Tommee Tippee Blackout Blind Review: Long-Term Use

The nursery window faces east. I did not think about that when we looked at the house. I thought about the crib fitting against the inside wall and about the linen closet in the hallway. Then Milo was born in February, and by March the sun was landing on the crib wall at seven in the morning like somebody had flipped a switch, and naps in that room were twenty five minutes on a good day and fifteen on a bad one.

I ordered the Tommee Tippee Sleeptime Portable Baby Blackout Blind in January, about three weeks before my due date, in one Amazon cart along with everything else we thought we needed. It went up on the window the week before he was born and it has not come down since, apart from one wash in June and one weekend at my mother's house in July. That is nine months of daily use on the same pane of glass, which is long enough to know what a thing actually does and what it only claims to do.

How I've Used It

It is one panel with suction cups fitted all the way around the rim, plus fastenings that let you gather it down to a smaller window. The listing sizes it for windows up to about 51 by 78 inches. Ours is smaller than that maximum, so there is a fold of extra fabric pinned back along the bottom edge and it has never bothered me once.

I measured the glass before I ordered, which I would recommend to anyone, because the panel is sized as a maximum rather than as a fit. Our window came out around 34 inches wide by 58 tall, comfortably inside the 51 by 78 inch limit, so the fastenings gather the spare fabric into a fold along the bottom and one side. It is not tailored. It is a rectangle with extra material in two directions and a ring of cups holding it flat, and it has never once let a stripe of light through the middle of the room the way the old curtains did.

Putting the Tommee Tippee blind up took me about four minutes the first time and takes about two minutes now, and most of that is wetting the cups and pressing them evenly instead of rushing one corner and having to start over. I do not take it down between naps. It stays up. That is the entire reason it works in this house, because it is not a routine I have to remember at 6:40 in the morning when I am already behind on the day.

I run my hand around the edge after it is up. When a cup has not seated properly you can feel the give before you can see the light leak, and catching it on the way past is faster than noticing it from the doorway an hour later. Nate does not touch it. He works HVAC and is out of the house at 5:30 on weekdays, and the blind is mine the way the laundry is mine.

One thing worth saying plainly: this is a panel that goes over a window. It is not a curtain with a track and it is not a fitted shade. It covers one window. If your nursery has two, you are buying two.

The East Window Problem, and What Actually Changed

Thin white curtains came with the house and they were still up, so I did nothing about the window for the first month. They were never doing anything except looking tidy. Light came through them and around them, and by seven the whole room had that washed out hotel breakfast quality to it.

For the first two weeks I tried to fix it without buying anything at all. I clipped the two white panels together down the middle with a binder clip so there was no gap, which worked for about four days and then the clip bent and stopped holding. Then I draped a dark bath towel over the curtain rod and it slid off at five in the morning and landed on the floor with a sound I can still hear. Neither of those was dangerous and neither of them was anywhere near the crib, but neither of them worked either. That is when I went looking for something that actually attached to the glass instead of hanging near it.

With the blind up, naps went from twenty five or thirty minutes to something closer to an hour and a quarter, and on a good day an hour and a half. That is the honest version of the change. It did not turn him into a sleeper. He still wakes some nights. He still has afternoons where a nap is forty minutes and nothing on this earth extends it. What the blind did was remove one obvious, stupid, fixable problem, which was a bright room at seven in the morning in a house with exactly one east window.

Dr. Bell, our pediatrician, is the person I ask about sleep, not a blind manufacturer. I bring that up because a dark room is not a treatment for anything, and no product in this nursery prevents a medical problem. It is just a room that is easier to sleep in. The safe sleep basics do not change and were not affected by any of this: he goes down on his back, on a firm flat mattress, with nothing loose in the crib. The blind hangs on the glass across the room and it does not touch any of that.

The room is now the darkest room in the house at ten in the morning. That was the entire point and it is also a consequence you should hear before you order, because it means the nursery is a sleeping room and only a sleeping room. Books and play happen downstairs. Nobody is sitting in there in the afternoon.

The Suction Cups Are the Whole Story

Around month four, one corner started letting go on cold mornings. Not falling off, just lifting enough to throw a thin blade of light across the ceiling. I re-wet it, pressed it back, and it held for another few weeks. Then a different corner did the same thing. That is the trade you make when the mounting method is a ring of cups instead of a rod and a bracket.

There was one morning in a February cold snap when the whole right hand side let go at once and the panel swung inward off the glass. It stayed hanging by the cups on the left, so it never fell anywhere, but the room went from dark to bright in about a second and the nap was finished. I re-seated the entire rim that afternoon and it held through the rest of the winter. That was the worst it has done in nine months and it cost me one nap and about two minutes.

It is also why I understand the one star reviews. If you want to fit something once and never think about it again, a cup that needs a press every few weeks is going to irritate you every time it happens. If you are already walking past that window four times a day with a baby on your hip, it is ten seconds and you forget it. Cold glass is where it struggles. Ours is an old single pane window and the upstairs gets cold in a way a newer house probably would not. Through the summer it held for months without a word.

I have not had a cup fail outright, and I have not had one leave a mark on the glass. I wet them under the tap, shake once, press, and move on. When I re-seated that loose corner I did the whole rim at the same time, which sounds fussy and takes about ninety seconds.

Washing It, Folding It, and One Weekend in Erie

The Tommee Tippee blind is polyester and it is machine washable, which I tested once in June after a season of being handled by a person with permanently sticky hands. Cold water, gentle cycle, fastenings still on it, then over the shower rail for an afternoon. It came out the same size, which is not a given with anything that has sewn in hardware, and the cups behaved exactly as they had before it went in, which was the thing I was actually worried about.

That June wash came after a handprint near the bottom corner and a smell I could not place and did not want to investigate further. Taking it down on purpose is a two minute job and putting it back up that same evening took about the same. It is the only time I have removed it just to clean it.

It folds into a travel bag and that bag is genuinely small, small enough that I put it in the duffel rather than treating it as its own piece of luggage. We took it to my mother's house in Erie, Pennsylvania, for one weekend in July. That is the only trip we have made with it. It went over her guest room window in about three minutes, on a window a completely different size than ours, and came down just as easily on the Sunday. The HelloBaby monitor came with us. The audio monitor and the sound machine stayed home, because her house is quiet and small and we did not need them.

I have not flown with it and I am not going to pretend I know how it behaves in a checked suitcase. What I can tell you is that it went into a car duffel without displacing anything, and that fitting it to a strange window took less time than finding a parking spot in Erie on a Saturday.

What It Doesn't Do

It does not make a room quiet. It does not make a room cool. It does not stop the cat from walking past the door at the exact wrong moment, and it does not stop a baby from being a baby.

It also does not flatter the house. From the street it looks like a plain rectangle stuck to an upstairs window. My neighbor asked once whether we had a projector screen. The thin white curtains are still hanging over it, mostly out of habit, and from inside they hide the edges of it well enough that I stopped noticing months ago.

And it is not a permanent solution to a badly lit room. It is a panel over glass. If the cup holds, the room is dark. If a cup lifts, you get a line of light and you go and press it. That is the whole mechanism, and calling it anything more sophisticated than that would be me overselling a piece of polyester.

Naps went from twenty five minutes to an hour and a quarter. It did not make him a sleeper. It removed a bright window from a room where a baby was trying to nap.

Who This Is For

Nurseries with one bright window and one tired parent. Ours faces east and by seven the sun is on the crib wall. If your baby's room gets hard light at the hour you are trying to get them down, this is the simplest fix I know of that does not involve drilling anything into a wall or a window frame.

Renters, and anyone who does not want a bracket. Half of why I chose the Tommee Tippee blind over a rod and a curtain was that it mounts inside against the glass with cups and leaves nothing behind, and the curtains that came with the house stayed exactly where they were the entire time. If you move, it comes with you and goes on the next window.

People who travel to one or two houses with a baby. I cannot vouch for a flight, but it went over a guest room window in Erie in about three minutes and that alone justified the space it took in the duffel.

Who Should Skip It

If you want to fit something once and never touch it again, get a rod and a proper blackout curtain instead. That comparison is worth ten minutes of your evening before you decide, because the two are honest, different products. The blind wins on fitting flat against glass and on travel. Curtains win on looks and on being installed a single time and then forgotten.

Skip it if you have several windows in the nursery and you were hoping one panel would do the lot. It will not. Price out every window before you start, because doing them one at a time over three paydays is how people end up with a half dark room and a bad opinion of the product.

And skip it if what you actually want is a brighter room during the day. This does the opposite on purpose. Milo plays downstairs and naps upstairs and I would not change the arrangement for anything, but it is a real consequence and you should know it before you press the first cup to the glass.