Here’s the bad news: there are dozens and dozens of baby monitors to choose from. And when you’re shopping for baby monitors, you can spend hours and hours researching them and still not walk away with a clear answer on what will work best.

The only way to really know what can stand up to the rigors of real-world use is to actually use baby monitors like you do in the real world — every night. In the middle of the night. During naps. At grandma’s house. While trying to do conference calls … you get the picture.

And that’s exactly what we’ve done. We’ve spent the past 4 years battle testing 25+ baby monitors. These aren’t “oh let’s set it up and spend a few minutes poking around the app” type tests. This is “use it for months as our primary monitor” type testing.

(Oh and by “we” we mean mostly Fathercraft’s John Doht, the guy in all our YouTube videos who once heard from his wife “no more monitors in this house until you get rid of some first”)