Dude!

[rivka]

I just won an Ebay auction for a Medela Pump In Style electric breastpump which, according to the seller, was only ever used for a handful of times. It comes with all the accoutrements - bottles, lids, extra tubing and membranes, extra breast shields in larger sizes...

The Pump In Style retails for $250-300 new. On eBay they seem to go for around $150-200, depending on how much they've been used and what's included.

I won the auction for $62.

Dude.

The only thing I can figure is that the little cooling packs are missing - you know, the gel things you stick in the freezer. We have half a dozen of them already. Would that really dissuade people from bidding?

Comments

[aendr.livejournal.com]

Over here, we're advised to replace the tubing, horns and shields before using second hand pumps, or even using them for a second baby. My pump design didn't have any cooling packs though (I have the Ameda Lactaline, wonderful thing, used it for exclusively expressing till that got too much).

[rivka.livejournal.com]

I would worry more about using a pump right after someone else, but it's hard for me to see much danger in using a pump months or maybe years after the previous owner. Even if some horrible bacterium or virus managed to escape normal cleaning processes or lurk within the deepest recesses of the machine, there's only so long those things are actually going to live, you know?

[aendr.livejournal.com]

Well, I had no information about how recently it was used :-)

Some of the advice over here is drastically paranoid, other rather too blase. I believe over there you are advised that dishwashing bottles on hot setting is fine - we are supposed to sterilise them every use for the first 6 months. We're also now supposed to make up every feed just beforehand, which is a pain with an unpredictable demand fed screaming hungry baby and given our mothers made up them all first thing in the morning... The trouble is, people are then at risk of not making them up with hot enough water to kill the bugs in order to get them to said screaming baby quicker.
(Despite the packaging saying add the water, then the powder, to make sure one has the right amount of water, we figured out that we could put the powder in, stick the bottle on some scales, add just under half hot water, shake and then add cooled boiled water from the fridge to the right amount using the 1ml weighs 1g principle. I discovered that the bottles are around 10% out so the instructions about accuracy weren't worth the cardboard they were printed on.)