What price are you willing to pay for a good night’s sleep?

While researching all things pillows and duvets for this month’s issue of Which?, I came across a multitude of information, ranging from the interesting to the shocking to the downright disgusting.

Interesting

Smart and connected technology is being applied to beds and bedding with the aim of making your sleeping experience better.

The ZEEQ smart pillow can stop your snoring, stream music and analyse your sleep. It also uses the information it gathers about how you sleep to wake you up in the right part of your sleep cycle.

The Sleep Number 360 smart mattress uses smart technology to adjust, in real time, the firmness heat and incline of your mattress. The aim of this is to help you (or your partner) to stop snoring and to make sure you’re getting the best night’s sleep possible.

And finally, there is the Smartduvet, which is still being developed and funded through a kick-starter. This fits inside your duvet cover with your duvet and uses air to get your duvet back into place in the morning; saving you the trouble of making your bed.

While I think it’s great that there are more solutions available to help people get a better night’s sleep, I have to wonder about the necessity of these items. The Smartduvet, in particular, seems a bit over the top to me. My duvet ends up on the floor most nights anyhow and do I really want wires and cables trailing into my bed?

Shocking

I, for one, was shocked to discover how expensive some bedding can be.

On trolling through the crème de la crème of bedding, I came across an eiderdown duvet that would cost you £10,500. Eiderdown duvets were something that I thought had been consigned to the annals of Victorian times and now only existed in novels.

Surely eider ducks need their feathers more than we do since the invention of central heating? However, the makers of this particular eiderdown duvet say that these precious down feathers are hand-picked from eider nests once the ducks have migrated away for the year. I guess this explains, in part, the exorbitant price?

Silk pillows and duvets can run upwards of £100. Apparently, silk keeps you cooler at night. However, these pillows come with the instructions: ‘Do not wash. Do not bleach. Do not tumble dry. Do not dry clean.’ This leads me nicely to the next bits of information I came across in my research….

Downright disgusting

I’ve been looking at my bed in a whole new way since finding out the following:

In 2011, a study being conducted by Dr Arthur Tucker, who was then a clinical scientist at Barts and the London NHS Trust, had found as much of a third of the weight of your pillow could be made up by bugs, dead skin, dust mites and dust mite faeces.

Another study, carried out by the University of Worcester, found that duvets can contain up to 20,000 live dust mites.

So if you opted for the ‘clean under no circumstances’ silk pillows and duvets, be prepared to share your bed with an enormous amount of creepy-crawlies.

What price are you willing to pay for a good night’s sleep? Is it possible that smart technology can help you sleep better? And how do you feel about things living in your bed?