The OOLER Sleep System review, night 5
The OOLER Sleep System, as we’ve covered, is a pad that goes under your fitted sheet and as you’re sleeping moves heated or chilled water through the thing to keep you cool, or warm, when you want to be.
For me, when I get too hot I toss and turn. I’m generally not rested when I wake, and other fun things that go with a lifetime of insomnia. There were times a few years back where I could lay down at 8pm and still be exhausted by noon the next day. Even when they found I needed a CPAP as I was just not breathing that only improved things a bit.
The best way I can think to describe the OOLER with the settings I’ve got it on is I’ve been waking up and feeling like I actually rested. I’ve been waking up before the alarm for a couple of days and not hating the day. I’ve been feeling like someone who I thought only existed in TV shows who wakes up to greet the day refreshed.
That said, it’s night 5. We’ll see how things go.
Things discovered with the OOLER
The software needs a little work. Not a lot, but some fixes need added. An example of this is with two OOLER units (me and my wife each are testing one,) switching between units on the phone can cause oddness.
Example: I opened the OOLER app, turned mine on and to LOW. I switched over to hers and did the same. I heard her OOLER unit kick on (it’s quiet, but with three noise/performance settings I’d set it to blast.) I noticed I had not heard my OOLER turn on.
I re-opened mine, sure enough it was now claiming it was off. I turned it on again and heard the unit kick softly on and it worked. Minor bug, needs squashing.
When looking at an operating OOLER unit you can see streaks of cold going up and down the mattress. It doesn’t feel that cold, but if you’ve got a FLIR unit you can watch as the heat is removed while the water inside pumps it toward the OOLER base unit.
The OOLER base units appear to blow heat out of the sides of the unit. As the water temperature is getting well below room temperature without ice cubes or the sound of a compressor, I’m betting they’re using the Peltier Effect and some whisper silent fans to chill the water.
If you stand watching after leaving a thermal print you can watch as the heat is carried away. It does it pretty slowly even on max performance, but it feels like it’s going fast enough to cool me down.
Improvements I’d like to see
While the OOLER Sleep System does have bed straps to keep the mattress pad in place, they don’t do a great job. They’re a bit too stretchy and you end up with an OOLER pad moving or bunching up. I think this might be solvable by stretching them some more and tying them, but I think the straps should go from stretchy to solid with a ratchet buckling system at the end.
I’d also like to see these as IoT rather than Bluetooth. While I laugh that I’m complaining about having to go into the room to turn them on, and wait for two bluetooth connections to establish, it seems like a premium sleeping system like that you really should have the ability to tell your assistant to turn the OOLER pad on or off before you go to bed and after you wake.
Not to mention that unless you’re setting a schedule you might just walk out of the house and leave them running.
And while we’re at it, one of the great things about the BedJet system we reviewed was the little remote. I wanted to turn on the bedjet, I reach for the remote, press a button, bam it’s on. With the OOLER I either have to have the pump in range of me, or unlock my phone, open OOLER, wait for a connect, change the setting. This isn’t particularly conducive to sleep.
I will say though that has only happened once at night and once in the morning so it’s not a particularly terrible downside.
The OOLER Sleep System is available at ooler.co
