My Ooler Sleep System started throwing an F2 error (and my bad fix)
During all of the health fun I also was left with a bed that next to impossible to sleep in unless the room was freezing when my Ooler Sleep System threw the dreaded F2 error and shut off. It would last a little while and give hope with everything I tried (power cycling, hitting the hidden reset switch, chanting various curses at it,) but it would never run more than a few minutes, just enough to chill the bed a bit.
TL;DR – F2 probably means internal fan out or overheating, no repair from mfg (discontinued,) place in front of external box fan and see if it doesn’t work. Paul’s being excessively verbose for the first time in a month.
I’ve got an old name brand memory foam mattress. I’d mention the name of it, but I’m really drawing a blank right now. Not me being coy, memory is still shot a month after surgery. Unfortunately that thing is a heat pit. You get on it and it’s nice and room temperature, about 20 minutes in you find yourself slowly experiencing heat death as every waste erg of heat calories you expel is bounced back at you.
In 2019 Ooler Sleep Systems PR contacted me and asked if I’d like to try out this thing and I was like… hells yeah. They sent over a queen coverage set which was two ooler sleep systems as opposed to one big one. And after I found every bug in 4 pre-production or first release versions I ended up with two stable and awesome sleep aids. Yeah, I had a bunch of issues (which you can read by searching Ooler here,) with several in a row. Wonder if that’s why ooler’s people stopped talking to me?
Anyway, while I was back home after surgery they both went out. One I was able to fix because it was chillpad/user related and not the device, but the other was throwing F2 after short amounts of time.
F2 is the CPU of the thing overheating so the unit shuts down. I grabbed an air gun and cleaned everything out that I could, which unfortunately did nothing, and decided to contact tech support telling them what I had done (everything in the F2 faq they have). Of course they asked me do it again, which resulted in no change and I was told that they do not service those any more, they’re out of warranty, and given a 25% off coupon to buy their new Chillpad Dock system (same concept, looks like better heat direction).
Keep in mind, I have no particular right to expect anything of them. These were promo items and honestly if I didn’t just go through $140k worth of surgery and am sitting waiting on the tsunami of uncovered by insurance bills to come rolling in, a $800 good night’s sleep is something I would invest in as my Tempur-Pedic (finally remembered it) is honestly making my life miserable. Never been a more disappointing investment in sleep than that old memory foam mattress.
On a whim I grabbed the last thermal camera I reviewed and pointed it at both oolers while they were running. It was pretty obvious that the one that was always working was pushing heat extremely far away from the ooler, and the one that was not there was barely a visible thermal footprint around it. This is something those without temporary (hopefully) peripheral neuropathy can tell simply by putting their hands down near them… I guessed at it but temperatures are still difficult. Conclusion is that internal fans busted and it’s not pushing heat out.
Anyway, I needed my existing to work, I don’t have much of a brain at the moment and we’ll not even get to how wrecked my body still is and that picking up an ooler is an effort still, I grabbed a desk fan and put the broken ooler in front of it making sure all of the unit was getting airflow. Last night at 2am I woke up freezing to death. The F2 ooler in front of the fan set on low reported that the temperature was 54 or so and was still running several hours after being turned on. I had to raise the temperature on it which is something I never have ever had to do with either ooler.
My wife’s ooler (not in front of a fan,) was reporting that it was about 64 degrees and she was sleeping soundly, so I set the temperature on mine to 60.
While her Ooler was not directly in the fan’s line of air the airflow had increased in that area and her ooler slept a lot cooler.
Waking up after a good night’s rest (finally) I noticed that the area where the oolers were was noticeably hotter than the rest of the room. I’m going to see if I can’t get the air to circulate better.
So yeah, if you can’t fix it, throw it in front of a box fan isn’t the worst idea to try.
I start thinking that would be about 4 years of great night’s sleep ($1000 system) / ~$250 a year / $20.83 a month… yeah, I would honestly pay that on their new system (if I wasn’t waiting for a mountain of medical bills after being out of work a month and a week.)
So yeah, as a wrap up. I don’t generally overly endorse product that has broken, but damn… once you sleep on a cool pad you do not want to go back.
I’d love to try out their newer version, looks like it’s designed to expel the heat in one direction as opposed to out and down. Oof, I’d have designed it to blow the heat straight up, and added a way to kick start the cooling (ice tray, which I attempted to get them to add to address the long cool down times in a warm environment,) but that’s just me.
