My teenage daughter is a sound sleeper. The typical alarm clock doesn’t wake her up. Usually I have to shout several times to get her to stir. Now she’s got to get herself up for high school and I need some kind of device, besides an electrical shock, that will do the trick. Can anyone recommend a reasonably priced, easily obtainable alarm clock that, say, gets increasingly louder until it is turned off?
I have a Timex alarm clock and I swear, the thing has the most EVIL sounding alarm I’ve ever heard in my life! The damn thing is so irritating to the human, dog and cat ear, that:
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Husband has slammed it into the nightstand so many times that the housing is cracked.
The damn thing still works.
I’ve moved it to the dresser across the room, so he can’t get to it easily. -
The cats flee from the room like they’re on fire when they hear the thing go off. They won’t return to the bedroom for days after that happens.
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The dogs howl and bark when it goes off, until someone gets up and turns it off. Then, they cautiously slink up to it and growl at it.
Does she have a cell phone?
If so, most have an alarm function. Set the alarm to the same tone as her ring. Trust me, any self respecting teenager will be roused by the sound of her cell. 
I got yer answer!
Yup. A “bed shaker”.
No, that don’t mean a live-in lover.
It’s a gadget that makes the whole bed vibrate until you wake up.
I swear by my Sharper Image Sonic Boom clock: huge numbers, an alarm whose volume and tone you can adjust independently, and a vibrating disc for under the pillow/mattress. I don’t even use the disc. And it’s only $40.
(On preview, the one that Bosda is talking about is a different model than what I have.)
Jill, rather than a clock radio type of alarm, would one of those old fashioned ones work? They’re so obnoxious and the shrill certainly will wake someone up. Something like this. That’s what I used when I was a teenager - I put it across my room so I had to get out of bed to shut it off. You should be able to check them out at the store to see which is the loudest.
Here’s an idea that will save you some money. Condition your daughter to become alert to the sound of any alarm clock. You could use the alarm clock as a warning (she is a teenager after all) and this will give her a Pavlovian association.
Shout while pressing the alarm buttton. “You better wake up!” beep beep beep, “You better take out the trash!” beep beep beep. Soon you won’t even need to shout, the alarm will be the ‘overriding stimuli’. I also saved you your voice.
The Sonic Boom clocks only work if you have to do more than just roll over to whack the button.
I speak from bitter experience.
I was at Radio Shack today and noticed an alarm clock advertised as LOUD. I don’t have any details about how loud, or how hard it is to turn off. I think it was $15.
They also had fuzzy M&M radios for $5. Cute little faces on 'em. I guess it’s almost Christmas.
Good point. However, while I’ll admit that I often hit the snooze button every 9 minutes for an hour or more, I have never slept through the alarm – which I’ve always done, eventually, with other alarm clocks. 
I have one I got at Radio Shack about 10 years ago. They don’t havethe same model but it’s great. (In college I would line up three alarm clocks on my ironing board, set up across the room, set at five-minute intervals, and still I would sleep through them. But then, it wasn’t a very big room.)
This Radio Shack clock doesn’t have just ONE tone, it has several, like a car alarm, progressing to more and more obnoxious, and it just doesn’t go off. Put it in a laundry hamper or hide it in a closet, it will still go off and be loud enough, and she will have to get up and seek it out. It cost about $15. Probably they don’t have the same model still, but they might have something similar.
This wouldn’t solve the main problem, but for snooze addicts I saw an alarm clock that forced you to play a game of simon to turn it off. When the alarm sounds it flashes a sequence of lights and you have to repeat them. Until you do that you can’t hit snooze, turn it off or even adjust the volume. For the OP, what about just getting a cheap 120v AC timer and setting it to turn on something loud at whatever time she needs to get up. Maybe hook it up to a vacuum cleaner.
Pick your favorite, then…put it on the other side of the room so she HAS to get out of bed to stop the shrieking.