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- Thick, quilted fabric
- Multiple temperature and timer settings
- Heats up quickly
- Tricky to get in place on the mattress
Slumberdown’s Wonderfully Warm electric blanket is a fairly reasonably priced offering that’s going to be a godsend on those colder winter nights (or through most of the year, if you get as cold as I do). It follows the traditional underblanket design, with straps to attach it to the mattress, and has multiple temperature and timer settings.
There was a lot to like about the Slumberdown blanket and I was impressed by how quickly it warms up, but I did have some reservations about its design. Bearing this in mind, does it deserve a place in our best electric blankets round up? Read on to find out how it fared in my tests.
Slumberdown Wonderfully Warm Electric Blanket review: What do you get for the money?
The Slumberdown Wonderfully Warm blanket is available in four sizes: single, double, king and super king, with prices starting at £47 for a single and rising to £66, £72 and £80 respectively. Somewhat confusingly, you can also find the blanket at Argos, where it’s called the Perfectly Warm Luxury Electric Blanket. It’s worth checking out both sites, as you’ll sometimes find the blanket on sale.
It’s considerably cheaper than the Dreamland Hunker Down Scandi Sherpa electric blanket, which retails at £115 for a double, but neither is it the cheapest option: the Silentnight Comfort Control electric blanket, for instance, costs £35 for a double. A two-year guarantee insures you against any manufacturing defects (but not accidental damage or wear-and-tear).
While many electric blankets have four corner straps to secure them to your mattress, you’ve instead got two large reinforced elastic straps here – one for the bottom and one for the top of the bed.
It comes with dual controllers on all sizes except the single (which was the size I tested), so if you share a bed with a partner, you can both adjust your side of the blanket independently. There are nine heat settings to choose from, with independent heat settings for the body and feet. There’s also a timer control that lets you set the blanket for one, five, eight or 12 hours. And there’s overheat protection built in too, so you needn’t worry about the blanket getting too warm.
The whole thing is made from polyester and is machine washable, but it’s not suitable for tumble drying. And lastly, it comes in a reusable zipped bag so you can easily store it away for the summer.
Comfort, performance and test results
Despite this 100% polyester construction, The Wonderfully Warm blanket’s fleecy cover feels really nice to the touch. It’s also thick enough that you can’t feel the heating wire: something that can’t necessarily be said about the Silentnight Comfort Control blanket. It’s comfortable to lie on and the controls attach underneath the blanket, so you don’t have a hard plastic lump on the top to contend with.
Having separate settings for body and feet is a great feature that I wish was included on more electric blankets, especially considering how prone feet are to the cold. As an owner of particularly icy feet, I really appreciated it here, and the choice of timer settings meant I could keep the blanket on throughout the night.
I was impressed with the speed at which the Slumberdown heated up and, after an hour, it felt toasty warm and ready to turn down to a lower temperature for the rest of the night. For the sake of consistency, I run the same tests on all heated throws and electric blankets that I review. With a temperature probe taped near the heating element, I timed how long the blanket took to warm up. After 10 minutes on full power, the blanket reached 27.4°C, warming up even further to 33.8°C when I repeated the test with the duvet on. It’s not the hottest blanket I’ve tested and it won’t compete with products such as the battery powered Stoov Huge Hug 3, but I think it’s more than adequate for chilly nights.
I followed these tests by letting the blanket heat up for an hour as recommended, before returning and testing temperatures with an infrared thermometer gun. By this time, the blanket had reached an impressive 32°C in the centre with even hotter temperatures at the foot end, where it had reached 35°C and 34.°2C in the left and right corners.
Finally, I ran a power consumption test to see how energy efficient the Slumberdown blanket is. It used 47W to heat up on full power, with an accumulated use of 0.02kWh over 30 minutes. According to the current energy price cap (around 28p per kWh), those 30 minutes would cost a fraction of a pence.
What could be improved?
Although the Slumberdown Wonderfully Warm Electric Blanket is comfortable and produces impressive results, I did have one fairly big issue with it. The blanket doesn’t cover the full length of the bed and only reaches up as far as your pillows (again like the Silentnight Comfort Control). It’s also ever so slightly narrower than the width of the bed.
Though I can appreciate that it’s not designed to cover the whole mattress, this was still disappointing. It also meant that fitting it to the bed was a challenge. You really have to stretch the elasticated strap at the top to fit in over the mattress, while ensuring that you don’t pull the bottom up too far and lose coverage over the feet. Once it was in place, it stayed there without issue, but I found setting it up annoying.
Slumberdown Wonderfully Warm Electric Blanket review: Should you buy it?
There’s a lot to love about the Slumberdown. It’s comfortable to sleep on, heats up well and offers lots of options for heating levels and timers. It’s also pretty reasonably priced in the electric blanket world.
But I didn’t find it to be the best-designed blanket, and I do wish the brand would rethink its sizing when it comes to mattress coverage – as well as those elasticated straps.
Still, if you’re looking for an affordably priced and effective electric blanket that’s cheap to run, the Slumberdown is a good choice.
