There’s nothing worse than waking up in the middle of the night all sweaty then having to wrestle with the blankets in a bid to escape what feels like a furnace. Being too hot in bed is cited by many as the number one reason they wake up during the night and can’t get back to sleep.
How many of us have had to shift constantly throughout the night to avoid a mattress hot patch in search of a cooler area? Our Australian product design team looked at the issue & decided it was time to launch not just a SleepMaker cooling mattress but a technology that could help in different ranges and beds.
Kulkote, pronounced SleepMaker cool coat, is actually a US-based technology. It wasn’t originally designed for mattress temperature control. Yes, it was used to help with cooling, but for a range of materials, fabrics, foams and textiles.
SleepMaker managing director Graeme Turner says the technology had been around for a while, however no one had looked to put it in a mattress before. Graeme alongside the SleepMaker product development team engineered the technology to help produce a cooling effect in mattresses.
So the SleepMaker temperature regulating mattress was born, or the innovation to put it inside our beds was created and its popularity has grown hugely ever since.
So how does Kulkote work? Without blinding you with science – inside Kulkote are tiny microcapsules which, once you’re lying on the mattress, heat up and liquefy inside the layer and start the process of absorbing heat. If you’re at one of our SleepMaker stockists, you might have the opportunity to put your hand on the foam that has a cooling layer of Kulkote. It immediately feels cool to the touch.
But don’t worry, Kulkote’s technology isn’t designed to draw out all your heat nor is it just for those who feel too hot in bed. The genius behind the technology, Graeme explains, is to work only as hard as it needs to.
“KülKote cleverly doesn’t take away all your heat, it senses what’s needed,” he says.
We know this from studies done in New Zealand’s Auckland University to test Kulkote on a SleepMaker cooling mattress. When your skin temperature reaches between 29°C and 33°C, the KülKōte technology activates. The testing found that in a simulation of someone asleep on the KülKōte mattress, the sleep surface reached 29°C and stayed at this temperature for 22 straight hours.
However, on a traditional mattress without KülKōte, the sleep surface reached 35°C and stayed that way – a full six degrees hotter than the mattress using KülKōte.
In a SleepMaker cool bed, you’ll find it will help with partners – because some of us sleep hot and some sleep cooler. Either way, Kulkote is cool mattress technology that could help you get a better night’s sleep.
