Getting Breast Milk Pump

This post is about the analysis and evaluation in getting a breast pump products. There are tons of breast pump products and my wife and myself are quite puzzling on what breast pump product to decide. There are cheap and expensive and it's very hard to part a hard-earned money to something which we've no clue how it works. Enjoy the reading...

Hand vs Manual Pump vs Electric Pump
First of all, there are 3 mechanism to extract the breast milk which are as per below:

Using hand method would take a very long time and tiring to express the breast milk.
Using manual pump method would take some time, and tiring too to express the breast milk.
However using electric pump method would take shorter time without much efforts.
Finally we decided to go for electric pump device.

What Brand?
The next puzzling thing in our head is to go for which brand. Upon asking lactation consultant, we've been informed that Avent and Medela brand are good. So I went to Philips showroom and ask to get a whole list of Avent products and breast pump is in the list. I was informed that Philips representative would email me about the good price as I could get corporate discount. 1 week passed, 2 week passed and still no news. So finally decided to look for other brands like Medela. We come across that many baby shops sells Medela product but kind of doubt on the warranty and Medela product is not cheap. As warranty is an important factor in our decision, therefore we drill down to Medela distributor and found out that lacta-equip is the only distributor in Malaysia. And lacta-equip provide a 1 year warranty.
Medela distributor for Malaysia link:
http://www.medela.com/IW/en/breastfeeding/about-medela/distributors.html?country=Malaysia
Lacta-Equip Website
http://www.lacta-equip.com/
Warning: If purchased Medela product from other source (e.g. ebay) which lacta-equip does not recognize, then be prepare to fork out more $$$ for repair as lacta-equip company is the only service centre for Medela products in Malaysia.

Which Model to Choose?
Finally we have decided to go for Medela brand, and the next question is which model. Medela have 3 types of electric breast pump:

Swing is a single electric breast pump that cost RM 799.
Pump In Style Advanced (PISA) can be a single or dual electric breast pump that cost RM 1,788.
Freestyle is similar to PISA but it's mobile that cost RM 2,299.

We decided to get dual electric breast pump as this provides a better mechanism for breast milk expression. However the cost is a bomb to the family budget.

Decision Time
Finally we decided to get Pump In Style Advanced at lacta-equip because:
1) Based on Amazon.com product review, we come to the conclusion that PISA is better than Freestyle because the suction power in Freestyle is weaker than PISA.
2) Lacta-equip company have promotion in selling PISA at RM 1,399
Do call up lacta-equip whether they have promotion as it's much cheaper and with warranty.

Also, do get Hands Free Breast Pump Bra that can free up the hands for multi-task purpose. The product that we got is from Simple Wishes that cost RM 132.

Try First Before Buy
Recently a friend share his experience in which a shop allows the mum to try different types of breast pump product before buying, and this is a good idea and friendly way to allow mum to experience different type of breast pump before parting hard-earned money. The shop is located at Klang and here are the website:
http://www.enjoybreastfeed.com/aboutus.php