Review: Eight Sleep Pod 3 Cover

With celebrity endorsements from Elon Musk and Danny Green generating plenty of biohacking buzz, you may have heard of Eight Sleep’s Pod 3 Cover. It’s a mattress cover that can heat or cool your bed to help you sleep better. You can tweak the temperature in the Eight Sleep app or have the autopilot mode adjust it automatically, and the Pod 3 can provide in-depth, accurate sleep tracking.

To unlock the smarts of this system, including autopilot and sleep tracking, you need an expensive subscription (from $15 per month), and that’s on top of the astronomical asking price (from $2,045). The UK Super King cover I tested costs £2,495 (around $3,175), which is far more than I could ever justify spending on a gadget like this. (The US equivalent is a Queen, roughly $2,145.)

High prices and billionaire endorsements are a turn-off for me, so I approached the Eight Sleep Pod 3 with a healthy dose of skepticism. Turns out rich people have nice things. Closing in on a month with the Pod 3, I’m a grudging convert. It is far too expensive, and I don’t need another subscription in my life; not to mention there are some quirks I’m not keen on. But my wife and I have both been sleeping better, and that kind of trumps everything else.

The Eight Sleep Pod 3 is a thick mattress cover with a network of rubber tubing inside and a soft, plush black material on top. It is elasticized for a snug fit on your mattress, but I’d advise enlisting some help to fit it. There’s a sticker to ensure you put it on the right way around with the connectors at the top. The brushed fleece top is soft, and I found the cover very comfortable. It doesn’t feel as though it’s filled with tubes with sensors.

A device that resembles a desktop PC with a big 8 on the front connects to the cover via a double tube. I slipped mine next to my bedside cabinet. This unit is the brains of the operation, with a quad-core CPU inside, and it pumps chilled or heated water through the mattress cover.

Hooking up the app and Wi-Fi was a five-minute job; the app walks you through every step. The first time you set it up, you need to fill the Pod 3 with water. A cylinder slides out of the top with a clear fill line. You have to do this a couple of times, and it takes around 90 minutes after each fill to pump the water into the system and calibrate, so don’t start the installation right before bedtime.

The cover has two distinct sides, so your partner can configure different settings, which is ideal if one of you runs cold and the other warm. It was easy to invite my wife from the app, so we could both control the Pod 3 from our phones. It took maybe four hours to prime the system, but most of that was waiting.

On my first night with the Pod 3 Cover, I slept like a log. My sleep score was 100. Like, actually 100. I fell asleep in less than five minutes and got seven hours and 55 minutes of blissful slumber. I woke refreshed and bounded out of bed, ready to tackle the day. This is rare for me. I usually take up to an hour to drop off and frequently wake through the night. But this auspicious start was not to last.

The next night, I scored an 84, and my sleep scores continued to yoyo for the rest of the week. The autopilot takes time to get to know you. It will suggest temperatures for different sleep phases, but you can tweak them manually once you figure out what works best for you. Like most folks, I fall asleep more quickly if my bed is cold. A lower temperature also helps my heart rate drop early, allowing me to get more deep sleep.

On alternate days for the first week, I would wake in the wee small hours freezing cold and, once, roasting hot. But after the Pod 3 Cover figured out I like a warmer bed for the late stages of sleep, it began to click. The idea is that by changing the temperature in response to both your body temperature and the ambient temperature in the room, the Pod 3 Cover helps you sleep through the night.

The data is clear. Glancing at my long-term sleep scores from my Ultrahuman Ring Air and Apple Watch Series 9, the Eight Sleep Pod 3 Cover undeniably improved my sleep quality and duration. The scores from Ultrahuman and Eight Sleep rarely matched (Eight Sleep places more importance on sleep latency and consistency), but the sleep stages, heart rate, and respiration were extremely close.

All of your data is presented neatly in the slick Eight Sleep app. There’s an overall sleep fitness score out of 100, informed by three things. The sleep quality rating breaks your sleep stages into a chart and considers heart rate, breathing rate, and heart rate variability. The routine score looks at your bedtime and wake time, including sleep latency (how long it took to fall asleep and get up in the morning). Finally, there’s sleep quantity, measured in hours and minutes. The data tallied with my own feelings, easily making it one of the best sleep trackers I have used.

Most importantly, the Eight Sleep Pod 3 Cover consistently helped me fall asleep faster, and I spent longer in the deep sleep and REM stages. My wife has a completely different schedule on her side of the bed, with warmer temperatures at every stage, but her sleep has improved too. After a month, the slight improvements seem to have stuck, and I’m reasonably confident it’s not just a placebo effect. I was surprised by how much I missed the Eight Sleep Pod 3 Cover on a recent work trip.

My wife and I have also been using the alarm function set to vibrate gently, which is a slightly less jarring way to start the day than a traditional alarm. You can set the Eight Sleep Pod 3 to wake you by cranking the temperature up or down, but I do not recommend it, as being forced out of bed because it’s ice cold or waking up in a sweat are horrible ways to start your day.

It hasn’t all been plain snoozing. The Eight Sleep iPhone app works well, but the Android app is downright janky and often lags or struggles to connect. The Eight Sleep Pod 3 Cover kicks in perhaps half an hour before you turn in based on the schedule you set in the app. While it’s nice to slide into a pre-warmed or -cooled bed, it will run when you’re not there unless you tell it not to. More annoyingly, if you don’t set an alarm wake time, you have to turn the system off manually every morning. It can already accurately detect when you are in bed, so I’d like to see some automatic smarts here, but I guess you don’t want it to shut down if you get up for a bathroom trip or midnight snack.

After just over two weeks, I got a notification asking me to refill the water tank. I only had to fill it once this time, but it still took 90 minutes to prime the pod. It’s a minor recurring hassle. The Pod 3 unit does also make some noise. It’s pretty similar to a desktop PC fan, emitting a gentle hum with an occasional gurgle. That is not a problem for me, as I like to play rain sounds through the night to combat my tinnitus, but if you’re sensitive to sound, it might annoy you.

The main con by far is the high price. In the US, you'll pay between $2,045 and $2,445, depending on the size of your bed. The subscription is crucial, but I can’t help feeling that $15 a month is a bit steep, and that’s the Standard tier that comes with a two-year warranty. You can boost that to five years with the Enhanced tier, but it's $24 per month. I can’t speak to the longevity of the Eight Sleep Pod 3, but it’s a concern. This thing is also not be fun to drain and repackage, should you ever need to return it for repair.

While the Eight Sleep Pod 3 Cover seems unique, I have tested something similar. Sleepme’s Chilipad Dock Pro made our best sleep gadgets guide, and it’s significantly cheaper. We've also tested the BedJet 3 several years ago, which uses air for cooling. And there are alternative options like a temperature-regulating mattress, like the Sleep Number Climate360 (5/10, WIRED Review), but it costs nearly $10,000 and we don't recommend it. Eight Sleep’s Pod 3 Cover is far more polished and more comfortable, and the autopilot feature adds a lot of value. The company also still sells its cheaper Pod 2 Cover, but it is reportedly less comfortable and has fewer sleep-tracking sensors inside.

I always figured rich folks slept well because they lack the conscience that keeps the rest of us up at night, but maybe it's the fancy beds. The Eight Sleep Pod 3 Cover is too expensive for most people and unnecessary if you sleep well. But if you struggle to nod off or often find that you wake too hot or cold, it could be an investment worth making. After all, proper sleep makes everything in life more manageable.