When I was a kid, I had a wonderful electric blanket. You turned it on, and the blanket got warm. It worked exactly the way I wanted it to.
Once I was old enough to have my own apartment, I stopped needing an electric blanket, since I could simply keep the apartment warm enough that I didn’t need the blanket.
However, my current apartment has heating that’s a bit less reliable. So, as I go looking for electric blankets, I find that they don’t exist anymore! At least, not as I know them. Nowadays, the only electric blankets I can find describe how they don’t actually warm up but instead apparently use some sort of New Age science to calculate just how much warmth you want and then they slowly (too slowly to measure?) give you just that much warmth and no more.
But this is a sort of indetectable warmth, so I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s not doing really all that much, and certainly isn’t giving me the wonderfully toasty warmth that I’d like.
What happened? When did the electric blanket industry stop giving the customers what they want?
Since you were a child, there was some media attention given to possible long-term health problems related to having an electrical current passing all over your sleeping body for hours and hours.
I don’t know if that theory was valid, but it was in the media as a concern. This surely hurt sales, at any rate, and might contribute to why they are now hard to find.
I didn’t know they stopped making electric blankets altogether. I am sure I’ve seen some for sale within the last three years
When misused (esp older models) they can cause fires. They also generate large amounts of ELF radiation which some people have tried to link to various canacers and other ailments… New ones are better, but the aforesaid concerns put a big hit on their popularity.
I prefer heated matress pads…heat rises and a comforter holds the heat in nicely, letting me sleep with the window open and keeps mrAru happy and not a mrAru-cickle.
I actually just bought a really nice one from JC Penney. It was marked at $120 (for Queen-sized), but was on sale at $49.99.
I think mine is made by Westpoint-Stevens, and the packaging made a big deal about the fact that the blanket only uses 25 volts vs. the old blankets that used the full 120v. It has an safety function that cuts the power if it overheats, and it also automatically shuts itself off after 10 hours. It also claims that it converts the AC current to DC, so the likelyhood of getting shocked or starting a fire is much less.
It’s absolutely wonderful and I can’t figure out how a slept through all these winters without one. The funny thing is, it’s not like a heating pad that generates a LOT of intense heat. I set it to warm the bed about 10 minutes before I actually want to go to sleep, and at medium settings, the bed feels as warm as it would have been if I had slept in it all night.
I use an alternative to an electric blanket…a sleeping bag. The one I use is designed to keep you “comfy” down to -5 F (per label). I only use it during the winter, and I keep my thermostat turned waaaay down.
and a comforter holds the heat in nicely, letting me sleep with the window open and keeps mrAru happy and not a mrAru-cickle. 