Heated mattress pads

Why people who dislike blankets like pads

The complaint about electric blankets is almost always the same: you can feel the wires, and the blanket adds weight on top of you. A pad removes both objections. It sits under the fitted sheet, so there is a layer of cotton between you and the element, and it adds nothing to the weight of your bedding.

It also warms differently. Heat rises, so a pad warms the whole bed from below rather than trapping air above you. In practice that means a pad is better at making a cold bed pleasant to get into, and a blanket is better at keeping a person warm who is already in one. Neither is superior; they solve different halves of the same problem, which is why the direct comparison is worth reading before you choose.

The four specs that decide it

• Pocket depth. Every pad here claims to fit an 18-inch mattress. If yours is deeper, or you already run a topper, measure before you buy: a pad that will not stay on migrates in the night and heats the wrong part of the bed.
• Dual zone or single. Queen and larger usually ship with two controllers. Serta and Valthie both state that dual control starts at queen; below that you get one. On a shared bed this is the single most important line on the listing.
• Auto-off ceiling. Sealy stops at nine hours. Sunbeam, Serta, Bedsure and Valthie all run to twelve. Nine is a feature if you want the bed off by morning and a limitation if you want it warm at seven.
• Waterproofing. Bedsure's cotton-top pad has a TPU layer. Sunbeam's is described as water resistant, which is a genuinely different claim. Serta sells its pad as a mattress protector as well as a warmer. If there is a child or a dog in the bed, this line is the purchase.

Preheating, and why it is the feature that matters

Several pads here advertise a preheat function. It is worth understanding what it does, because it is the difference between a pad that costs you 29 cents a night and one that costs a good deal less.

A preheat cycle runs the element hard for a fixed period before bed, then steps down to a lower level for the rest of the night. Bedsure publishes its curve explicitly: two hours at level 6, then six hours at level 4. Because the element is only at its rated draw for part of the run, the actual overnight consumption is well below the rated-watts arithmetic. We publish the rated figure anyway, because it is the only number the maker stands behind and because we have not measured the duty cycle ourselves. We will not estimate one.