Because travel sterilisers need to be compact enough to carry around, they’re usually short on bells and whistles. What we loved about the Milton Solo was that, travel steriliser or not, it’s more adaptable and comes with more useful design features than any other travel model we tested.

Items inside stay sterile for 24 hours and the lid is designed with a flat lip so it can be laid horizontally in a smaller microwave – a useful feature we didn’t find in any other travel steriliser. The box contains five capacious, well-designed bags that can fit two bottles apiece and each bag can be reused 20 times, so they’re much more economical than they might first appear.

If you choose to use a bottle sterilizer for your baby's bottles, there are two ways to go about it — microwave or electric. Both types use the steam to kill approximately 99.9% of harmful bacteria in just a few minutes, so it's simply a matter of personal preference which one you should choose, and they are both safe and effective given the right devices. Here's a breakdown: BabyCenter's editorial team is committed to providing the most helpful and trustworthy pregnancy and parenting information in the world. When creating and updating content, we rely on credible sources: respected health organizations, professional groups of doctors and other experts, and published studies in peer-reviewed journals. We believe you should always know the source of the information you're seeing. Learn more about our editorial and medical review policies. Cycle lengths depend on the wattage of your microwave: two minutes for 1200W to 1850W, four minutes for 850W to 1100W or six minutes for 500W to 800W. Even the longest option is quite a bit shorter than many of the sterilisers we tested, such as the Milton Cold Water or the Dr Brown’s Deluxe Bottle Steriliser.

Instructions are clear and easy to follow, but the Dr Brown’s Deluxe Electric Steam Steriliser is really intuitive to use – three lights on the front let you know instantly whether the eight-minute cycle is heating up, cooling down or completed. We spoke with three moms on BabyCenter's staff about their experience with three of the bottle sterilizers on this list According to the NHS, sterilising feeding equipment is necessary for the first 12 months to keep your baby free from bacteria that could harm their brand-new immune systems. If you’re planning on expressing breast milk, combination feeding or using a dummy during your baby’s first year, you’ll need to sterilise all the relevant baby equipment after every use. If you’re using bottles and breast pumps regularly but not intensively, you might find that a travel steriliser is sufficient for your needs – it’s certainly cheaper to buy and easier to throw into a drawer. If you’re bottle-feeding full-time, though, sterilising one or two bottles at a time will be too inefficient and labour-intensive to manage. 5. UV steriliserWe find it really easy and it just gets kept in the microwave when not in use. It does four bottles at once which stay sterilised for 24 hours if you keep the lid on."Loved by Mumsnet user OvertiredOverthinker. Our verdict Can easily be scaled up and down for different quantities of equipment and equipment in awkward shapes

The inner tray is formed with notches to position the four bottles it can hold, which means they’ll stay in place throughout the cycle and sterilise properly. As we aged out of sterilizing, we still valued the dryer. In 30 minutes, bottles would go from dripping water to dry, which helped when we needed to prep for the next feeding," says Bykofsky. "Pump parts fit in too, which was a godsend when I forgot to wash a pump part and had 30 minutes until the next session. We still run the dryer every night with toddler cups."The sterilisation cycle is just five minutes, one of the shortest from an electric steriliser we tested. If the lid isn’t removed, everything inside stays sterile for 24 hours after running a cycle. While the initial outlay is more than a microwave steriliser, it’s considerably cheaper to run. Altogether, the Tommee Tippee Super-Steam is a reliable, thoughtfully-designed steriliser that’s widely available, well-supported and should do its job consistently over time – a lifesaver to an overloaded new parent and a worthy winner of this year’s Mumsnet Best Steriliser award. Cold water sterilisers involve filling a container with water and adding sterilisation tablets or fluid to make a sterilisation solution. The active ingredient is sodium hypochlorite, which is a mild bleach that has been through a purification process to make it stable and non-toxic. It’s perfectly safe to use, but does smell vaguely of swimming pool. She looked at whether each steriliser was available from a wide range of retailers, whether you’d need to buy any extras separately and whether it was possible to buy replacement parts.

Versatility: If you want to use your sterilizer to clean pump parts, children's toys, or pacifiers, you'll need to make sure it can do so. When choosing your sterilizer, consider how many bottles you'll want to clean at once, the cost, how much counter space you have, and if it would be easier to have an all-in-one device that dries and stores or a simple unit that fits in the microwave when you need things cleaned. Some also include dryers, for an added bonus. There are four main sterilisation units on the market: cold water sterilisers, microwave sterilisers, electric sterilisers and travel sterilisers. They all have their own pros and cons. 1. Cold water steriliser

Cons

The instructions are quite specific about how to arrange bottles and breast pump parts on the steriliser’s inner tray, but our tester found it easy enough to do (and also to ignore when she wanted to sterilise non-standard parts). There’s plenty of room inside for large bottles, small toys, dummies and breast pump paraphernalia.