Challenge: a pillow thats always cool

Interesting idea. How would you go about making it work?

i actually have a idea about this ben ... i run a liquid cooled PC what about a liquid cooled pillow ... how to accomplish this would be a radiator and some fans some tubing and the idea for a bag with inlet's and outlets ... doing it like this would be always cool ... as for the bag it would be inbetween the pillow sides and make it out of a really strong rubbery plastic     just a idea and make sure u use quiet fans and it would be done    

Chris pretty much summed up the idea that I was thinking of. I too was thinking of using liquid cooling in oder to keep the pillow, well cool. Thanks Chris!

This is a clever idea. Couple challenges:

1) Pillow needs to be soft. So whatever you put inside it can't take up too much space.

2) Pillow needs to be flippable. Maybe it's just because we're all so used to flipping to the cool side, if there IS anything hooked to the pillow, it can't get in the way of flipping it.

We will consider this project!

-Ben

perhaps a peltier device might work?  solid state and easily contained. not sure if it would be powerful enough to keep the pillow cool, though.  the other side of the pillow would get warm, so flipping would be out, unless you also put in a switch to reverse polarity so that the side facing up will always become the cool side.

An always cool pillow has been on my wishlist for a long time. I like the ideas proposed. I would lean towards something that was passive in that there were no pumps or active mechanical devices. This could keep it quiet (important during sleep). The challenge is conducting heat away from the head. It would be neat if you could actually generate heat from the temp gradient -- a pillow iPhone charger would be crazy - although would it really save money? probably not. I'm less familiar with the peltier devices, but if you have a temp gradient across it, it generates electricity, how much?  And as Ben said we'd want it to be soft.

I had a similar idea a few years ago. What about an internal pocket, for a pouch of thermal gel? A bit like the chill-packs athletes use. You could keep the pouch in the fridge or freezer until bed time, then slip it into the pillow.

It would need a double-walled construction to prevent rupture, but being flexible it should be comfortable, and provide a cooling effect long enough for the user to fall asleep with.

I did experiment with an ice pack (the kind you take on picnics) but being rigid, it wasn't comfortable enough.

If this goes into production please credit the source!

There are actually several pillow-cooling items on the market and they do mostly involve gels, pads, and basically ice packs.

We took a stab at an air cooled one but hit a wall - will probably revisit in Season 3.

-Ben

Gorammit! I don't know why I didn't think to check on that. Never seen anything like that in sale in the UK - not that it ever gets that warm here!

Maybe subconsciously I didn't google it because I knew I'd be disappointed. They even already use the name I would have chosen! I'm glad I didn't go on Dragon's Den with the idea...

Liquid cooling is a good idea... Maybe using something like a fish tank pump? They run almost silently and are safe electrically. Tubes running through the pillow, to a tank pump... Then possibly through a mini fridge or Peltier system to chill the return water? All these devices run very quietly.

My tought is that the presence of these other (existing) products doesn't preclude this as a fun maker project. These other products simply mean that we couldn't easily scale-up, manufacture, and sell our chilled pillow, but that's ok -- that's not the goal of this forum or Ben's cool show. Of course the existing products do take away some of the 'coolness' (pardon the pun) - i.e., the idea is less novel. The builds I like the best are typically those that don't already exist or which might be more fun/easy for someone to build rather than buy. Thus if you could charge a cell phone from the pillow heat that would be cool (none of the current products do that), what about charging your cell from the heat emitted from the bottom of a laptop? Or what about a laptop heat powered laptop cooling pad. Probably not enough energy there.

Good ideas.