Electric Blankets

Luxurious Comfort All Year Round

There’s nothing better than sinking into a warm bed after a hard day at work. Electric blankets give you that cosy, contented feeling every single night, without having to spend a fortune on heating bills. Take the chill out of a Netflix and chill on the sofa or keep cosy through the night without using costly central heating and experience a new kind of comfort.

Gone are the days when electric blankets were lumpy, ugly, and uncomfortable. Thanks to modern design and technology, they can now be every bit as comfortable as a premium quality bedsheet. You can choose from a variety of colours, designs, and finishes to pick up a blanket that's perfectly fitted to your needs. They're also fitted with thermostats, timers, and energy-saving heating elements to help keep you warm for less without compromising on comfort.

Electric blankets are becoming increasingly popular as an affordable way to keep cosy. As most of them (most good ones, anyway!) are made of thick, heat-absorbing material, they'll retain warmth well when you're using them. In addition, they only need to generate enough heat to warm one or two people directly, as opposed to your central heating system which will need to generate enough heat to warm up the whole room. What this all means is that it's very easy for an electric blanket to reach its target temperature, so it doesn't cost much on your electricity bills.

Premium Brands at Affordable Prices

If you're looking for a brand you can trust, you can find it here. We've collected a range of the world's top heated blanket brands, including Which? Best Buy award-winners from Homefront, Dreamland, and Beurer. In recent years, we've added even more quality brands like the stylish Sweet Dreams range and the affordable MYLEK blankets, which broke into the Independent's top 5 electric blankets of 2018. Whether you're looking for a budget blanket or one that's indulgently soft, you can find it by clicking above.

Blankets are available in a range of materials, from diamond quilt to plush fleece. We've made sure that everything in our range meets your highest standards, so you're guaranteed a comfortable night's sleep with any of the products you can find above. The signs to look out for when looking for a heated blanket include the thickness of the blanket and of the wires - you want plush material and thin heating elements, which means you won't feel any uncomfortable wires when you're trying to get comfortable. You also want it to heat up evenly, with no hot and cold patches on your bed. This means you can sink into bed and drift off to sleep without having to wriggle around to avoid wires and lumps in your bedding.

Choosing Your Electric Blanket

Heated blankets usually come in two main types; heated throws and fitted sheets. These fitted sheets can themselves come in many different styles (including heated mattress toppers, fully fitted sheets, and underblankets), so choose the one that best suits your needs. If you'll only be using it in bed, a fitted electric blanket may be better for you. If you want to keep cosy on the sofa, a heated throw offers a little more versatility as you can use it in both the bedroom and the living room.

If you're planning on using a throw or overblanket, you may want to accessorise it as part of your home decor. You can choose from a variety of colours and styles to fit in with your home, so you can indulge your stylish side and browse by colour using the filters above.

Sharing Your Bed With a Partner?

When you share your bed with a partner, you might find that one of you likes things a little cosier than the other. To help prevent arguments in the bedroom, many double, king, and super king electric blankets come with dual controls. Each of these controls operates a different side of the blanket, so if you like things a little hotter than your partner does, you can set your side of the bed to be warmer without making your partner uncomfortable. Make sure to check that your blanket has dual controls if you share your bed! Note that, for blankets with dual controls, this does mean you will need two plug sockets to plug in both power cords.

The power cord of the blanket can be detached, and it's this that contains all the sensitive electrical components. What this means is that you can machine wash your blanket if you detach the power cord - the heating element isn't affected by water. Just make sure the blanket is completely dry before you use it again.

Added Foot Warmth

Some heated blankets let you set the top and bottom of your bed to different temperatures. This is good if you have poor circulation and end up with cold feet in bed. When you apply warmth to an area of your body, your blood vessels open up and will start to circulate that warmth around your body. This helps relax your muscles and relieve pain, as well as improving circulation. If your feet are always cold in bed, you can use a blanket with extra foot warmth to divert a little extra heat to the bottom of the blanket, giving you cosy toes all night long.

Timers

If you plan on using your blanket while you fall asleep, you might want to make use of the timer function to turn it off through the night. Not all blankets have this feature, so be sure to look out for it if you plan on using it in bed as it could save you money on your energy bills. Most blankets work using a simple countdown timer, which lets you program it to switch off automatically after a set number of hours. The more settings your blanket has, the more control you have over when it turns off! Our range also includes this smart electric blanket from Beurer, which allows you to program your timer using your smartphone.

How Do Electric Blankets Work?

Electric blankets are, essentially, just regular blankets with a single wire threaded through them. This wire is known as a heating element, and it's the thing that warms up your bed! Normally, this wire is threaded through the fabric in wavy 'S' shapes to reach every corner of the blanket, meaning you won't be left with any cold patches. This element is also insulated, so it never gets hot enough to burn through the fabric. When you plug the power cord in, the wire inside the blanket warms up and the heat is gradually absorbed by the fabric surrounding it resulting in a cosy, comforting warmth rather than a scalding hot bed.

History of the Electric Blanket

When you sink into your electric blanket at night, you're lying on a piece of history going back over 100 years! The very first heated blanket was invented in 1912, although it was very different from the plush models you'll find in our range today. It was a large, bulky underblanket that used the same technology as the electric heaters of the time, making it quite unsafe! These early blankets were mostly used in hospitals - back in those days, medical science wasn't quite at the level it is now, so many doctors would prescribe fresh air to their patients. This meant many patients were forced to sleep outdoors, and they needed these primitive heated blankets to keep warm. These blankets were known as "heated quilts" or "warming pads" - the term "electric blanket" wasn't coined until much later.

Heated quilts were mainly used in the medical field until the invention of the thermostat-controlled blanket in 1936. This new blanket used thermostat control to automatically turn itself on and off as it responded to room temperature, so it was much safer as the thermostat prevented it from getting too hot. This basic principle is still used in electric blankets to this day, although the thermostats these days are much more sensitive and more efficient.

These "automatic electric blankets" first went on sale in the USA in 1946 at a price of $39.50. That doesn't sound like a lot, but in today's money, it's the equivalent of over £400! As the technology became more widespread, the prices kept falling and these thermostat-controlled blankets became steadily more popular - a trend that's still continuing today. Modern thermostats smartly measure both the room temperature and your body temperature, adjusting your blanket's warmth as required to keep you perfectly cosy all night long.