my wife needs to pump to help with supply while relieving the build up of milk in the breasts. For this reason we decided to purchase the Philips Avent Manual Comfort Breast Pump

Do we think the Philips Avent hand pump is a suitable replacement for other more expensive electric based portal pumps? No. While the suction levels of the Philips is impressive, it doesn’t compete with electric market offerings was covered in this article.

Philips Avent Manual Comfort Breast Pump 

After using the Philips Avent Manual Comfort Breast Pump for a few months now, I feel like we’re in a good position to talk about the advantages and disadvantages. 

Positives

Let’s start with some of the positives first.

Comfortable

The breast pump uses a soft gel like cushion that covers the flange to help with comfort over the breast.  If the soft gel isn’t your fancy, this can be removed and you can pump without it attached.

Compact

We found the Philips Avent Manual Comfort Breast Pump perfect for when you’re out and about running errands but looking for something small and discrete that you can store in your handbag. The Avent includes a shield cover for the breast pump to keep things clean when you’re not using the pump.

Good Suction

When you think of manual hand pumps, you associate it with being a chore and causing discomfort due to the repetition of hand movements from pumping.

Good news! The Philips hand pump is not a chore to use thanks to the great suction levels. We found that due to the great suction from the pump, this also helps reduce the amount of hand movements required which reduces hand movement repetition.

Generally it will take 10-15 minutes to get enough milk but obviously this may depend from person to person.

If you find you are not getting a good level of suction from the pump, we recommend removing the silicon based cushion which can help provide greater suction.

Do we find the suction level as good as our electric breast pump? No. But the suction level is strong enough to get a good amount of milk when you’re out and about.

Price

Coming in at Price not available, the Philips Avent Handpump becomes a more affordable option compared to other hand pumps like those which we’ve reviewed in this article.

As we already own a hospital grade pump at home and were just looking to get a portable pump for the occasional use, we struggled to justify the cost of more expensive motorised breastmilk pumps.

For us it came down to a few things when deciding on a cheaper and more affordable pump:

• How often are you using the pump?
• Will you be time constrained when you do use the pump?
• Will you need to pump both breasts?

Negatives

While we really liked the Philips, there were a few negatives which we’ve experienced with the Philips Avent Hand Bottle that we wanted to highlight.​​​​

N​oisy

We found the hand pump really squeaky when used straight out of the box. As you can imagine when using a hand pump, you’re doing lots of pumping motions so any slight sound becomes apparent really quickly.

Good news though, it’s possible to remove that squeaky sound by popping open the pump lever and putting oil or Vaseline on the pivot pin and in the hole of the lever where it catches the pump pivot pin.

Cleaning the Unit

When you first take the hand pump out of the box, it can be a bit overwhelming trying to work out how to dissemble the unit for cleaning. With XX amount of parts, we struggled initially but over time it becomes far easier to clean the unit.

We clean our Philips Avent Hand Pump using our Philips Avent Microwave Steam Cleaner combined with the Philips Avent Drying Rack to keep our hand pump clean before each use.

Compatibility

The Philips Avent hand pump is the pumps compatibility with other non-Philips branded milk bottles. We use the Philips Classic and Natural range bottles so this wasn’t an issue but for others that are heavily invested in Medela or other brands may find this restrictive.

The Philips Avent hand pump is compatible with the following bottles:

• Philips Avent Classic Breast Milk Bottles
• Philips Avent Natural Breast Milk Bottles
• Philips Avent Milk Storage Cups