One thing I've been trying to do, is to make better use of natural heating sources in the house. One very obvious place for this, is keeping warm in bed.
Now blankets are an obvious answer here, but traditional blankets aren't as effective as you might expect, and actually let a lot of body heat escape. Furthermore, the bed (mattress, etc) itself can actually get cold, and quite simply pull body heat away from you. So I've been looking for ways to better give that "toasty feel" in bed, without resorting to a lot of room heating and/or "electric blankets" (which not only use electricity, but also directly subject your body to their magnetic fields). And it's surprisingly hard to find technologies to do this very simple task.
However, two strategies I've found (which work well together) are to use "Reflectix" ( a reflective "isolation", that looks like silver coated bouble-wrap of all things) between the mattress and the box-springs, and then to use "emergency thermal blankets" on the top of the bed. Both of these strategies work, by effectively reflecting your own body heat back to you, vs having that heat escape into the room. While neither approachwill make the bed warm when you first get in it, either (or both) approaches (and they can be used together very effectively) will cause a gradual warming effect, that is very similar to having an electric blanket turned on (low), except it uses zero electricity, and doesn't subject your body to the (sometimes slightly annoying) electrical/magnetic fields of a real electric blanket. Instead you just get the warmth without any of the baggage that otherwise would come with it.
In the case of the Reflectix (silver bouble-wrap type "isolation"), you can pick up rolls of the stuff for a few dollars at many hardware stores (which is where I picked up my last roles of the stuff). Just cut it to size, and tape smaller pieces together (if your bed is bigger than what you can cut from your role), and just put it as a "pad" between your box-springs and your mattress. By doing it this way, someone won't even notice that they are sleeping on a pad made out of insulation. And anyone seeing the bed won't see anything different (as the mattress will cover up any evidence you have anything different. But the mattress will just feel a little "warmer" when you lay on it, as body heat that would otherwise escape through the bed will be reflected back at you. That does a great job of saving against heat loss down through the bed (1/2 of the problem).
However, for heat loss up through the covers, blankets have been the traditional approach. And while they help, traditional blankets still let a lot of body heat escape. Which is why I was looking for a better approach in this area. Now, there are those "emergency thermal blankets" (basically reflective mylar) that you can get from various places, but it seems like virtually all of them are made so flimsy, they should tear almost immediately (i.e. clearly NOT made to last). Which is why I've been looking around for an alternative that provides the advantages (for body heat retention), with some ability to last. And I finally found a product (so far, I've only found ONE) that seems to provide the heat reflective advantages of those "emergency thermal blankets" with a design that might actually hold up to some use. It's the so-called "Liberty Mountain Thermal Emergency Blanket" (
http://www.libertymountain.com/catal...product&id=550 ) and seems to be a cross between a tarp (for strength) and a traditional "emergency blanket" (for heat retention). They are a little more expensive than traditional "emergency blankets" (about $13 + shipping each), and I could really go with a better tarp color (the red is a bit tacky). However, they are available from multiple retailers (I picked up 3 of them from:
http://outdoorcooking.com/catalog/it...l+Blanket.html ), and they do seem to work as expected. I found that the combo of tarp and emergency blanket is very effective at both providing strength and retaining body heat. In our case, since they don't come in "king size", I just put two of them on our king sized bed, over our traditional blanket (one as a "foot warmer" of sorts, and a 2nd "thermal blanket" for keeping the upper body warm). So far, we've only used it for one night, but the extra retained warmth (over the warmth already retained due to the Reflectix under our mattress) was very noticeable and appreciated). So at this point, the experiment seems like a success. In fact, if the other family members like the results (after trying it out for themselves), we might get some more of these for the other beds in the house.
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