GQ Magazine reviews the Ooler Sleep System, a new mattress pad that regulates body temperature during sleep.
The general premise: instead of cooling all the air in your apartment, maybe it’s easier to just cool the thing you’re laying on. I don’t know anything about thermoregulation, but this sounds like a solid idea.
The Ooler pad connects to a little shoebox-sized cooling device with some rubber tubes. Here’s how it generally works: The box cools a tank of water, and then sends the cooled water through the tubes, which are woven through the mattress pad. It all looks a bit laboratorial, until you throw a fitted sheet on top. Then it looks normal, except for a rubber tube protruding from your bed into a gently-whirring white box.
The Ooler’s accompanying app lets you set a bed temperature anywhere between 55 and 110 degrees. I hopped on to set my sleep temperature. The plan: come 9:00pm, the Ooler would start to hit 70 degrees, and then go down to 65 degrees at 1am. The app said that 65-68 degrees was the optimal temperature for deep sleep. It proposed to me that I set a “Wake Up Alarm,” wherein the bed would heat up to gently rouse me from sleep. I politely but firmly declined to implement said warm wake up into my life.
