A home yogurt maker can be a great appliance, or another thing rattling around in the back of the cupboards taking up space. It's important to find a yogurt maker which works well for a household, and to confirm that a yogurt maker is needed in the first place, to ensure that a yogurt maker will see years of steady use.
For people who enjoy yogurt, especially plain yogurt, there are some definite advantages to getting a yogurt maker. Making your own yogurt is much cheaper than buying commercial versions, and it allows for greater control over the ingredients and consistency of the end product. It is possible to make yogurt at home without a special machine, as the key to making yogurt is heating milk, inoculating it with starters, and then incubating it for several hours while yogurt forms, but using a yogurt maker is a lot easier.
People who do not use yogurt very much may find that a yogurt maker is a wasted purchase. Good yogurt makers can get expensive, and they don't do much good sitting in the back of a cupboard unused. For households which prefer flavored yogurt, making yogurt at home can be time consuming, as the yogurt needs to be made and then flavored, and this can require a lot of effort.
Once one has determined that a yogurt maker is genuinely desired, there are a number of things to think about when making the purchase. The first is capacity. If a household regularly goes through a couple of big tubs of yogurt every week, a large yogurt maker is going to be needed. Yogurt makers also come in two different configurations which should be considered. In the first, the yogurt is made in little serving-sized cups, while in the other, the yogurt is made in a large central vat.
Ease of cleaning is something else to think about. Ideally, a yogurt maker should be dishwasher safe so that all of the cups can be regularly sterilized, and the base should be easy to wipe down. Milk can get icky when it sits around for awhile at room temperature, and an appliance with cracks or textured surfaces is going to trap milk and create some very unpleasant smells.
Some yogurt makers come with an automatic shutoff or timer which alerts people to the time when the yogurt should be done. However, different bacteria ferment at a different rate, and subtle variations can change the amount of time it takes for yogurt to ferment. If the yogurt is underfermented, it will be thin and watery, while overfermented yogurt will be thick, which may be a desirable trait. If a device does have a timer or automatic shutoff, cooks should confirm that they can change the settings to reach their ideal fermentation time.