How I Keep It Hot in the Bedroo
“Why am I so hot?” said Liz, bolting upright in bed the other night.
“Perhaps it’s early menopause?” I giggled back into the darkness.
Silence.
I could feel my wife’s (mental) temperature rising.
“I bought us an electric blanket,” I confessed. “It’s pretty toasty, right?”
“That is such an old person thing to do,” she said, rolling over and giving me a warm shoulder.
Truth be told, this night had been a long time coming. You see, I have PTSD from staying over at my grandparents’ house when I was a little tacker. As Nana would turn up the wiry electric blanket, my big sister would hiss at me, “Remember, if you wet the bed tonight you’re going to electrocute yourself”.
From that point on, I slept with one eye open.
Thankfully, I’m over that now (plus, I figure I’ve got another 25 years till my prostate starts playing up), so I’m good to go.
Yet there was one real problem:
Electric blankets are known to cause fires, which is quite terrifying really.
So how do you find a good one? (I mean, one that won’t take you from toasty to toasted.)
Well, I bought the Dimplex DreamEasy Electric Blanket, which cost $75.
Why?
Because the Dimplex scored the highest rating from CHOICE testers, and they don’t give them out easily.
They looked at heaps of electric blankets and put them all through a series of safety, comfort and electrical testing, which included taking thermal images to see how they disperse heat, measuring energy consumption (mine will apparently cost $61 to run through the 92 days of winter), and even building a custom-made rig that simulates 5,000 cycles of the cord flexing and pulling under a weight of 10 newtons (around 1kg).
Then they performed a current leakage test. ZZZZT!
Contrast this to the reviews you get from the Wild Wild West (aka the World Wide Web).
A report from the World Economic Forum (WEF) found that writing fake online reviews is a well-organised multibillion-dollar business. In response to this, in 2022 alone Amazon blocked more than 200 million suspected fake reviews and Google blocked or removed more than 115 million. Yet now artificial intelligence is being used to write fake reviews en masse and pollute the internet.
So here’s my take:
The sort of in-depth testing that CHOICE does across 200+ categories – without getting a kickback or even a freebie from the manufacturer – costs a lot of money. And that’s why I’m happy to pay my $84 annual membership. Not only does it save me hundreds of clams each year, it also keeps me warm in bed each night!
Tread Your Own Path!