I gotta admit something guys. I am falling out of love with my Brava smartbox pump. At first I was loving the extremely gentle, steady pressure, but the Brava pump just doesn’t work well with most types of padding. The suction of the Brava pump is too gentle to maintain pressure unless the padding is thin and firm. The thicker and squishier your padding is, the harder it is to hold suction without pumping to a high pressure. The only reason the extremely thick padding on the Brava domes works with their pump is because their padding is adhesive.
<meta charset="UTF-8">The only padding that has worked so far is the camper tape. The problem with campers tape is that it only allows me to maintain suction if I apply it very carefully and then carve it with scissors until it’s perfectly smooth. It worked great the first 2 times I used it and it stayed in place for a week and a half each time. But every time after that, the tape either wouldn’t stay in place, or it wouldn’t maintain suction, or both. And every time I fuck it up I have to remove the tape and all the gunk it leaves behind, which is much harder than it sounds.
I got tired of the tape, so I switched to blue tac (aka poster mounting putty) covered with cling wrap to keep it from sticking to my skin. Other people have recommended blue tac as padding because it stays in place very well but it’s also very easy to remove. I like it, but it absolutely does not work with the Brava pump. It does work with my breast milk pump at lowish pressure.
The breast milk pump at its lowest pressure is still not as low pressure as the Brava pump, but it’s probably close enough. Unfortunately it shuts off automatically after 30 minutes so I can’t just sleep and leave it running all night. Before buying the Brava pump, I was hoping to find a good quality breast milk pump that doesn’t shut off automatically, but couldn’t find one. Maybe it’s not an uncommon feature, but I couldn’t find it in the product descriptions of the pumps I was looking at.
Yesterday I finally found a decent breast milk pump that doesn’t shut off automatically, but I haven’t ordered it yet. It’s cheap to buy used. I feel stupid for putting even more money into this program after I already spent so much, but I can’t use the Brava pump any more. I’ll save it for when I start using my real Brava domes, since it was designed to work with them. The breast milk pump I’m planning on buying to replace my Brava pump is the Ardo Calypso Double Electric breast pump.