It is the bed that is cold, not the room

Climbing into a freezing bed in winter is a genuinely unpleasant few minutes. The usual response is to turn the heating up, but that is the long way round: what needs warming is the thirty centimetres against your body, and heating the rest of the air is wasted effort.

An over-warm room also has side effects. Hot air drops the relative humidity, which is why you wake with a dry throat. The sound of the heating running disturbs light sleepers too.

The better arrangement divides the work: the electric blanket takes the bed, the air conditioning takes the air. With a warm bed, the heating can run two degrees lower and the result is both more comfortable and cheaper.

How one winter night is arranged

1. 21:30

   Warm the bed first

   You are still in the living room and the blanket has already started. Thirty minutes later the bed is around 34 degrees — the temperature that feels good to climb into. The air conditioning brings the room to 20 at the same time.

2. 22:00

   Getting in

   The bed is warm, so there is no curling up and waiting. That single moment is the most direct value in the whole arrangement.

3. 22:20

   Blanket drops to holding

   Down from pre-warm to around 30. Your body produces its own heat, and holding higher than that leads to sweating, thirst and waking in the night.

4. 05:00

   Fading out

   The blanket steps down until it switches off, while the air conditioning nudges upward and takes over. Your body is preparing to wake and the requirement is shifting.

5. 07:00

   Morning

   The room is back at 22, so leaving the bed is not a shock. Two systems handed off to each other all night and you adjusted nothing.

How the two systems divide the work

Four things it takes care of

Different people, different numbers

What you need to have

How the whole thing works

Use the ready-made blueprint

The hub ships with 22 tested automation blueprints — think of one as a fill-in-the-blanks form. This uses adascene_multi for the timing, plus sync_climate if the room has more than one air conditioner.

You do not have to set it up, just say the word

None of those four time points needs laying out by hand. The WOOWTECH hub ships with HA-MCP, which lets AI connect straight into your system, build the thing, and then go back and check that it really works.

Prompts you can copy straight over

Every block below can be copied whole, using the button on the right. Pick the one closest to what you want rather than using all five.

Set up winter bed warming in the master bedroom.
Switch the electric blanket on to pre-warm at half nine, so the bed
is already warm when I get in at ten, then turn it down half an hour
after that. It has to be off by seven in the morning.
Run the heating alongside it, but not high.

Build the whole winter night setup for the master bedroom, with the
blanket and the heating handled separately.
Blanket: pre-warm to 34C at 21:30, hold at 30C from 22:20, then step
down from 05:00 until it is off.
Heating: 20C through the night, 21C at 05:00, 22C at 06:30.
Add one separate safety rule that switches the blanket off at 07:00
every day whatever else happened, carrying no extra conditions at all.
Only arm the set in winter, or when the room is below 18C.
No spoken announcements, send a phone notification instead.
Once it is built, test it yourself, confirm it really works, and then
tell me which devices you used.

The two of us feel the cold very differently, and the blanket is a
dual-control one with a separate smart plug on each side.
Set the sides apart: the window side pre-warms to 36C and holds at
32C, the other side pre-warms to 32C and holds at 28C.
Leave the heating in the middle at 20C, since one unit serves both
of us and cannot be split.
Keep the same times, and give both sides the seven o'clock cut-off.

I woke up too hot last night, the bed was stifling.
Bring the hold temperature down from 30C to 28C, and move the start
of the step-down earlier, from 05:00 to 04:00.
Leave the pre-warm stage, the heating and the morning cut-off alone.

Some nights the blanket pre-warms the bed and some nights it does
not, and I cannot see the pattern.
Pick out the nights in the past fortnight when the bed was still cold
as I got in, put them next to the nights it worked, and tell me what
those cold ones have in common: whether I came home late, whether the
room never dropped to the number the rule is waiting for, or whether
the plug happened to be offline right then.
Give me your conclusion first, and touch nothing until we have talked.

Common questions