Bedwetting alarms - recommendations?

We used the SleepDry Alarm for my son, who was still wetting the bed at night at almost 10yrs old.  It worked the first night we used it!!  He still would occasionally have an accident, but the issue resolved 90% of the time.  

Dear bedwetter Mom,

I don't have advice but wanted to share my story. My son also was a bedwetter all the way to age 7 or 8. We didn't try anything except for buying high quality mattress protectors and avoiding fluids after 6pm. But truly we were so busy raising kids, working, and remodeling our house that the bedwetting was always a 'surprise' with me having to get up and change sheets and dry my son in the middle of the night. He was so mortified that is was not possible to do anything but work fast to get him in bed again nice and dry. The good news is that it eventually stopped.  Very likely your son will soon stop. The alarm might work so that he empties his bladder before it happens. Much luck.

My stepson was a frequent bedwetter at that age, and would even occasionally wet the bed up to age 12. Our pediatrician at the time gave us a pamphlet from the National Kidney Foundation that was really helpful - they now have it online: https://www.kidney.org/patients/bw and there is a section for kids.  At this site there is also info on what to look for in a moisture alarm and how to use one. My stepson was such a sound sleeper that alarms didn't work, and it was really difficult to get him up at night to pee. In any case, one of the big take-aways from this info is that bed wetting is not the kid's fault and that there can be physical reasons why they are doing it (smaller bladder or they produce more urine at night than most kids), and it can run in families. Our pediatrician gave my stepson bladder stretching exercises. 

We used a Chummie bedwetting alarm with my eight-year-old son. He was peeing twice a night, every night in his sleep when we started, and so was still using night diapers. We used the Chummie for about a month, after which he stayed dry for 10 nights in a row and we stopped using it. Sometimes the alarm came unstuck from his underwear and therefore didn't sound when he peed. Sometimes the alarm went off but didn't wake him up. But even with those fails, the process as a whole worked. Other considerations/tips for use: (1) The child needs to want to be done with the night diapers: it was no fun for my son (and me) to be woken in the night and have to change his underwear and the bedding (use a waterproof pad on top of the sheet to minimize what needs changing) and reattach the alarm, but my son tolerated it because he was invested in the end goal. We did the training during the school year (because we had a busy summer of traveling coming up), and it turned out okay, in terms of sleep not being too interrupted. (2) Definitely make your child go to the bathroom after the alarm wakes them up. After the first few days, my son would stop peeing right after the alarm sounded, and was convinced that he had already peed everything out in the bed--because he wanted to go back to sleep--but in truth he hadn't, and would have another accident an hour later unless we made him go to the bathroom and empty his bladder the rest of the way out. (3) We always rinsed and dried the detector with a microfiber towel before reattachment, and didn't have a problem with false alarms. (4) When we ran out of the tapes that came with the package, we used duct tape: it stuck really well, although it did leave a temporary residue on the underwear.

Bedwetting alarm was useless for my son.  It buzzed a few seconds after he had already let loose!  And the wire broke after 3 weeks.  His doctor finally recommended Desmopressin at age 10, because he was wet most nights and pull-ups couldn't contain the sheer amount of his urine.  By 12, the doctor started decreasing the Desmopressin and at 12 1/2 he was off it, without wetting anymore.  

Since you didn't get great responses to your question, I thought I would chime in. My daughter (now in high school--shocking) was a deep sleeper to the point that bedwetting was an issue. I can't remember the exact age but it was something like 1st or 2nd grade when she was determined to be done with pull-ups at night. We ordered an alarm online from Malem that did the trick. At first it was torture--like having a newborn again with middle of the night wake-ups! But the issue was that she really did not feel anything when her body had to go so she needed the alarm to wake her up. At first, it is after the fact--obviously, since the alarm detects moisture. (Like a previously poster mentioned--make sure your child gets up and uses the bathroom.)  But eventually her body learned to anticipate it. She went through a phase when she would get up at night to pee, but now, years later, she sleeps (heavily!) through the night and has to use the bathroom first thing when she wakes up. It is a bit of a pain, but the alarm definitely can work. It did for us.

My daughter is a bit younger at 5, but she had the same issue. She's a very deep sleeper, so she would wet the bed most nights. We started carrying her to the bathroom a few hours after she would go to sleep and right before we would go to bed. She hardly ever woke up or remembered in the morning. This kept her bed dry and eventually she stopped needing to pee in the middle of the night. It worked really well for us.

We used the book "7 steps to night time dryness" which was amazing. follow the steps exactly really worked amazingly well. We used a Malem alarm (the metal clipped to the front of the underwear to sense the first drop of pee). We had to sleep in his room (90% of kids will sleep through a smoke alarm, let alone a bedwetting alarm) to wake him to it. He hated the noise and being woken up but once we explained that it needed to be obnoxious so that his bladder would learn to keep the pee in so that it wouldn't hear the noise, he understood and tolerated it. Also for many bedwetters, stool retention is the issue and once you get rid of that, the issue goes away (see the website bedwettingandaccidents.com).