Keep Warm On the Cheap: How to Choose a Heated Mattress Pad
Posted by Lise on 06 Feb 2009 at 12:07 pm | Tagged as: frugality
Here in New England, we are in the coldest month of the year. This morning the temperature outside is a mere 8 degrees Fahrenheit, and snow and ice is packed thick around roads and driveways. And yet, inside my house, the heat is turned to a cool 60 degrees.
How do we keep warm without turning up the heat – especially at night? We use a heated mattress pad!
What is a Heated Mattress Pad?
A heated mattress pad looks much like a regular mattress pad and is meant to fit directly over your mattress and under your fitted sheet. The only difference is that it has conductive coils threaded through the middle of it, and there’s a plug at the head or the foot of it to connect it to a power source. There will usually be a control dial (or two) to adjust the temperature settings.
What Makes it Better than an Electric Blanket?
One thing I learned from my childhood spent wistfully browsing Boy Scout manuals (the Girl Scouts were never as much fun!) is that a heat source or insulation underneath your body is often more valuable than one above your body. With my own camping experiences, I remember placing my damp clothes underneath my sleeping bag to dry them while I slept. A heated mattress pad takes advantage of this, warming your body from below and keeping heat from dissipating into the mattress.
Is It Really a Frugal Option?
If the other option is turning your thermostat up five degrees, then undeniably so! Consider the following math:
My own heated mattress pad (a Biddeford queen size) is a 340 watt appliance when both sides are on (80 per side + 180 for the control). That’s .34 kilowatts. The national average cost of a kilowatt-hour is 12 cents (16 cents where I live!), so it costs about 4 to 5 cents an hour to run the heated mattress pad.
Assuming it takes an hour to raise the temperature of your whole house by 5 degrees, how much would that hour cost you? Here are some estimates (thanks to Mr. Electricity for the wattage estimates of heating devices):
- Electric furnace heating a 2,000 sq ft home in a cold climate: 26.5kW = $3.18 (!!!)
- Electric furnace heating a 1,000 sq ft home in a warm climate: 7.9W = 95 cents
- Electric space heater, high: 1.4kW = 17 cents
- Electric space heater, medium: 0.9 kW = 11 cents
- Electric space heater, low: 0.6 kW = 7 cents
- Gas furnace, for the blower: 0.8 kW = 9 cents
Now, obviously if you heat with gas or oil, this is much more difficult to calculate. You have to know exactly how much gas or oil it takes to raise the temperature of your house by 5 degrees, which brings in a score of difficult-to-calculate factors. But I have a hard time believing it would be cheaper than 4 cents per hour.
Even with this math, it may be hard to see the reasons why you should outlay $60-$250 on a heated mattress pad. Consider this: over any of the alternatives listed above, a heated mattress will pay for itself in the first year of usage.
How Do I Choose a Heated Mattress Pad?
Like any purchase, you need to consider durability and how well each model will meet your needs when purchasing a heated mattress pad. Some issues to consider:
- Reviews. The model I have actually has some fairly negative reviews on Amazon in terms of durability. It was given to me as a gift, and if I were buying one for myself, I would probably opt for a different brand, based on that. I have had some problems with it turning on – the dial will not light up and the pad will not warm up on occasion – but I have always been able to fix it by tapping the control dial against my bedside table. (See, hitting things really does fix them!)
- One control or two. Obviously, if there are two people sleeping in your bed, you’ll want two controls. As a caveat, most full-sized beds have only one control, so if you’re a couple that uses a full-sized bed, this is something to consider.
- Where does it connect to a power supply? Most heated mattress pads are designed to plug in at the foot of the mattress. If that’s not convenient for you, you can fit the pad the opposite direction. I don’t have a power source near the foot of my bed, so I flipped mine around. The disadvantage of this is that the plug sits right at the edge of my pillow, and if I’m sitting up in bed, it can be uncomfortable.
- Comfort. Some people are bothered by feeling the coils beneath them when they sleep. As I mentioned above, the plug can also fall in an uncomfortable spot, depending on how you position the pad. Most manufacturers do not recommend putting another mattress pad above the heated one, but I have seen several Amazon reviews suggest doing just that.
- Automatic shut-off. This is an important safety feature that I would suggest a heated mattress pad MUST have. For most it’s an 8- or 10-hour shutoff.
Okay, I’m Convinced! Where Do I Go Now?
Finally, here are some suggestions for heated mattress pads that might work for you. (In the interest of full disclosure, I do receive a percent of the profit should you decide to purchase from any of these links).
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(See, hitting things really does fix them!)
It’s called Percussive Maintenance. *grin*
Excellent post, and not something that had sprung to my mind. I may invest in one, although it’s not a big problem or us. Our thermostat goes down to somewhere in the 50-55 range at night, but we’re comfy enough. Yes, insulation underneath is a good thing! Most mattresses are insulation though. If you put your mattress right on the floor or on a platform bed, it might get colder, but ours is on a boxspring, which is on slats. Of course, we also have flannel sheets, a loose-weave blanket, a tight-weave blanket, and a lightweight comforter (going from inside to out). We also have a flannel blanket, but that’s only at the foot, and mostly for the cats.
By ordering the blankets in such a fashion, we’ve created a system that traps and holds the air and the heat, and keeps us toasty and dry. Remember, even with insulation and/or heat below, you’ll want to use careful layering so you’re not wasting that heat.
Lastly, your links at the bottom seem to have vanished. Where Do I Go??
That’s a lot of bedding! You might say you’re full of sheets ;)
Do you not see the little Amazon carousel widget at the bottom of the post? You might have to enable Flash to get it to work…
Yeah, Bedding is inexpensive (at least, in the sense that it has already been purchased – a sunk cost), and plentiful here. So it makes no sense for us _not_ to make use of it.
As for the carousel widget, AdBlockPlus stopped it (after I enabled FitF in NoScript), so I never saw it. (Still don’t). I thought the links would be links, which is why I didn’t think the issue was on my end. :D
I’ll go ahead and put real links, when I’m feeling more awake and less sick.
Interesting! I would not have thought of that, as in my bed is the one place in the room where I don’t get too cold. :-P Just out of curiosity, can you feel these things through the covers, or only if you’re directly on top of them? That would be nice for when I’m just sitting on top of my bed during the day.
Phoebe: you can feel them through a sheet, certainly. On top of the covers? I dunno. I guess that depends on how heavy your covers are? I don’t think I could feel it through mine, fwiw, though I have a sheet and a blanket and a comforter over it.
I know some people do put a second mattress pad on top of these things, so I expect you could get some value out of it that way.
My brother lives in a really old house in Chicago where his room-mate/owner of the house barely uses the heat. He used to wear a hat and gloves to bed. I bought him a heated mattress pad last year and he says it is perfect. I’ve thought about buying one for myself even though it does not get that cold where I live and I am usually not cold after being in the bed under the covers for a few minutes.
Hi Kim! If you can get a cheap one on sale, that might be a good way to try it out before buying. The one I have now is actually on its last legs (it only lasted about three winters), but it’s one my mom got on sale at Big Lots or Christmas Tree Shops for like $30, so I don’t mind so much. Now that I know it’s helpful, I’m going to go invest in a more durable one.