Getting a solid eight hours of sleep is one of my greatest pleasures, and it is hard-won after having two children. But just when I thought my sleep had turned a corner and my young sons were on a sleep schedule, my night sweats began. No matter the house temperature, regardless of what pajamas I wore or whether I banished my heat-generating spouse to another bed, thanks to perimenopause I’d have to get up and do a complete pajama change every night in the dark. Sometimes, the ones I took off left a damp spot behind when I picked them off the floor in the morning.
My initial night-sweat research offered generic health-advice bromides — things I had already tried. I didn’t drink alcohol. I exercised five or six days a week. I managed my stress and practiced good “sleep hygiene.” So I tried Ambien to see if I could sleep through the sweating; no dice. I went on birth control for the first time in years, which worked like a miracle — until it didn’t. Was my only option to sweat myself awake every night and hope sweet menopause would release me? At 43, mine was due anytime in the next two to 15 years.
I re-Googled, this time looking for things I could buy instead of things I could do. Desperate, I decided to pull the $419 trigger on the BedJet 3 Climate Comfort Sleep System. “Never feel too hot, too cold, or too sweaty in bed,” the website promised me. The cooling, heating, and drying system, designed by an engineer who worked on NASA space suits, came with numerous tantalizing videos, stats, and testimonials promising dryer nights. It failed to hook investors on Shark Tank, but that did not deter me.
The gadget is basically a central-air unit under your covers. A shoebox-size hub rests under the bed and plugs into the wall. An air hose connected to the hub attaches to the side of the mattress to blow continuous air above the top sheet. It took minutes to install. When I turned it on with the remote, the hose blew a stream of air, like a vacuum cleaner in reverse, between my covers. The effect, accompanied by a whirring white noise, puffed up my comforter like a mushroom. I thought this would be hard to get used to, but after one night, the pleasure of sleeping without sweat overrode the soft purring of the motor and the gentle air-current feeling. Now I could either sleep naked or wear a full, long-sleeved set of pajamas and never wake up sweaty. It was a miracle. There was one issue. The BedJet tripped the bedroom’s fuse several times a week. This happened no matter what other devices I unplugged from my bedroom. I’d wake up sweaty and have to take a trip to the basement to flip the breaker. I emailed customer service. They wrote back with a code to input on the remote control to set the machine to a different power to avoid interference with my AFCI breaker. And that was all it took.
The BedJet was worth every penny, even if I sometimes disturb the covers in the night and wake up realizing the hose has been uselessly blowing air into the room. (You need to have the blower blowing under your blanket for it to work). But that’s not the BedJet’s fault. I would never blame the BedJet. I finally got my sleep back consistently (I can even warm the sheets before I get in bed on cold nights.) I do a lot less laundry. I wake up feeling like a person and not a slime monster. For sweaty sleepers who don’t have an extra $400 lying around, BedJet sells refurbished systems at a discount. You can also try other BedJet bells and whistles, like special bedding, a dual-zone version for sleeping couples, and “biorhythm technology.” Still, I did fine without any of those things.
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