Elegear Cooling Blanket and Pillowcases Review: A Cool Sleep on Hot Nights

Wow, this has been a hot summer, even by central Florida standards. Keeping the air conditioner cranking away is just tossing cash out the window. Sleeping in a hot bedroom is awful. What is a hot sleeper to do? Enter Elegear. Elegear Cooling Blankets and Cooling Pillowcases promise to deliver some solid chill to even the toastiest snoozers. How do they do it, and does it work? Read on!

Better Than Silk or Bamboo

Blankets are typically designed to keep you warm. Cooling blankets do just the opposite. Typically, hot sleepers gravitate to fabrics like silk or bamboo. These fabrics feel cool to the touch and effectively dissipate heat, making the sleeper feel cooler. But science has arrived and brought a whole new generation of fabrics to the cool-sleeping game. Elegear’s version is called Arc-Chill 3.0.

A fabric’s ability to transfer heat is quantified by a measure called Q-Max. The higher the Q-Max value, the more effectively the fabric dissipates heat (in Watts per square centimeter) and the cooler it feels to the touch. For reference, silk’s Q-Max is around 0.2, and bamboo is around 0.35. Elegear’s Arc-Chill 3.0 fabric’s Q-Max is greater than 0.5, claiming to drop skin temperature between 4°F and 9°F on contact. The blanket is two-sided. The top side is 100% cotton and soft to the touch. The business side that faces toward the bed (and you) is 80% cooling nylon, 20% cooling polyethylene, incorporating jade nanoparticles. This is the magic that is designed to feel cool.

What’s in the Box?

I received the king-sized Elegear cooling blanket (108″ x 90″), plus two king-sized (20″ x 36″) Elegear cooling zippered pillowcases, all in Light Gray. Packaging is minimal. The blanket arrived in a simple box.

The blanket itself was cinched with a taped-together label.

The pillowcases arrived in a simple, recyclable sleeve.

The two pillowcases were tucked inside.

Both the blanket and pillowcases are two-sided. Each has a soft-touch cotton side and a cooling side. The slightly different texture doesn’t show up well in photographs, but each side is slightly visually different. The cooling side is much smoother than the other side, so it is easy to tell which is which.

The pillowcases close with a zipper. The zipper doesn’t go all the way to the edge, forcing you to stuff the pillow into the pillowcase. It will be interesting to see how long the zippers last with that kind of force each laundry day.

The edge of the blanket is nicely finished with a contrasting edge, stitched all the way around the blanket.

Was It Chill or Just a Hot Mess?

We have been sleeping under a cooling comforter for a while now, so this isn’t new to us. Our comforter has some quality issues, so testing this was perfect. The Elegear Cooling Blanket is different because it is a cooling blanket. Weighing in at about four pounds, it isn’t weighty like a comforter. It is like sleeping under a blanket, because, well, it is a blanket. It is heavier than a sheet, but nowhere near as heavy as a comforter. That was a change for us.

The pillowcases are generously sized to hold a king-sized pillow, even with the aforementioned issue of having to stuff the pillow in through the relatively small opening. The underside is a nice soft cotton, and the top delivers the cooling tech.

One thing to note about cooling bedding is that to be effective, the cooling fabric needs to be in contact with the skin. No skin contact = no cooling. I’ll let you do the math for what that means you need to wear, or more properly not wear, to bed to reap the benefits of the cooling tech.

With the blanket in place and the pillowcases stuffed and ready, we snuggled in for our first night under the new gear. Both my wife’s and my first thoughts were…Brrrrr. And this is coming from two people used to sleeping under a cooling comforter. The Elegear Cooling Blanket was cooling indeed.

You do warm up a bit after lying there for a while. But as soon as you change position and a new area of the sheet touches skin, it quickly whisks away any heat. What this amounted to for us was that we were actually cold all night long. Seriously. I think the difference is the thickness, or rather thinness, of the blanket versus the comforter. The comforter offered a little insulation against our ceiling fan, while the blanket seemed to act like a gigantic heat sink, pairing with the fan to suck away whatever heat we were producing.

What this meant was that we could turn our thermostat up a bit at night. That’s a good thing, given that our lows lately have still been in the 80s, so the air conditioning runs overnight. The Elegear Cooling Blanket might save us a couple of bucks on electricity over time. Nice!

One thing we don’t like about it is the lack of weight. While neither of us is looking for a heavy weighted blanket, a comforter offers just the right weight for us. The blanket is almost like sleeping under nothing. In addition, the semi-slippery nature of the cooling fabric makes it very easy for the blanket to slide around as you turn in your sleep. This meant that occasionally, the blanket nearly slid off the end of the bed or wound up much more on my side, since I turn more in the night than my wife does.

The pillowcases were fine. They have a slightly lower Q-Max of 0.4, but still feel noticeably cool to the touch. When you roll in the night, your cheek naturally touches a new part of the pillowcase, adding to the cooling and allowing the other portion to dissipate the built-up heat. This sets you up for the next roll with a newly cool place for your cheek readily available.

Care and Feeding and Other Oddities

This is how they explained the cool touch tech. The fabric wicks moisture and is breathable.

Let’s start with laundering the blanket. Wash it on cool (30°C/86°F), don’t bleach, don’t iron, don’t dry clean. OK – easy-peasy. Don’t tumble dry and hang it in the shade? Yikes! We live in central Florida. We don’t have that thing known as “shade.” And even if we found some and hung it outside, with dewpoints in the 80s, if we washed it in July, it wouldn’t be dry until February.

After a few nights, we pulled the blanket off and tossed it into the washer, on cool, of course.

After a wash and spin, I set up our large drying rack and draped the blanket over it to dry. This is the drying rack that we use.

The design of that rack is important. Do you see all the endpoints of the rods? Here they are with the blanket hanging over the rack.

With the air conditioning running and a ceiling fan spinning overhead on low, the blanket did dry during the day, and we were able to use it again that night.

Yeah, so… the rack stretched out the blanket, showing each of its endpoints. That isn’t necessarily the blanket’s fault, but seriously, not being able to do a quick low-temp tumble dry is a serious shortcoming. The folks who live in oppressively hot climates who would benefit from this product likely won’t have a clothesline or other long drying rack for this blanket. Eventually, I might just toss it in the dryer on low and see what happens. For now, we have stretch marks on the blanket. I expect that they will all go away with the next wash.

The use instructions were also hilarious.

So, according to the packaging, to use it effectively while you’re sleeping to cool you off, you must constantly move around in your sleep. What? In practice, it was highly effective at dissipating body heat without constant movement.

Final Thoughts

In the end, the Elegear Cooling Blanket isn’t for us. That’s not the product’s fault. The product is great. We just prefer something a little more substantial. For someone who sleeps hot and just uses a sheet or light blanket, this is a perfect solution that would help cool the body overnight. I do like the pillowcases. Those will remain on the bed.

Checking both Elegear and Amazon, I see that they also offer cooling comforters. My review looks like it might just wind up costing me some money, as based on the quality of this blanket, we might be purchasing an Elegear cooling comforter in the near future. For the moment, we’re using both the blanket against our skin and our old cooling comforter on top of it. Let the chill begin!

The Elegear Cooling Blanket retails for $22.02-$72.99 depending on size and color; it is available directly from Elegear and other retailers, including Amazon. The Elegear Cooling Pillowcases retail for $15.94-$20.99 depending on size and color; they are available directly from Elegear and other retailers, including Amazon.

Source: Manufacturer-supplied review sample

What I Like: It is well-made and attractive; Does what it says – effectively cools you as you sleep; Launders well; Nice selection of colors and styles

What Needs Improvement: The slippery nature of the cooling fabric lets it slide around at night; Being able to dry it in the dryer would be a huge plus