Calling all (dog) dads/moms

Hi all -
My girlfriend and I adopted two dogs over the last 6 months and having little love or attention previously, they crave it now. This means our bed has become their bed also. I’m not upset about that, or going to attempt to train the behavior out of them (my gf loves to cuddle, I don’t during the night, so it’s a win win).

My issue is heat. They are like a furnace. We upgraded to a king bed, and my previous bed was cool to the touch which I didn’t realize how important that was to me. We got a cooling mattress cover and a cooling comforter but it doesn’t seem to help.

Any suggestions for helping to cool down during sleep are greatly appreciated. I keep the AC at 65 but that doesn’t help. And I need to be under the comforter to be comfortable sleeping (between a rock and a hard place currently).

Thank you!!

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We just had to put our foot down and teach our two that dogs sleep on the floor, work in progress. They like a dog cave so we created a couple spots they feel safe from the attacks of our FITA cats.

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Not sure it will help in your situation but we have a heater as well in the form of a chihuahua. What has helped for us is putting another blanket on top of the comforter and folding it over the chihuahua. The dog feels warm and snuggled but it somewhat isolates the heat generated from us as she isn’t physically in the same space if that makes sense.

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I first started working in a vet clinic in the 80’s as a kennel boy and have been a veterinarian for 27 years. In my time I’ve seen dogs go from living outside to the garage or dog house to the kitchen to the house to the bedroom to, finally, the bed. They have had a remarkable run over then last 40 yrears.

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A fan at the foot of the bed helps. You may need two :dog: Also, we have a separate window ac unit for the bedroom. Partially because of the dog and partially because it’s an old house and the bedroom is upstairs. I don’t have any calculations but it must be more efficient to cool one room than the entire house.

We had some intermittent success getting the dog to stay by our feet/legs by putting a blanked in that area for him. It is much cooler than being against your body.

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We have 3 ~80lb rescue pit bulls that all expect a spot on our king bed. I have a similar problem with being too warm, especially because my wife is always cold (so we can’t turn thermostat down to 65). My solution thus far has been to keep a separate thin comforter to myself. Two of the dogs sleep above the comforters and one sleeps under my wife’s. That, along with a ceiling fan above my side of the bed, usually does the trick. However, when I’m in the middle of particularly heavy training blocks and am already running warm before I even get in bed, I still get uncomfortable.

Didn’t Nate mention something about an air conditioned mattress cover or something on one of the podcasts?

As a hobbyist woodworker, my next major plan is to build a bed that uses two queen mattresses side by side. Since we already use separate comforters, it should theoretically give the dogs more room to not bug me. Theoretically :slight_smile:

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Nate did but they’re quite expensive.

Yeah I was looking into the bet jet, they are on sale of Father’s Day right now. Do they have dog dad Father’s Day? Haha. If you get the single zone it’s $350 which is expensive but the dual zone is $900 which is crazy. I think they recommend dual for king but I think we’d survive with single.

We got a bed jet about 6 months ago - it’s fantastic. both my wife and I are sort of “hot sleepers” so having the bed cooled is a game changer. That being said, one of our 2 dogs also feels entitled to sleep on our bed instead of his bed on the floor, and sometimes he lays down right on top of the bedjet vent and blocks the airflow. But I’d still highly recommend it.

We trained our dog to understand the second floor (where bedrooms are) is off-limits. She seems to get it. Unless there’s a thunderstorm, in which case the rules book gets thrown out apparently.