Cooling/heating mattress padI know partners often prefer different temperatures for sleeping comfortably, so I would LOVE some advice on how you all deal with this issue.
As soon as I get tired, I lose all ability to generate my own body heat. I’ll be sleeping with socks, pajamas, three blankets and something over the top of my face and still feel chilled at the same time my husband is boiling. If the air in the room is too cold, I can’t sleep at all. My husband on the other hand has his own internal furnace and can’t sleep well if he’s too hot.
You could always invest in something like the ChiliPad — a bed pad that heats and cools your bed at the same time. Or maybe just a heating pad on your side of the bed? Perhaps different blankets weights on different sides of the bed, or consider using a heated blanket just on your side.
Homies, what hot and cold advice do y’all have for bed time?
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Comments on I’m freezing and he’s boiling at bed time — help!
My husband and I have the exact same problem. The best solution we’ve found for the depth of winter is an electric blanket on my side of the bed. It keeps me from needing to snuggle against him for warmth when he’s already toasty. Good luck!
My mister and I are similarly matched–he is a furnace when he gets tired, I start getting cold. But then sometime in the night we switch or something! I always end up with the blankets wadding into the middle of the bed, where he has been known to get up and grab more blankets because apparently the FOUR blankets he sleeps under is sometimes not enough, even when he’s sweating a puddle in his sleep!
You may have gathered we have separate blankets, and it’s mostly due to: Him sweating (gross) and requiring 8 million pounds of weight on him even during the summer; and my tossing & turning and the need to keep my feet uncovered most of the time, which often results in, if we shared blankets, me needing to stock my leg through the center of the blanket. Not helpful.
As far as blankets go, I have a few that I cycle between depending on conditions. This fall I’ve been sleeping with an acrylic fuzzy blanket–what we call my “muppet-skin” blanket or just “the muppet”–with a homemade quilt on top. I also need more than just a top sheet on me when I sleep (it’s too light, it tickles and wakes me up), so during the summer I use the homemade quilts. Quilting cotton has magic woven into it, magic stolen from the Ice Queen to keep them cool to the touch at all times. So it’s great for summer, ever-cool, but in the winter I need something that feels a bit warmer. Muppet and fleece, or comforters. During the worst of the season, I also have a down-alternative comforter tucked away that gets added to the top of the pile.
My partner can’t stand flannel sheets, so I just save those for my trips back to the tundra for Christmas, when he doesn’t come with me. There I get a queen sized bed to myself, and a giant comforter.
Cuddle baby cuddle! My husband is human furnace (no joke – he has been outside in -30 weather with no coat and steam rolling off him). He NEVER gets cold. NEVER. His hands get so hot he puts them on the walls to cool them off sometimes. I am a normal cold blooded woman who gets cold hands and cold feet and cold everything else. I cuddle up close to him and we both benefit! I warm up and he cools down! Sure it can be an initial shock to the system (I’ve given him the “yikes!” effect in the middle of the night before) but he has told me he doesn’t mind it that much because of the cooling effect I give him. We’ve decided it’s another way we were meant for each other.
On a more practical note, one method I’ve used before is the “roll the blankets down the middle” method. Make the bed as you normally do, but leave the bottom of his side untucked. Then, roll his blankets to the middle so they’re in a nice roll. That way he is all open and exposed and if he wants a small light blanket to throw over he can grab one, and all the blankets are close to you to help you warm up!
My guy is always hot 😉 but I get really cold. We can’t usually cuddle because when I get cold, I loose body heat like crazy. He says I’m like an oven, but I will be freezing. We have a mini fan (usually sold in the dorm room section of stores) that clips onto the head board of our bed if he gets too hot. But I actually have to have a very cold room in order to fall asleep, so he’s usually okay. I use a heavy blanket to keep me warm. Throwing it into a dryer for a few minutes to warm it up if the blanket is cold from being in the room all day fixes me up.
depending on your cuddling preferences, use his warmth to your own advantage? My hubs and I have pretty much the same problem. He needs it super cold when he’s sleeping or he’ll sweat himself to death, but he also has to have some sort of blanket and a fan …it’s a comfort thing. I on the other hand need to be warm and toasty or I’ll never quit reading and go to sleep…well, everything other than my feet which have to be uncovered and are usually freezing cold. So here are the ground rules we’ve come up with:
1: His fan goes on the floor on his side of the bed where it’ll hit him but not me. It gets turned off when he gets up so I don’t freeze 🙂
2: California King comforter on our queen bed (can anyone say blanket OD?) so we can cocoon or snuggle as we choose.
3: Snuggles!! Typically he’s in bed before I am, and since he radiates heat, I’m only cold until I’ve gotten under the covers. Perfect excuse to snuggle close, and since it’s all under one blanket I don’t have to be right up on him to get his body heat if I don’t want to.
When we reach bitterly cold middle-of-winter-summer’s-never-returning-ever-we’re-doomed freezing temps I might put an afghan on my half, the weight seems to make it that much warmer.
I am like a furnace when I sleep and my husband is on the colder side, so I sleep under the covers with this, and he sleeps in a sleeping bag on top of the sheets!! He loves the feel of the satiny material, and I get to sleep with a breeze under the sheets! So worth the money and keeps everyone happy. I highly recommend one!
We had the same problem. I’m the cold one, and he’s the hot one. We tried to have separate duvets, but I always ended up stealing his in addition to mine. We tried sleeping close, or further apart, opening a window, turning the heat up or down, different types of sleeping wear…
Now we have a king size duvet, classified as “medium” weight, so snuggling up together is easy and allows his bodyheat to warm me up aswell, but also allows for an easy escape should he feel too hot. I sleep with varying amount of clothes on, depending of the season. He only has his underwear. I have two blankets at the foot of the bed that I can use if I feel cold, and I have a wheat heating pad that I use during the cold seasons.
Also, one of the cats prefer to sleep by my side (he likes spooning and hugs), so I have my personal purring heating pad during cold nights.
Now we both feel comfortable sleeping, but it took us 6 years to find out the best way to accomodate for or different heat preferences. Maybe we’ll start changing things again in the future, but the trial and error in our past has taught us that as long as you talk about it and both of you are willing to compromise and try out different possible solutions, you will find a way that works for the both of you. Just maybe not right away.
My husband and I are the opposite, I’m frequently hot, he’s frequently cold. We have a heated blanket on our bed that has a separate control for each side. He turns his on every night in the winter, I rarely turn mine on.
In the summer, I sleep with no blankets, he sleeps with a regular, non heated blanket.
We’ve gotten strategic about placing heating/cooling devices in our bedroom. I get insanely overheated in the summer, and he does in the winter, so we arranged our room so that both the space heater/humidifier and AC are aimed at my side of the bed. A very tiny space heater placed at the foot of the bed aimed at a slight angle towards my chilly self is VERY effective, and my husband manages not to get too warm by just kicking off the top blanket layer and keeping the hall door open so air can circulate. I think our electric ceramic heater might have cost $20 at the hardware store, and (no joke) I sometimes bring it to hotels and friends’ homes when we travel just because it is so darn lovely.
In college I used to sleep in a mummy sleeping bag under my comforter. It was amazing. I have never felt so warm and cozy, especially since we kept the heat down really low to cut costs.
Have you ever been checked for Reynauds Syndrome? It’s about poor circulation, and there is medication for it. My feet and hands get really cold and I have a hard time circulating my body heat. So I take a hot shower/bath before bed, put socks on, and then sleep with an extra blanket under all the sheets. Ideally I’d still sleep in my grubby mummy bag from college, but my husband finds it a bit strange. Ha!
I’m in your gent’s position– I get way too warm and my lady freezes. So she has her hot water bottles, and I my cold ones. I have two, and rotate them throughout the night as they suck the heat from my body.
I cocoon myself underneath the duvet, he lies mostly on top of it or outside of it, and shields me from the fan which is on his side and has a timer so it goes off after an hour.
I have the same problem – except was reversed during my pregnancy (go figure) – plus hubby needs a fan to sleep. We’ve done the separate doonas, me having extra blankets but it seems on the cool nights one person ends up with covers and the other without, and hot nights there is bedding all over the floor or in the middle of the bed and we are both hanging out.
What has worked for us is a wool underlay, wool quilt for winter and a graduated quilt for summer like this -http://www.linenparties.com/public/Products/Bedding/harmony-quilt.aspx
We have a similar problem, except opposite. He wants three huge heavy down quilts on us, and I freak out under the weight and oppressive heat and get tangled and sweaty all night. So, I kick off all my blankets and flip them over to him so he is double-blanketed. That or they get folded over and the dog cozies up in the extra blanket and I get my one corner of a blanket covering up a leg…just like I like it. 🙂
A few years ago my mum stumbled across the Duo Quilt – a quilt that is different thicknesses on each side. We just have a basic one, thicker on my side to keep me warm and toasty, and thinner on his side to keep him cool, but you can get fancier ones like this that let you choose the thickness of each side: http://www.aussiewool.com.au/products/King-Duo-Quilt.html
In winter I also have a single bed electric blanket on my side of the bed, an extra one-person-sized blanket in between the sheets and quilt, and heat packs for my feet and belly if I need them (hellooooooo period pain). The silly thing is, I often find him stealing my warm things!
My husband I and I were the same. Our solution is to each have our own blanket(s). It’s awesome. He’s always hot and I’m always cold. We also have a fan. I like it for the noise, he for the noise and the cool. It’s small on his side of the bed so the air pretty much just hits him. When we would use just one blanket, by the time he was cool enough to want it I’d have stolen it all.
My future hubby and I have the same exact issue. We both like it chilly in the room to go sleep but he usually goes extreme and turns the a/c down too low for me. We just keep an extra blanket on my side…but during winter it’s nice because he radiates heat and keeps me toasty!
My husband and I just recently started each using our own blanket and I gotta say, it’s working out wonderful. He would get so warm and the spread his body heat on to me. And I love to cocoon myself up into a burrito, leaving him with out any blankets. This way we both have a blanket we like, but can still feel connected and touch under the blankies.
We are in more or less the same situation. I was always cold in bed and whenever he moved to get a leg out of the blanket in the cold there was a draft between us and I got annoyed.
We bought the largest standardized duvet available (240cm x 260cm). Now I can curl up in the duvet, I am not afraid of my feet getting cold at some point in the night since there is always at least 50cm of duvet hanging at the bottom of the bed, and even if he moves a lot, either to curl up too or to get limbs out in the fresh air, there is still enough duvet for it to snug between us and there is no cold draft. We both sleep a lot better.
My husband and I just use different blankets. We have a queen sized bed and I use the queen sized comforter (great for wrapping around you with no holes) and he uses a sheet. The dogs lay in between us anyway so when we were using the same blanket we both ended up with holes and cold air sneaking in.
I have a massage table warmer, which is basically a heated blanket meant to go under the sheets on a massage table. My fiance turns it on when we start putting my son to bed, so the bed is nice and warm when I climb under the covers- on my side, and only on my side.
As far as i can see, no one else has suggested this! ‘Hairdriering’ the bed. We both need warmth to sleep then he gets hot so it works for us, gets the bed warmed up in less than a minute and less energy use too 🙂 just be careful to leave plenty of space behind the fan part of the hairdryer while heating the foot of the bed so the drier doesn’t overheat!
I used to use one of those microwavable rice bags, but we are now living without a microwave. Does anyone know of another way to heat those up? Or something similar? I’m afraid of hot water bottles leaking, and don’t really want another thing to charge or plug-in in the bedroom.
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My husband and I have the exact same problem. The best solution we’ve found for the depth of winter is an electric blanket on my side of the bed. It keeps me from needing to snuggle against him for warmth when he’s already toasty. Good luck!
My mister and I are similarly matched–he is a furnace when he gets tired, I start getting cold. But then sometime in the night we switch or something! I always end up with the blankets wadding into the middle of the bed, where he has been known to get up and grab more blankets because apparently the FOUR blankets he sleeps under is sometimes not enough, even when he’s sweating a puddle in his sleep!
You may have gathered we have separate blankets, and it’s mostly due to: Him sweating (gross) and requiring 8 million pounds of weight on him even during the summer; and my tossing & turning and the need to keep my feet uncovered most of the time, which often results in, if we shared blankets, me needing to stock my leg through the center of the blanket. Not helpful.
As far as blankets go, I have a few that I cycle between depending on conditions. This fall I’ve been sleeping with an acrylic fuzzy blanket–what we call my “muppet-skin” blanket or just “the muppet”–with a homemade quilt on top. I also need more than just a top sheet on me when I sleep (it’s too light, it tickles and wakes me up), so during the summer I use the homemade quilts. Quilting cotton has magic woven into it, magic stolen from the Ice Queen to keep them cool to the touch at all times. So it’s great for summer, ever-cool, but in the winter I need something that feels a bit warmer. Muppet and fleece, or comforters. During the worst of the season, I also have a down-alternative comforter tucked away that gets added to the top of the pile.
My partner can’t stand flannel sheets, so I just save those for my trips back to the tundra for Christmas, when he doesn’t come with me. There I get a queen sized bed to myself, and a giant comforter.
Cuddle baby cuddle! My husband is human furnace (no joke – he has been outside in -30 weather with no coat and steam rolling off him). He NEVER gets cold. NEVER. His hands get so hot he puts them on the walls to cool them off sometimes. I am a normal cold blooded woman who gets cold hands and cold feet and cold everything else. I cuddle up close to him and we both benefit! I warm up and he cools down! Sure it can be an initial shock to the system (I’ve given him the “yikes!” effect in the middle of the night before) but he has told me he doesn’t mind it that much because of the cooling effect I give him. We’ve decided it’s another way we were meant for each other.
On a more practical note, one method I’ve used before is the “roll the blankets down the middle” method. Make the bed as you normally do, but leave the bottom of his side untucked. Then, roll his blankets to the middle so they’re in a nice roll. That way he is all open and exposed and if he wants a small light blanket to throw over he can grab one, and all the blankets are close to you to help you warm up!
My guy is always hot 😉 but I get really cold. We can’t usually cuddle because when I get cold, I loose body heat like crazy. He says I’m like an oven, but I will be freezing. We have a mini fan (usually sold in the dorm room section of stores) that clips onto the head board of our bed if he gets too hot. But I actually have to have a very cold room in order to fall asleep, so he’s usually okay. I use a heavy blanket to keep me warm. Throwing it into a dryer for a few minutes to warm it up if the blanket is cold from being in the room all day fixes me up.
depending on your cuddling preferences, use his warmth to your own advantage? My hubs and I have pretty much the same problem. He needs it super cold when he’s sleeping or he’ll sweat himself to death, but he also has to have some sort of blanket and a fan …it’s a comfort thing. I on the other hand need to be warm and toasty or I’ll never quit reading and go to sleep…well, everything other than my feet which have to be uncovered and are usually freezing cold. So here are the ground rules we’ve come up with:
1: His fan goes on the floor on his side of the bed where it’ll hit him but not me. It gets turned off when he gets up so I don’t freeze 🙂
2: California King comforter on our queen bed (can anyone say blanket OD?) so we can cocoon or snuggle as we choose.
3: Snuggles!! Typically he’s in bed before I am, and since he radiates heat, I’m only cold until I’ve gotten under the covers. Perfect excuse to snuggle close, and since it’s all under one blanket I don’t have to be right up on him to get his body heat if I don’t want to.
When we reach bitterly cold middle-of-winter-summer’s-never-returning-ever-we’re-doomed freezing temps I might put an afghan on my half, the weight seems to make it that much warmer.
I have the answer to the prayers of all the hot sleepers out there!! It’s the miraculous bed fan from Brookstone. http://t.brookstone.com/bed-fan-with-wireless-remote?flag=search&question=%22bed%20fan%22&_requestid=90269&bkiid=redirect_bed-fan&_requestid=472513
I am like a furnace when I sleep and my husband is on the colder side, so I sleep under the covers with this, and he sleeps in a sleeping bag on top of the sheets!! He loves the feel of the satiny material, and I get to sleep with a breeze under the sheets! So worth the money and keeps everyone happy. I highly recommend one!
Interesting. My husband would love that! Thank you. I should buy him one for christmas!
We got an organic wool comforter, which regulates our temps. It’s magic, and I love love extra love it. http://holylamborganics.com/comforters.html
We had the same problem. I’m the cold one, and he’s the hot one. We tried to have separate duvets, but I always ended up stealing his in addition to mine. We tried sleeping close, or further apart, opening a window, turning the heat up or down, different types of sleeping wear…
Now we have a king size duvet, classified as “medium” weight, so snuggling up together is easy and allows his bodyheat to warm me up aswell, but also allows for an easy escape should he feel too hot. I sleep with varying amount of clothes on, depending of the season. He only has his underwear. I have two blankets at the foot of the bed that I can use if I feel cold, and I have a wheat heating pad that I use during the cold seasons.
Also, one of the cats prefer to sleep by my side (he likes spooning and hugs), so I have my personal purring heating pad during cold nights.
Now we both feel comfortable sleeping, but it took us 6 years to find out the best way to accomodate for or different heat preferences. Maybe we’ll start changing things again in the future, but the trial and error in our past has taught us that as long as you talk about it and both of you are willing to compromise and try out different possible solutions, you will find a way that works for the both of you. Just maybe not right away.
My husband and I are the opposite, I’m frequently hot, he’s frequently cold. We have a heated blanket on our bed that has a separate control for each side. He turns his on every night in the winter, I rarely turn mine on.
In the summer, I sleep with no blankets, he sleeps with a regular, non heated blanket.
We’ve gotten strategic about placing heating/cooling devices in our bedroom. I get insanely overheated in the summer, and he does in the winter, so we arranged our room so that both the space heater/humidifier and AC are aimed at my side of the bed. A very tiny space heater placed at the foot of the bed aimed at a slight angle towards my chilly self is VERY effective, and my husband manages not to get too warm by just kicking off the top blanket layer and keeping the hall door open so air can circulate. I think our electric ceramic heater might have cost $20 at the hardware store, and (no joke) I sometimes bring it to hotels and friends’ homes when we travel just because it is so darn lovely.
In college I used to sleep in a mummy sleeping bag under my comforter. It was amazing. I have never felt so warm and cozy, especially since we kept the heat down really low to cut costs.
Have you ever been checked for Reynauds Syndrome? It’s about poor circulation, and there is medication for it. My feet and hands get really cold and I have a hard time circulating my body heat. So I take a hot shower/bath before bed, put socks on, and then sleep with an extra blanket under all the sheets. Ideally I’d still sleep in my grubby mummy bag from college, but my husband finds it a bit strange. Ha!
No I haven’t, but I do occasionally have poor circulation, so maybe I should!
I’m in your gent’s position– I get way too warm and my lady freezes. So she has her hot water bottles, and I my cold ones. I have two, and rotate them throughout the night as they suck the heat from my body.
I cocoon myself underneath the duvet, he lies mostly on top of it or outside of it, and shields me from the fan which is on his side and has a timer so it goes off after an hour.
It works.
I have the same problem – except was reversed during my pregnancy (go figure) – plus hubby needs a fan to sleep. We’ve done the separate doonas, me having extra blankets but it seems on the cool nights one person ends up with covers and the other without, and hot nights there is bedding all over the floor or in the middle of the bed and we are both hanging out.
What has worked for us is a wool underlay, wool quilt for winter and a graduated quilt for summer like this -http://www.linenparties.com/public/Products/Bedding/harmony-quilt.aspx
We have a similar problem, except opposite. He wants three huge heavy down quilts on us, and I freak out under the weight and oppressive heat and get tangled and sweaty all night. So, I kick off all my blankets and flip them over to him so he is double-blanketed. That or they get folded over and the dog cozies up in the extra blanket and I get my one corner of a blanket covering up a leg…just like I like it. 🙂
A few years ago my mum stumbled across the Duo Quilt – a quilt that is different thicknesses on each side. We just have a basic one, thicker on my side to keep me warm and toasty, and thinner on his side to keep him cool, but you can get fancier ones like this that let you choose the thickness of each side:
http://www.aussiewool.com.au/products/King-Duo-Quilt.html
In winter I also have a single bed electric blanket on my side of the bed, an extra one-person-sized blanket in between the sheets and quilt, and heat packs for my feet and belly if I need them (hellooooooo period pain). The silly thing is, I often find him stealing my warm things!
My husband I and I were the same. Our solution is to each have our own blanket(s). It’s awesome. He’s always hot and I’m always cold. We also have a fan. I like it for the noise, he for the noise and the cool. It’s small on his side of the bed so the air pretty much just hits him. When we would use just one blanket, by the time he was cool enough to want it I’d have stolen it all.
My future hubby and I have the same exact issue. We both like it chilly in the room to go sleep but he usually goes extreme and turns the a/c down too low for me. We just keep an extra blanket on my side…but during winter it’s nice because he radiates heat and keeps me toasty!
My husband and I just recently started each using our own blanket and I gotta say, it’s working out wonderful. He would get so warm and the spread his body heat on to me. And I love to cocoon myself up into a burrito, leaving him with out any blankets. This way we both have a blanket we like, but can still feel connected and touch under the blankies.
We are in more or less the same situation. I was always cold in bed and whenever he moved to get a leg out of the blanket in the cold there was a draft between us and I got annoyed.
We bought the largest standardized duvet available (240cm x 260cm). Now I can curl up in the duvet, I am not afraid of my feet getting cold at some point in the night since there is always at least 50cm of duvet hanging at the bottom of the bed, and even if he moves a lot, either to curl up too or to get limbs out in the fresh air, there is still enough duvet for it to snug between us and there is no cold draft. We both sleep a lot better.
My husband and I just use different blankets. We have a queen sized bed and I use the queen sized comforter (great for wrapping around you with no holes) and he uses a sheet. The dogs lay in between us anyway so when we were using the same blanket we both ended up with holes and cold air sneaking in.
I have a massage table warmer, which is basically a heated blanket meant to go under the sheets on a massage table. My fiance turns it on when we start putting my son to bed, so the bed is nice and warm when I climb under the covers- on my side, and only on my side.
As far as i can see, no one else has suggested this! ‘Hairdriering’ the bed. We both need warmth to sleep then he gets hot so it works for us, gets the bed warmed up in less than a minute and less energy use too 🙂 just be careful to leave plenty of space behind the fan part of the hairdryer while heating the foot of the bed so the drier doesn’t overheat!
I used to use one of those microwavable rice bags, but we are now living without a microwave. Does anyone know of another way to heat those up? Or something similar? I’m afraid of hot water bottles leaking, and don’t really want another thing to charge or plug-in in the bedroom.