OOLER Sleep System – Water Cooled/Heated Mattress Pad

Have you ever built or worked with a computer using a liquid cooling solution to help bring the processor and other elements of a system down in order to improve performance? Let it be a custom built solution or a fully enclosed plug and play product, these solutions can drastically help with bringing down temperatures and can outperform your basic fans and heatsinks in a heartbeat. In fact, these are used in a lot of custom building competitions for this reason. So what if something like this could be used for other purposes? Like cooling your body while you sleep? Your body is a machine after all.

One company sets out to do just that with its new OOLER Sleep System. OOLER is a water cooled and heated mattress pad that uses a main control unit to circulate water via small tubes running throughout the pad. The control unit will heat or cool the water as it passes through at the temperature you select, and thus passing the effect to your body as you sleep. So, a liquid cooling system for your bed!

It’s a neat idea in general that could really help hot sleepers score a lot more rest if it works. Which leads us to figure out what that verdict is. Does it work?

Design

When ordering your OOLER, you would choose between single or double (one person or two, each having their own control/temperature) unit/pad, and then the size of your bed (queen, king or California king). The box comes with everything you need and no accessories are needed.

It breaks down into two main parts (as mentioned above), the pad and the control unit. The pad looks like your typical mattress pad, but thinner since it isn’t there for the cushion. What cushion it does have is solely there to hide the detection of what’s running around inside.

Inside are small tubes (again, as mentioned earlier) running all throughout it, all intersecting at the bottom where it adapts into a larger set of two main tubes that travel away from the mattress and down to the floor. These main tubes are insulated with foam running nearly the entire distance, leaving just enough on the mattress end to create a nice bend, so that they can follow the mattress down.

These main tubes lead to the control unit, which would typically be sitting on the floor, and more than likely under your bed (unless you want to redirect the tubes in a nightstand or something and keep the unit on a shelf). The control unit is nearly a fully enclosed product outside of a hatch on top that you pour water into, filling the reservoir.

The hoses connect to the back of the unit and you plug the unit in and you are ready to go!

The unit is all plastic with a fan system inside and ventilation all around for air to move in and out. The controls are on the top and consist of just a power button and an up and down option for temperature. Everything else is controlled by an app.

Setup

As mentioned, the setup is easy and doesn’t require many steps at all. Between putting it all together and filling it with water, you can be finished with it all in just a few minutes. At this point, you can even turn it on and test it out using the temperature controls on top.

However, downloading the app is where you want to jump right into. You can find it for both iOS and Android smartphones, and it expands on the features and settings.

It will ask you to register with an OOLER account (just like everything else that connects to your phone asks you for). It will then send you a confirmation email–which may or may not come through (we had issues getting it to send an email to any address on our internal mail server, so we wound up opting to just use a Gmail address which finally worked). Once you confirm your email, you can then log into the app and it will walk you through setting the OOLER up (in case you didn’t already do so with the supplied instructions). It will walk you through pairing it to your phone via Bluetooth, and then you are ready to go.

With the app, you can name your OOLER (in case you plan on owning multiple units like his and hers), update the firmware of the control unit, create schedules, track your history and ratings, configure notifications, trigger the deep clean and more. Of course, from the main screen, you can control the temperature of the unit, view the current (actual) temperature of the water in the unit (not the tubes), control the fan speed, and turn it on and off.

With the schedules, you can choose to have it wake you up at a certain time by warming the pad for a more natural wakeup, vs a rude awakening by an alarm clock.

It is also supposed to be able to pair up with Alexa, Google Assistant, Nest and more, using IFTTT. Although, we were unable to pull this off since their login process for logging into your OOLER account doesn’t seem to take any credentials (claims your information is wrong every time). However, if they fix this, you get access to the ability to turn it on and off using your voice, adjust the temperature, set a time for it to come on and more.

Performance

We had a great deal of time with the OOLER as we waited to figure out the whole email confirmation thing, realizing their emails just weren’t being received by our own mail server. By the time we go the app working by using Gmail, we had already had a handful of nights testing it out via the manual controls on the top.

Getting the app going made things a lot easier and opens up so much more control over the basic buttons, you won’t find yourself going back to them (mostly). Especially if they manage to get IFTTT working.

Turning it on and setting your temperature is pretty straight forward. It doesn’t happen instantly like magic, so you do have to wait for some time until the pad becomes noticeably different. This window could include 20-30 minutes. So it’s best to get it going a little before you actually go to bed. 

Surprisingly it does work in cooling the pad down a little, and especially noticeable when it comes to heating it. However, it does require you to set an extreme temperature on the unit for it to actually happen. For example, we didn’t really feel anything cool coming from the pad until we took the temperature closer to 65 (F) or lower. We had the best results around 60 or lower. Doing this, the pad felt pretty cool to the touch. Although after laying on it for some time and allowing the body heat to clash with this temperature, it typically balances out quite a bit leaving some warmth.

Taking the temperature to around 105 however, resulted in a softly toasted pad, which can keep you decently warm under your covers. This should be just enough to do the trick since a hot spa temperature might have an opposite effect.

Since it can get pretty hot here in the desert, it is hard to say of the simple cooling it does provide will be enough as temperatures heat up to 110-120 during the day, leaving a lot of heat behind during the evenings. As it gets warmer, we will try taking it lower in temperature to see if it can beat such a heat. It can only go as low as 55 (F), so you can’t expect the effect to be life-changing by any means. For some, it may simply be enough to stop you from waking up with the sweats if you are a hot sleeper. Anything beyond that might be a little moot if you are expecting it to take you any coolers. Then again, you also don’t want to wake up sick because it got too cold. So we were kind of stuck on this one, still coming to the conclusion that the pad could get at least a little colder than it does (in order to match up to everything they brag about).

If it runs low on water, the app will notify you to let you know that it is time to add more. So you don’t have to constantly check it. You can wait until it lets you know (and it does seem to last for a number of days before you have to top it off).

The warm to wake feature is pretty neat, and most people should find this useful since the body does tend to wake when warmed. As for how long it will take to go from cold to warm depends on how cold you typically run it.

We were a bit disappointed in the fact that the OOLER login wasn’t working when trying to enable the service/skill on IFTTT. It would have been nice to give Alexa or Google Assistant a go at controlling it. For now, we can only hope that they work on getting that up and going soon.

You can easily detect the small tubes running throughout the pad with your hands, however, you don’t notice them at all while lying on it thankfully. This was an important test in our minds since you really don’t want to be rolling around on any noticeable tubes. It simply feels like a mattress pad (for the most part). The mattress pad itself does bunch up a little if you roll around a lot while sleeping. So you will find yourself fixing it in the morning each time when you make the bed back up.

Energy usage isn’t too bad when compared to some of the other similar products we have tested in the past. They claim it uses only around 80 watts per unit (depending on if you have one or two). This is pretty good compared to something like the BedJet that consumes around 1200 watts regardless of a single or double setup. So you can’t really plug much else into the wall if the other outlets are on the same breaker with the latter. However, with OOLER, you can have just about anything else plugged in. For example, we plugged a decent laserjet printer (which are notorious for hogging loads on breakers), a few lights and the OOLER into the same circuit and let it all run without any issues at all.

Price, of course, is a heavily debated variable. It is really high as the OOLER weighs in around $700-$1,500 depending on your setup (bed size and single or dual person setup). BedJet is also pretty expensive, and the Moona pillow (not yet released) that has a similar approach but to your pillow vs your mattress, is going to fall around $300-$400. So these companies are hoping that you are willing to spend a lot of money for a good nights rest. Of course, if it does provide you with such, it might be worth every penny. However within our debates, one of the biggest highlights was the fact that the temperature it delivers to the pad itself isn’t really THAT huge. This makes the price sting a little.

It doesn’t pop breakers like the BedJect does, and is sure cools/heat a lot more of you than the Moona pillow can/would. However, the temperature isn’t as noticeable when the water has to run such a distance before making it back to the tank. So how much of an effect is it really having? Honestly, it is hard to say, and more so for cooling than heat since the heat is more noticeable. So this might be an effective solution for the winter months at least. I guess we will know for sure when the temperatures outside reach their max this year.

Our Conclusion

We were all over the place on this one and it will more than likely require additional testing and more test subjects to really dial in our opinion. However, the pad does actually cool you down enough to prevent night sweats, and it is a really cool concept. It does heat pretty well, enough that it seems like it would add a cozy effect during the colder months. The app adds a bit to it with scheduling and the ability to warm you to wake quietly/gently vs an alarm, and the unit doesn’t seem to be too loud by any means (in fact the fans are more soothing than annoying for sure). They just need to get the login on IFTTT working properly and it would have been nice for the cooling effect to be more noticeable. Finally, that heavy price tag really has an effect on the score. Thankfully, in the end, it still received a positive score from us and it has the potential to grow even more positive if we feel more of us see improvements in our sleep while testing it, and of course, seeing where it goes with integrating with third-party devices and options via services like IFTTT.

*Average price is based on the time this article was published

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