Mornio's setup takes a minute, and almost none of that minute is the decision that determines whether it works. The item you choose, and where it lives, does more than any setting in the app.
The four rules
- One room away. Far enough that you must stand, cross a threshold and ideally turn on a light. Close enough that you will still accept the deal in February. This is the balance that matters most.
- It will not run out. This is the single most common failure. A kettle lasts years; a toothpaste tube lasts weeks and then has a different barcode.
- Nobody else will move it. If you share a kitchen, pick something unambiguously yours, or a printed code you put somewhere specific.
- It scans quickly, in the light you will actually have. Flat surfaces beat curved bottles. Test it in a dark bathroom at 6 a.m., not in daylight.
Good choices, ranked
| Item | Lasts | Scans | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Printed QR code, taped up | Indefinitely | Excellent | You choose the exact spot. Laminate or tape it well in a bathroom. |
| Kettle or coffee machine | Years | Good | Your next action is already queued up. Excellent choice. |
| Soap or hand-wash dispenser | Months | Good | Refillable, and it lives where you want to be. |
| A tin or jar you keep | Long | Good | Inside a cupboard adds a small extra act of waking. |
| Shampoo bottle | Weeks to months | Curved, slower | Works, but re-register when replaced. |
| Toothpaste | Weeks | Fine | Popular, but you will re-register often. |
| Cereal box | Days to weeks | Flat, scans well | Gets recycled, often by someone else. |
Where to put it
Roughly in order of effectiveness:
- The bathroom. A doorway crossed, bright light, and you are already at the start of your routine. The strongest all-round choice.
- The kettle or coffee machine. The next action is queued, which makes going back to bed feel like an interruption rather than a decision.
- Inside a kitchen cupboard. Walking, opening and looking is three small acts of waking rather than one.
- The back of the front door. Effective if your problem is missing a commute. Slightly brutal.
Avoid: anywhere visible from the bed, anywhere you can reach by leaning, and anywhere you will resent going in winter.
The mistake almost everyone makes
People pick somewhere genuinely difficult, the garage, a top shelf, another floor, on the theory that harder is better. It works for about four days. Then one morning you are ill, or it is freezing, or you simply resent it, and you delete the app.
Aim for one room away. The setup you keep using beats the one that was theoretically stronger. This is the single most useful thing on this page.
The best scan item is one you were going to walk to anyway.
Printed QR codes: worth it?
Often yes, for one reason: you control the location exactly, rather than being limited to where your household objects happen to live. Generate any QR code, print it, and stick it where you want to be standing at 6:30.
Two practical notes. Bathrooms are damp, so tape it properly or laminate it, and print it large enough to scan quickly in poor light. And do not keep a photo of your code on the phone you are trying to get out of bed with, for obvious reasons.
Use your backups properly
Mornio lets you register up to two backup items alongside the primary. The point of a backup is not convenience, it is covering the failure where your primary is gone: used up, recycled, or moved.
So put backups in different rooms. A backup on the same shelf as the primary fails at exactly the same moment. A kettle in the kitchen and a printed code in the bathroom is a good pairing.
What Mornio stores about your item
Not the code. Mornio saves a salted one-way hash plus the label you choose, on your iPhone. It does not keep a photo of the code or its readable value, so nothing on your device reveals which product you scan or where it lives. There is no account and no server for it to sync to. Full detail in the Privacy Policy.