Here is my long awaited review of this new product TranscriptionGear.Com is offering. For anyone who is unfamiliar, we started carrying an electric foot-warming pad just last week. So news that we were going to be carrying this little gem started fluttering around about 5 weeks ago now in the office. This was a hot gossip item around the water cooler as we are all freeze babies up here in Northeast Ohio. I’ve seen employees wrapped in blankets in the office before, so trust me; this item was surely wanted by a lot of colleagues. Fortunately for me, I was given the first one off the truck to take for a test drive.
We received the foot warmers on a frigid afternoon, and I was highly excited to put it straight to work. Now I normally use a small ceramic plated space heater that blows hot air on my legs all day. My heater and I have what I like to call a love/hate relationship. I am a freeze baby and cannot stand the cold, however, I dislike being very hot and dry too. Well that’s what pretty much any fan-based heater will do, is dry the air and blow hot air at you. So by mid-afternoon to late day, I start getting very uncomfortable with the heat that is blowing on me. I have even achieved nosebleeds from the dry, hot air. Will this heating pad make my life better? Let us find out now, together.
First thing I did was unplug my old heater and set it off to the side. I wanted to let my desk area cool-down for a while as well, in order to see how long warm-up time will take. Opening the product was very easy, just slid the heating mat out. It comes with a fairly long cord at least 8′ long by my estimations and the on/off switch is only about a foot from the pad. With my work area now reaching close to what I call arctic temperatures (65-68 degrees) I decided to engage the heating pad. So before I go into my experience now let me explain how this thing works.
This heated floor mat emits gentle radiant warmth to heat feet and legs directly. This is what intrigued me the most, as I hate hot, dry air but I want to be warm. But I set out to see if there were other benefits to using this over a ceramic heater. And I found some pretty great supporting reasons to switch to this heater. First is energy cost, I was shocked to see that this unit uses on average 1/10th of the energy a normal space heater would use. For your info, average space heaters use 1,500-2,500 watts. Another big benefit is safety. Normal space heaters regularly cause fires and blow circuit breakers. After all of that, this sounds too good to be true, but is it?
To summarize my experience in 2 words, truly amazing. I turned the heat pad on around 2pm and figured 3 hours would be plenty. I was wrong; I never wanted to let it go. The heating pad does take a short time to heat up, so keep that in mind. I have found that starting it and going to grab a cup of coffee works best! Anyways, it takes about 15 – 20 minutes to achieve my liking of heat. It was very subtle at first, which was nice. My toes were cold and I wasn’t wearing any shoes at the time. After about 10 minutes I started notice the pad was warm to the touch with my feet. So I began resting them on the pad until about 15 minutes into heating. At which point I also noticed that my lower legs were warm to the touch, but not hot at all. This was the moment of joy I was looking for. I was able to achieve comfort at my desk, and I don’t have a wave of hot dry air blasting me in the face from underneath my desk. I continued through the afternoon with this thing on and experienced a few different scenarios with it. I put a foot pedal on the pad and let it do its magic for about 15 minutes, and found the foot pedal comfortably warm with no fear over damage. Radiant warm air also filled the underneath of my desk and just stayed there. Without a fan blowing the air, the heat seemed to just linger around. I also tested the pad with shoes on and found not much of a difference between not wearing them. Let me explain, with my shoes and the natural protection they provide, the pad heats the outsides and my feet would warm the inside. It would also warm the air around my legs and leak out around my lower body. All in all though, this product was a pleasure to test. I have already recommended it to quite a few friends, and I look forward to any feedback they have. If you have any questions in regards to the foot warmer feel free to ask. Hope you enjoy!
By: Matt LaMond
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/matt.lamond
Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattattg
P.S. I keep my hands toasty warm while I work with the warming arthritis typing gloves by IMAK.
