Jack Pearce

Eight Sleep Pod 3: My initial thoughts

In my 20s I would rarely wake up in the night and would have described my sleep as excellent. Entering into my 30s and I often have wake countless times in the night.

One of the reasons I struggle to stay asleep is overheating. My partner likes to go to bed with a heated blanket and I like to go to bed warm too but a heated blanket would just cause me to overheat later on in the night.

The Eight Sleep Pod 3 is a PC tower shaped object that sits next to your bed in combination with a mattress that has water pipes running through it with the ability to warm you or keep you cool throughout the night. The mattress can also read your heart rate, HRV and breath rate.

I have owned the Sleep Pod 3 for coming up to 30 nights now, here are my initial thoughts.

Things I really like:

  • It has genuinely improved my sleep with less awake time.

    • On the cooler settings it is like sleeping on the cold side of the pillow, except that is permanent and the coolness stays.
    • I have my settings dialled in like this right now: +1 Bedtime, -2 Early stage, 0 Late stage, +2 wake up.

  • Heating and Cooling happens fast. The pod is able to heat or cool a side of the bed quickly, it’s very impressive.

    • Let’s say you’re on +1 and you set it to -3, by my estimation this takes between 5-8 minutes with the cooling effect being felt within 1 minute.

  • I can now track my heart rate trends without having to wear my watch every night, something I have never been a fan of.

    • It tracks my partners heart rate trends too.

  • Zero is the magic number. The app has you set different temperatures throughout the different sleep stages anywhere from -10 (extremely cold - 55f/12c) to +10 (extremely hot - 110f/43c). If you set 0 then the bed surface can vary between 70 degrees F and 90 degrees F, based on room temp and your body temp.

    • At first I thought that 0 meant do nothing.
    • 0 is in fact a neutral setting, water still flows and this process extracts heat away from your body. It cools you but in a subtle way.

  • The app works well. Despite missing some key information like explanations for the different sleep stages and what the -10 to +10 actually means. I had to dig through their support docs to find all this information.

    • I love that I can heat or cool my bed remotely.
    • The app is designed really well despite missing some key information.

Things I really don’t like:

  • Discoverability of how stuff works is poor The app doesn’t do a very good job of explaining what a temperature setting of -10 or +10 should actually feel like. I had to dig through their documentation for a long time to eventually find it (I now cannot find it again to link here, maybe they removed it). It also doesn’t explain what the different sleep stages mean ‘Early Stage’ and ‘Late Stage’, had to dig through the docs for this too. (it is explained here)

  • The pod can be noisy. It is advertised as very low white noise to non-existent. For the most part, yes it is very quiet. But it depends on what it’s trying to do. I.e If the left side is +5 and the right side is -2 and then it has to cool the left side to +1 the fan will spin up for about 10 minutes and it is quite noisy.

    • No worse than a ceiling fan, much quieter in fact, but still very noticeable.
    • Update: I recieved another Pod 3 hub with a newer manufacturer date and the fan is much quieter, it appears to be the same Noctua fan inside but it doesn’t spin up as fast or loud.

  • Sleep detection isn’t perfect. Often the pod will detect that I have fallen asleep when I haven’t, this means I am awake laying on a cold surface which isn’t very nice. I then have to wake myself up even more by opening the app, switching the pod off and back on again to reset the sleep stage back to awake.

  • Control is via the app only I’m not sure what the answer is here but I’d really love a way to control the temperature without having to unlock my phone and open the app. When you’re trying to fall asleep the last thing you want to do is wake yourself up by opening an app on your phone. Some kind of hardware button with up/down and a display at my bedside table with the current temperature would be perfect.

  • It is designed to sit at the top of your bed. To me this is really a design flaw. The Pod itself (PC tower unit) sits up by your headboard and this is because the hose comes out the top of the mattress topper. To me this is an odd design choice and personally I would have put the hoses at the bottom of the bed so the unit can also sit at the bottom of the bed, with the fan and noise away from my head. (I’m sure there is some engineering reason why this can’t happen that I am not considering)

  • The app & pod relies on internet connectivity to work. I’d like some local control to be included and not have the app or pod rely on the internet to provide basic functions (on/off etc)

    • I’d also love to see a local API so that I could switch it on/off via Home Assistant but that is not a big deal.

Conclusion

There are other features that I haven’t covered such as Autopilot and I will contribute more to this post at a later stage once I have spent more time with the Pod.

The technology is an engineering marvel and something fascinating to own (think Theranos, except it works). My sleep is starting to improve. I wake up far less in the night, perhaps once or twice and I’m working on that (better diet, more exercise, going to sleep earlier). Notice that I didn’t say “It’s incredible, life changing”. But we’ll see how my sleep is in 6 months.

Overall it was a good purchase and a really incredible piece of technology.