- So at night, when I'm sleeping all cozy
under my blankie,
sometimes my legs get a little toasty.
Of course, I do what we all do then,
stick one leg out from under the covers
to try to take that temperature down
from about 1,000 degrees to something more manageable.
Now, one innovator is aiming to cool off
the legs of the sleeping world
by pumping cool air down there.
Here's Alie Ward to explain.
(woman yawning)
- The power of restorative rest
cannot be understated, and temperature
is a critical piece of that sleep puzzle.
Too many hot Texas nights inspired Kurt Tompkins
to engineer a novel sleep solution,
and it's called bFan.
It's a fan that you place on the floor
at the foot of your bed,
designed to deliver cool air between the sheets.
It's adjustable to fit beds of different heights,
and the amount of air that flows is up to you.
- I was livin' in a little house down the road from here,
and it was just unbearably hot.
Layin' in bed one night I just
lifted the covers up with my legs
and let 'em drop, and the air flow felt so good
I thought, if I could just keep that air flowing
through the sheets like this,
I could probably sleep really well.
- In 2002, he started building prototypes
in his garage with the help of his family.
When Kurt's mother-in-law used the bFan
and reported she'd had her best night's sleep in years,
Kurt knew he was on to something.
She even kept the fan.
I headed for the heat of Boerne, Texas,
where Kurt showed me the step-by-step innovation process
of his baby, known as bFan.
Now, these are some of the first prototypes?
- This is the very first prototype.
- Oh, look at that.
- Yeah, it's kinda ugly, but it did the trick.
- How dare you call it ugly.
- Sorry.
- This is your first child.
- Right, right, right.
- It is a beautiful thing.
- Okay.
- Then you streamlined it?
- The streamlining was the next step.
- Okay.
- Once I figured out that it could possibly work,
I starting movin' in this direction.
- And now the air gets blown up through this,
and then it goes into, between your sheets.
- Correct.
And this is the one my mother-in-law stole from me.
I had to give her a new one for me
to get the old one back.
- From early sheet metal designs
to fan modifications to wood and finally plastic.
- The main difference between this one
and the previous models is the blower motor.
- Oh, you've changed the motor inside.
- Absolutely. This motor delivers
very high static pressure, which is
what lifts the sheets up.
- Oh. - And it delivers the air.
If you don't have high static pressure,
the air is just gonna sit at the end of the bed
and it's not gonna move.
There's three ways that the body cools itself,
conduction, convection, radiation.
Now, if the body's not able to cool itself
with any of those three ways,
it goes into the fourth stage, which is sweating.
- We set up a space so that I
could try the bFan for myself.
I'm gonna take my shoes off.
- Okay.
- I mean, I'm a professional.
Oh, and I wore my bug socks, because I love bugs.
This is, I have the worst job.
I have such a hard job.
- Right, right, right.
- Oh, hee hee. Bye.
Okay, and then this —
- Yeah, you gotta turn it on.
- There's a remote, right?
- Right.
- It has a little dial.
There it goes. Oh, that is cool air.
Oh, this is nice. I like this.
It's crazy though, air that comes in is really cool.
- Right.
- And look at this.
This is a balloon. This is awesome.
It's just like this cool rush of air
that comes all the way up,
and you don't feel the blanket on you.
And yeah, it's definitely a lot cooler.
I've been doing low-key research on this story
for at least 30 years.
I've been practicing sleeping hot for so many decades
just in preparation for this story.
(upbeat instrumental music)