Five ways to stay cool in the heat

All through the night

The hot-water bottle and the electric blanket have a decent record of warming up beds on cold nights. But I’ve always found the opposite problem more vexing – ie, how to cool down a bed in the summer months when the room thermostat tips 25ºC. Eight Sleep’s Pod system comes into its own in such circumstances. It’s based around a mattress cover containing a network of thin tubes, through which a nearby hub circulates cooled (or heated) water. Your own temperature preferences combined with Eight Sleep’s automated tweaks pretty much guarantee nightlong comfort.

We featured version three of the Pod in the winter of 2023 when it proved its worth on chilly nights. But the ability to have the temperature of your bed (or, indeed, just your side of the bed) dialled down before you go to sleep is a glorious luxury in hot weather, and version five comes with two iterations-worth of performance improvements. The mattress cover is more comfortable; the hub (while still looking a bit like a gaming PC) operates more quickly and quietly; and you can now tap regions of the mattress to cool things down or warm them up – so no more fiddling with an app in the early hours.

There are also optional add-ons: a base that sits between your bed and the mattress for gentle inclining and reclining, and a blanket that syncs with the mattress topper to keep you cool or cosy. These, in tandem with the Eight Sleep app and an “Autopilot” subscription (between £17 and £33 per month), give you an almost absurd level of environmental control, including snoring detection and automated head elevation to (hopefully) make it stop. 

Humans are already equipped with temperature regulation systems – not least sweat glands – but it’s good to have a little help. Especially when we’re unconscious.

---

I’m a fan

If you’re looking for a fan that blends in unobtrusively with your interior decor, this probably isn’t it. But what it does do, rather successfully, is push lots of air about. It’s a bladeless device with a pair of adjustable arms that emits cool air through embedded vents. The orientation and height of these arms can be altered to suit your space, blowing forwards, backwards, upwards and downwards, and while it’s running you can set the whole unit to rotate up to 180º, in effect giving you a maximum coverage of 360º.

Used overnight, level three of 10 generated decent air flow and was easily quiet enough for sleeping (there is also a dedicated “Sleep Mode”). For those keen to reconstruct a parkland environment in an indoor space, the “Natural Breeze” setting changes air flow patterns to simulate the wind, while “Breeze Boost” takes things up to 11 – ie, a cool blast with hairdryer-like power. It’s flexible, effective and simple to use; no shenanigans with apps, just a remote that can be stored magnetically on top of the fan.

---

Coolify me

This is the most unfussy of Torras’s range of neck-worn personal air conditioners, upgraded for 2025. It has a more sporty design than its brothers and sisters, and is lighter too, coming in at just under 400g – not an insignificant weight, but a burden easily cancelled out by the relief it brings on hot days. It doesn’t have Bluetooth so can’t be controlled by an app, but remote control isn’t necessary given that you’re wearing the thing: there are just three buttons (for the fan, the cooling feature and the heating feature respectively) each with three levels of power that are easily cycled through to find the optimum setting.

At the rear, sitting against the back of your neck, is a cooling (or heating) plate which works in tandem with the 36 air vents, arranged in a row of nine on each arm, topside and underside. The cooling and the fan running in tandem, on max, put something of a strain on the 5000 mAh battery – but that’s an extreme use case, with level one often perfectly adequate when you’re sitting at a desk or on a train. It also has pass-through charging, so if you really need to maintain high power for a long period, you can run a USB cable to a powerbank while using it.

---

Con air for campers

This portable air conditioner is optimised for outdoor adventures: roughly 50cm x 30cm x 30cm in size and with enough power to cool down (or heat up) an RV or tent. In testing, however, it lowered the temperature in a small bedroom by around 5ºC (from uncomfortable to ideal) in 20 minutes, so its use is by no means restricted to camping. 

If you’re under canvas, you’ll likely require an external battery; Ecoflow’s own (1024Wh, £599) attaches to the underside and can provide up to eight hours of off-grid use, depending on how hard it’s made to work. It can either sit inside or outside a tent, with different intake and exhaust duct arrangements for each setting – and they’re easy to extend, connect and secure in place.

If you’re using it indoors, a template helps you to cut correctly sized vent holes in a piece of foam or board to fit neatly across an open window. As usual with Ecoflow products, it’s most intuitively controlled using the app (via WiFi or Bluetooth), but there are also small buttons on the unit itself, next to a display that shows the functions you’ve enabled (dehumidification, cooling, heating, fan) along with ambient temperature, humidity level, battery level and so on. Evidently the cooling and dehumidifying processes accumulate water in an internal tank, and you’re alerted when it needs emptying – although I found that process (involving a plastic tube and another receptacle to collect the water) unnecessarily fiddly.

It’s easy to lift and highly transportable, with the ducts collapsing and stacking neatly inside each other and a winder for the power cable. Your summer house will become habitable, your tent no longer a sweltering pit of misery.

---

Cold and clinical

If the air quality in your home feels pretty good and allergies aren’t a problem, a standalone air purifier may feel like a mildly indulgent purchase. But if that purifier incorporates a fan and a heater – as the ComfortPure does – it presents a compelling case for becoming a year-round domestic pal. Let’s deal with summer first. Its “Cooling” feature has four fan speeds, of which the lowest two feel quiet enough for night-time use; the unit can also rotate from just 45º up to 350º, and although it’s floor-standing and only knee high, it directs air upwards towards anyone sitting (or lying) nearby. The heater works identically – four fan settings and controllable oscillation (angle, speed) – but you can also specify a target temperature for the room.

Purification happens whenever the unit is running, but if you want neither fan nor heater engaged, a “Boosted Purification” mode pushes air out through the top rather than the sides, while an “Eco” mode puts everything on standby until poor air quality is detected. The indoor temperature or the pollution level (PM 2.5, specifically) are displayed on the touch panel, along with a colour-coded light (red for poor air quality, through yellow for moderate and blue for excellent). You can operate it via the panel, a remote, an app or voice commands via integration with Alexa and Google Assistant. It’s quiet, unassuming, obedient and very useful.