Disaster of a first week
Got a rental for the pod 5 for a month because a few friends cannot stop raving about the product. We were excited to try it out.
I have never had so many problems with a product like eight sleep in my whole life. It feels like the engineering team has done essentially zero work in helping people diagnose and fix problems if they encounter them.
To start:
- [nit] the boxes are absolutely huge and very heavy. If you want to rent you’ll have to find a place to store these. Definitely not ideal for anyone in a small studio or small apartment in a city.
- setup takes hours but is fairly straightforward. Once setup it tells you to go through a test to try it out. It seems that this doesn’t actually test anything or confirm that the product is working as expected. It just tells you to roll around for a bit.
Our first night:
- everything seems to be working fine until we wake up the next morning and we apparently recorded only 18 minutes of sleep. The device stopped working in the middle of the night but the app confidently says we got up 5 hours prior to
- the pod is blinking yellow, signaling a disconnect of the WiFi. Fine, we change to a different network and try again the next night.
The second night:
- multiple times during the night, the pod starts to disconnect, requiring a 10+ minutes reset process
- we wake up again to find it telling us this time “you didn’t sleep on the pod”. So apparently it didn’t work at all and there is no way to tell during the process.
The third night:
- same as the other nights, it seems to be working when we fall asleep but records nothing. It also will often say it’s a different temperature than how it feels. The app shows-10 but it feels exactly the same as 0 in this phase. Maybe theres a kink or something? We fully staighten out the hose and nothing seems to improve. Another 10 minute reset of unplugging it and plugging it back in.
It’s our sixth night now and we haven’t gotten it to work a single night despite trying 10+ times per day to reset, change WiFi, change WiFi band frequency, unplug and replug the USB, try to unkink the hose, power off and on while holding the big button, you name it, we’ve tried it. Nothing seems to work at all.
After multiple times resetting it, the pod will say it’s either offline or the cover isn’t connected despite being plugged in.
Major flaws with the device:
For a multi thousand dollar product, it is incredibly frustrating for it to have essentially zero ability to debug or verify itself. If you have a kink, you have to figure that out on your own. The device is clueless to its own ability. If the cover isn’t working as expected or detecting things, it won’t tell you. There’s no way to check that things are working properly. The WiFi seems to work sporadically — is it a network problem with our router or is it a problem with the device? I have no idea and the pod won’t tell me what the issue is. There is no Bluetooth backup in case of an internet outage. Why does my bed require a perfectly stable internet system to work? It seems ridiculous.
I have to assume we either got a dud of a unit or there is something so special and magical about our internet that there is truly no solution for getting this thing to work in our house. From all the positives I’ve heard about it, I can’t imagine that this situation is common. This is truly a disaster of a product and we will certainly be cancelling at the end of the month to go with a competitor who doesn’t also charge hundreds of dollars per year subscription to keep your bed cool.