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SALT LAKE CITY — What does it take to wake you up in the morning? Two, three, or maybe four presses of the "snooze" button?
A couple of new extreme alarm clocks promise to stir, or at least seriously annoy, the deepest sleepers. Two KSL morning show producers put them to the test.
Both have found waking up for the overnight shift can be a long, drawn out process. So we thought the wheel-based Clocky could shorten that. This clock is designed to roll right off the night stand when its alarm sounds off.
Then it rolls around the floor, forcing the sleeper to actually jump out of bed and hunt it down to finally shut it off.
Sounds like a cure of a snooze-button addiction, right? We gave it to producer Tyson Plastow to try.
"I've had lots of practice hitting that snooze button. I do it every time I wake up. It's hard to get out of bed is what it is," he explained.
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A camera rolled during Plastow's test of Clocky, which he set up next to his couch.
"I just smashed it really quick," Plastow said. "It would work great if it went straight. Since it stops and turns around and stuff, it's not getting that far."
Plastow concedes Clocky could work better on a nightstand where it could jump from and perhaps rolls under the bed. Regardless, his kids loved it.
"It makes noise," he said. "It rolls around. It's a great kids' toy."
Another extreme alarm clock is called the Sonic Bomb, and it packs a 113-decibel alarm. That's a little louder than a power saw from 3 feet away. It also includes a bed-shaker unit.
We gave that one to morning producer Beth Grimmett.
"I'm lucky to get sleep crammed in somewhere. So when I hit the pillow I am out, and waking up is incredibly hard some days," she said.
So, she tried the Sonic Bomb.
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Alarm clocks are such dreadful things. Theyre noisy, abrupt harbingers of another dreary 9-5 at the office."The vibrating and the sound is what really shocked me. It would get my heart pumping and my adrenaline going," she said.
Grimmett said that sudden rush of adrenaline often robbed her of the energy she usually had about an hour after waking up.
"For me, waking up gradually over 15 minutes is much better than all at once," she said.
Although Plastow and Grimmett were not sold on the Sonic Bomb or Clocky, there are plenty of other extreme alarm clocks and even smartphone apps like Freakyalarm. It won't shut up until you solve a series of logic games.
