With celebrity endorsements from Elon Musk and Danny Green generating plenty of biohacking buzz, you may have heard of Eight Sleep’s Pod 3 Cover. It’s a mattress cover that can heat or cool your bed to help you sleep better. You can tweak the temperature in the Eight Sleep app or have the autopilot mode adjust it automatically, and the Pod 3 can provide in-depth, accurate sleep tracking.
To unlock the smarts of this system, including autopilot and sleep tracking, you need an expensive subscription (from $15 per month), and that’s on top of the astronomical asking price (from $2,045). The UK Super King cover I tested costs £2,495 (around $3,175), which is far more than I could ever justify spending on a gadget like this. (The US equivalent is a Queen, roughly $2,145.)
High prices and billionaire endorsements are a turn-off for me, so I approached the Eight Sleep Pod 3 with a healthy dose of skepticism. Turns out rich people have nice things. Closing in on a month with the Pod 3, I’m a grudging convert. It is far too expensive, and I don’t need another subscription in my life; not to mention there are some quirks I’m not keen on. But my wife and I have both been sleeping better, and that kind of trumps everything else.
The Eight Sleep Pod 3 is a thick mattress cover with a network of rubber tubing inside and a soft, plush black material on top. It is elasticized for a snug fit on your mattress, but I’d advise enlisting some help to fit it. There’s a sticker to ensure you put it on the right way around with the connectors at the top. The brushed fleece top is soft, and I found the cover very comfortable. It doesn’t feel as though it’s filled with tubes with sensors.
A device that resembles a desktop PC with a big 8 on the front connects to the cover via a double tube. I slipped mine next to my bedside cabinet. This unit is the brains of the operation, with a quad-core CPU inside, and it pumps chilled or heated water through the mattress cover.
Hooking up the app and Wi-Fi was a five-minute job; the app walks you through every step. The first time you set it up, you need to fill the Pod 3 with water. A cylinder slides out of the top with a clear fill line. You have to do this a couple of times, and it takes around 90 minutes after each fill to pump the water into the system and calibrate, so don’t start the installation right before bedtime.