Hatch Restore 3 review

What it is: a combined sunrise alarm, sunset fade, sound machine and wind-down routine in one bedside unit, configured from a phone app. Who it is for: someone who wants one device instead of three and will actually use the scheduling.

This page judges the light. The sound half is assessed separately at the Hatch Restore sound machine review, because people buy this device for two quite different reasons.

The sunrise itself

The ramp begins around thirty minutes before the alarm and moves from a deep orange through to a bright white. The color path matters more than it sounds: starting warm and dim rather than jumping to a cool white is what makes the first part of the ramp tolerable while you are still asleep.

On raw brightness it sits with the other quality units. Optimize Your Biology’s light-meter testing puts quality sunrise alarms at roughly 275 to 395 lux at 18 inches - their measurement, not ours - and the meaningful gap in this category is between quality units and budget ones, not between the premium models.

The display dims properly, which is rarer than it should be

A bedside clock is a lit object in a room you are trying to keep dark all night. Most clock radios have a floor below which they will not go, and you end up putting tape over it. The Restore dims genuinely low, which is a real and under-advertised advantage.

It matters because of the numbers: the 2022 PLOS Biology consensus recommendations suggest keeping light under about 1 melanopic lux at the eye during sleep. Most bedside electronics fail that comfortably. See the guide to making a bedroom dark for everything else in the room that does too.

Where it falls short

• App dependency. Setup and most changes need the phone. Flat battery, traveling without it, or someone else needing to change the alarm all become awkward in a way a physical dial never is.
• Subscription for the full library. The device works with included content, but the larger soundscape and guided library is paid. An ongoing cost attached to hardware you own outright.
• Price. The most expensive way to buy a sunrise. Justified if you are replacing two or three devices, hard to justify if you only want the light.
• Service dependency. A connected device relies on a company continuing to run a service. A Philips with a dial has no such exposure. This is not a prediction about Hatch, it is a structural difference worth pricing in.
• Ramp control is less granular than Lumie’s. If the precise duration and shape of the fade is what you care about, the specialist unit does it better.

Alternatives

• Philips SmartSleep - twenty brightness levels on a physical control, no app, no account, no subscription. The buy-once-forget-about-it option.
• Lumie Bodyclock Shine 300 - adjustable sunrise and sunset durations from a light-therapy specialist. The best fade of the three.
• JALL Wake Up Light - the cheap way to find out whether light waking suits you at all, with the brightness compromise that implies.

Verdict

If you want one object doing sunrise, sunset, sound and a wind-down routine, and you will genuinely use per-day scheduling, the Restore 3 is the most capable bedside device available and it earns the price.

If you want a light that wakes you and nothing else, you are paying a large premium and accepting an app and possibly a subscription for capability you will not use. The Philips does the light half as well for much less, and the full Hatch-versus-alternatives comparison lays out that decision properly.

Before you let the subscription settle it, note that it gates less of the device than people expect: the sound library breakdown shows that every sleep sound and the sunrise itself are free, while most of the wake-up audio is not.

The fact that it runs the evening as well as the morning is exactly why it tops our roundup of sunrise alarm clocks for ADHD, where the wind-down matters at least as much as the wake.

If you are buying a Hatch for a child’s room rather than your own nightstand, this is the wrong model - which Hatch sound machine should you buy separates the two lines and covers the subscription question.

If the membership is the part you are weighing up, Hatch Restore alternatives takes each of this device’s four strengths in turn and names the one-time-purchase clock that matches it.