The OOLER Sleep System (night one)
The OOLER Sleep System is a multi-part Bluetooth or panel controlled mattress topper pad that can not only warm you up, but most importantly to me is it can cool you down.
I run hot, I can’t sleep if I’m too warm, and my memory foam mattress is a heat sink. The bedroom I sleep in is also hard to cool since an AC guy took $3500 from me to install a unit for upstairs and never did the job four years ago.
So right now I attempt to get the temperature below 70 with a window unit, but even with that it’s not always cool enough for me, and I generally freeze out my wife or if she gets near me she boils.
I’d tried BedJet, I have to say I’m still trying BedJet, it’s great, but it only cools the top of me and sometimes turns into an igloo if I don ‘t have something on top of it, which in turn traps the heat even though there’s cool air going over it. It’s been great, but it wasn’t the solution for the heat pit underneath me.
I got a dual OOLER setup shipped to me a couple of days ago for review and installed it yesterday.
OOLER Install
For me I placed the mats upside-down on the bed, put the securing strap for the center under the mattress, then flipped the OOLER pad right side up and shimmied the straps to the right location. Probably would be easier if my mattress didn’t weigh 100 pounds, but it does.
I placed the water plug side at the head of the bed as that side had a bedside table I could put the OOLERs under and plug them in without more tech at the foot of the bed (visible).
Once the units were plugged in you turn them on and start filling with water. Instructions say to fill, wait until the water’s in the bed, fill, but I think I was filling it slow enough this was not an issue. After filled and cycling I paired the app.
The OOLER app
First off, as of this writing we’re looking at a $700 investment for half a bed so you’d expect the app to be polished. It’s close, but man there are some issues.
The first is it crashes if you take a screenshot, something pops in front of it, and a few other ways. I submitted bug reports after it crashed during a firmware update. App needs work, however even with the crashing everything did work.
Second way it needs work is if you’re going dual-zone, which I am doing at the moment, this is two OOLER units you have to pair. I paired the first one I powered up and then went to add and I’m seeing two units. It doesn’t tell me that very long string of MAC address numbers is already paired and I didn’t see an evident way to retrieve the address of the already paired one.
I lifted up a now-filled-with-water OOLER unit, couldn’t find the address, and then just guessed (easier way would have been to unplug the one I was paired to but there is a long story about a 6yo talking in my ear while I was trying to accomplish this omitted).
Initial thermal images disappoint, but wait
I cranked the OOLER to max, set it to cold, and got a thermal image of me laying for two minutes on the non-OOLER side of the bed. Should be noted this takes place before I got the second unit on the bed.
Above: Left non-OOLER, right OOLER turned on to cold
Initially the OOLER which was set to cold seemed warmer, even the FLIR thermal imaging shows it’s warmer as well. I didn’t want a bed warmer. This is not what the experience I desired entailed.
This is not what I got after a few minutes.
Night one: OOLER Action
I’d set it to 50something on both sides. The bed was cool to the touch when I got upstairs to my bedroom, it felt cooler than the ambient air. I noticed the area where the two OOLER units were sitting was warm. I wasn’t sure, and am still not sure, if this is because they’re acting as active air conditioners (or water conditioners) or not.
I got into bed, started heating under me with my body heat, and then started cooling down. I mean not like I’m on an ice block or anything but it felt like the heat I was pushing into the thing was going away.
I fell asleep pretty fast last night and was woken by my 3yo with her first bedtime accident since diapers (really impressive run, several months). I got out of bed and realized I was cold. I thought perhaps I had cranked the temperature down and was freezing the kids but it was 75 degrees or so downstairs and upstairs was showing 73. For me this is comfortable usually.
I got kiddo taken care of on the first bedtime accident of hers ever, she went back to bed, and I got into bed shivering and changed the temp from the 50s to the 60s.
I woke up this morning cold. I’d miscalculated how cold I could take it (you can set timers on the thing, we’ll get into that later) – I cranked everything to heat to try and get myself moving again and got out of bed about 12 minutes later after setting it to bake and turning the BedJet onto roast setting.
More?
That was night one. I’ll be writing about how this thing pans out and what it does more in depth later.
I have to pick my 6yo from last day of kindergarten now, but I’ll have more on this in the coming days.
You can check out more of the OOLER Sleep System at OOLER.CO and feel free to ask any questions, I’ll be putting this thing through its paces and have better thermal reporting over the next few days.
