Cosi Home electric blanket review

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As we slip from summer to autumn and finally winter, it’s time to think about heating the home. With astronomically high gas and electric prices in the UK this year, consumers are looking for more budget-friendly ways to keep warm – especially when in bed at night.

The answer? Electric blankets. They’re not a new concept admittedly, and you might be put off by the sub-par electric blankets of yesteryear, but the tech has had a bit of a resurgence in recent years with better protection and, crucially, much better power efficiency.

The Cosi Home electric blanket is one such blanket, aiming to keep you warm during even the coldest of winter nights without breaking the bank.

Design & features

The fleece material of the Cosi Home electric blanket feels soft and thick, which helps you ignore the heating coils embedded within. I still noticed their presence as I slept, but it’s nowhere near as noticeable as older electric blankets from a few years ago. It folds up easily for storage when not in use, pretty handy for summer months, and it’s washing machine-compatible too.

Setup can be a bit of a pain as, unlike most alternatives, there aren’t elastic straps to hold the blanket into place beneath your bedsheet. Instead, it uses cotton straps and loops that you have to feed under your mattress to the other side of the bed to secure it in place.

There’s much more faffing around compared to corner straps, and it was a fairly big job considering my 48kg memory foam mattress is quite large and heavy. Slipping something over the corners of my mattress would’ve been much easier. You can leave it undone, as I did on my first night, but you run the risk of the blanket moving and folding as you fidget during your sleep.

It’s worth noting at this point that the Cosi Home blanket doesn’t cover the entirety of your mattress, but rather the middle section where you’re most likely to lay, with the double size blanket measuring in at 1350 x 1200mm compared to a standard double mattress’s 1350 x 1900mm.

That’s fairly standard among entry-level electric blankets, even when buying the correct size for your bed, but it also means the top and bottom of the bed are often much cooler than the middle, and that has woken me up on occasion. My recommendation? Size up when buying.

The blanket is connected to the mains via a surprisingly flat cable, with the plastic controller sitting out of the way at the side of the bed. It’s more basic in operation than premium alternatives like Cosi Home’s own Dual Control electric blanket with multizone heating tech that can independently control the heating in different areas of the blanket, instead offering a simple on/off function with three levels of heat to choose from.

For reference, more premium alternatives can offer up to nine temperature settings to really dial in the perfect temperature for you. Cosi Home’s electric blanket essentially goes from a little warm to quite hot with very little in between. Cosi Home recommends level 1 for a comfortable all-night sleep, and you needn’t worry about overheating with built-in overheat protection keeping you safe.

While I found the top heat setting to be perfect for a cosy sleep on a cold night (my room averaged 14 degrees Celsius one night during testing, so it was welcome!), it can take quite some time to reach that temperature. Cosi Home claims 60-90 minutes, though I found it took closer to two hours before it reached its optimal temperature.

That’s fine if you remember to turn it on a few hours before you go to bed, but it won’t help if you forget. That is a pretty long time to wait, especially compared to the Dreamland Scandi heater sherpa blanket that takes only five minutes to warm up – though at around double the cost of Cosi Home’s option.

How much does it cost to run?

The question is, how much does it cost to run? It’s an important factor to consider amidst rising gas and electric costs, after all. The good news is that it’s impressively power efficient.

We’ve calculated that at its maximum, it costs only 2.5p per hour to run, or 20p to keep it on for an 8-hour sleep. Considering the astronomical cost of central heating, it could be a more budget-friendly way to stay warm at night during the cold winter months. It’s a depressing notion that we have to do this at all in 2022, but that’s another article altogether…  

Price & availability

As I’ve alluded to, the Cosi Home Electric Blanket is at the entry-level end of the market with a price tag of £39.99 that reflects that. You do have the option of paying a little more to get a blanket with more advanced features like multi-zone heating and more heat settings, but if you just want an electric blanket that’ll get the job done on the cheap, it’s a great option.

If you’re interested, you can buy the Cosi Home electric blanket from Cosi Home itself, along with retailers like Amazon in the UK. US buyers are out of luck though, with no US availability for now.

Verdict

The Cosi Home electric blanket might be a bit of a pain to set up compared to other blankets on the market, but once it’s done, it’s a solid little performer that’ll keep you warm all night long.

It doesn’t offer advanced features like multi-zone heating and more advanced heating control, and it can take a little while to get hot, but it offers good value for those on a tight budget this winter.

Specs

• 1350 x 1200mm
• 1.25 kg
• Polyester
• 180cm power cord
• 0.075kWh energy consumption (around 2.5p per hour)
• Three heat settings with single-zone temperature control
• 55°C maximum temperature
• Overheat protection