Eight Sleep Pod 4 Cover Review: 3 Years of Sleep on Pod

In 2022, there wasn’t a single independent Eight Sleep review online, which is why I spent $2,000 on the Pod 2. I was on a mission to create a genuine review. It was a win-win proposition: either I’d improve my sleep and productivity, or, if the Pod was just influencer hype, I’d expose it with an honest review.

Flash forward more than two years and my conclusion is kind of boring: sleeping on a cooled mattress that tracks my sleep is amazing and I hate being without it. But did I get caught up in the hype too? Recently, I had my conviction tested while living in an Airbnb for a couple of months without my Pod, and my sleep was miserable during that time.

I was so excited to get back to my cooled mattress that I preordered the Pod 4 as soon as I got home. Since I reviewed the Pod 2 and Pod 3, I figured I should cover the 4 too, which has nice upgrades like added comfort and a physical temperature adjustment.

So in this review I show how I tracked my sleep improvements, my comfort observations, the leak issue I had with my Pod 2, and the four types of people who should avoid the Pod 4.

TL;DR (9/10 Rating)

Who Should Buy the Pod 4 Cover:

• You have different temperature preferences from your partner
• You can’t get your room to your preferred temperature
• You want sleep tracking without wearables

Who Should Avoid the Pod 4 Cover:

• You sleep alone
• You have an extremely hot room
• You are already content with your sleep quality
• You like to snuggle with your partner

Temperature Control

Eight Sleep’s goal is to help you feel more recovered each morning without additional time spent in bed by trading some light sleep for deep sleep. The Pod 4 Cover tries to achieve this with a dual-zone active grid cover that slips over your existing mattress.

The cover heats and cools from 110°F to 55°F, and each person sleeping on the bed sets a desired temperature for their zone, then the cover gets prepped 30 minutes before you're scheduled to get into bed each night.

There’s no worse feeling than continuously rolling over to find a cooler spot on the sheets. When I get hot, an easy fix is to turn the AC down to 65°F and let the ceiling fan create some air flow. The problem? 65°F is costly to maintain and my wife hates it that cold.

Now, with the Pod 4 Cover, my wife and I compromise on the room temperature–we keep the bedroom at about 71-72 degrees, while I keep my side of the bed around the -5 coolness setting, while she keeps her side toasty.

So the multi-thousand dollar question is, does this temperature control actually improve sleep quality?

Well, according to an Eight Sleep study, of the 300 users tested via an Oura Ring, they averaged a 10% increase in their deep sleep. However, this study doesn’t tell you much because it would’ve been thrown out if it didn’t prove that Eight Sleep was helping people, which is why I wanted to get my own data.

In 2022, with the Pod 2, I rotated having the Pod enabled and disabled for 60 days. During this time, my deep and REM sleep increased by about 5% combined, according to my Oura Ring, which worked out to an extra 12 minutes of high-quality sleep per night.

With the Pod 3, I tried to repeat my findings using my Apple Watch, but there wasn’t an obvious difference in my deep or REM sleep when using the Pod. However, during this time, I averaged about four fewer tosses and turns with my Eight Sleep enabled (according to the Eight Sleep app).

For this Pod 4 review, I was so relieved to be back on a cooled mattress again, after two months without it, that I wasn’t willing to sacrifice my sleep to get more control data. Sorry!

More sleep tracking data would’ve made for a stronger blog post, but my reluctance is saying a lot, isn’t it? Sometimes I get too caught up in the data to justify something. I’m a simple man. I like to be cool when I sleep and the Pod 4 is the easiest way to achieve this in my situation.

Three Comfort Observations

When laying on the Pod 2 Cover it was obvious that I wasn’t sleeping on my mattress because of the extra stiffness and coils, but the Pod 3 made major improvements by masking the coils better and removing an annoying underlying strap. The Pod 4 improved things further by removing the stiff and firm encasement cover, which sat under the main cover and zipped to it.

The Pod 4 Cover gets close to having no impact on the feeling of your current mattress. However, my bet is that over time, the padding will wear down slightly and you’ll feel the coils again, but it won’t ever become an issue.

Secondly, I’m typically a side sleeper, but during the summer months, I’ve been sleeping on my back or stomach more often because it’s cooler when more of my body is in contact with the cover. You won’t feel fully cool when only one leg is in contact with the bed.

Thirdly, if the sides of the bed have different temperatures, there will be an invisible barrier, which is fine for me because I like my space when I sleep, but it’s not ideal for couples who sleep close to each other.

Day to Day Operations

The Eight Sleep app has four tabs: an overview, scheduled temperatures with manual control, alarms and sleep tracking. In over two years with Eight Sleep, they’ve had three major app redesigns, which shows they’re striving to improve things, but it’s annoying to relearn a new interface that frequently.

After the initial setup, I just let the scheduled temperatures do their thing and only use the app for sleep tracking.

The Pod 4 added a new way to change the temperature that doesn’t require a phone. There’s ribbed rubber material on each side of the bed that’s tappable. A double tap of this area lowers the temperature by a point, while a triple tap raises temperature by a point.

On nights where I felt hotter than normal in the middle of the night, I’d often avoid lowering the temp because I didn’t want to blind myself from the bright light of my phone. In previous reviews, I asked for a remote, but the tappable area is better and the largest difference between the Pod 3 and the Pod 4.

Eight Sleep also has an alarm feature called Gentle Rise that vibrates a single zone of the bed and adds heat or coolness when it’s time to wake up. When it’s your partner’s side of the bed vibrating, you won’t feel the vibrations, but you’ll likely still hear the bed shaking. This is more pleasant than your partner’s loud phone alarm blasting in the room, making it great for those with different sleep schedules.

Eight Sleep claims the Pod 4 hub is 40% quieter than the Pod 3. In my experience, if the room's hot or the hub's temperature is changed drastically, it sounds like a computer tower fan. But once it’s maintaining the temperature, you can barely hear it, which is how it runs most of the time. Even when the hub is actively changing the temperature, it’s quieter than a window AC and easy to sleep through.

Health and Sleep Tracking

Eight Sleep effectively tracks sleep movements, cycles, and duration. You also get a Sleep Fitness Score each morning that's based on a 100-point scale, which factors in your sleep time, consistency, and how quickly you fall asleep.

Eight Sleep’s data isn’t flawless. For example, if I had my baby laying on me while awake, it mistook my stillness for sleep. However, the sleep duration closely matches with other fitness wearables that I’ve tested, as long as you stay on your side of the bed.

What I appreciate most is its hassle-free tracking; no wearables required, and it seamlessly syncs with the Apple Health app.

Based on my observations over the years, the three health tracking metrics: heart rate, HRV and breath rate all seem to be at least directionally accurate too.

Another thing worth mentioning: we don’t let our dog sleep in bed with us, but I assume for those who do, it would affect sleep tracking accuracy. Not to mention the potential risk of your pet's claws damaging the cover. Eight Sleep recommends keeping pets on a thick comforter if they’re on the bed.

The bottom line? If you and your sleep partner stay in your zones and don’t have pets or babies on board, you’ll love the convenience of getting your sleep tracked without a wearable.

Durability and Maintenance

In the past, Eight Sleep’s pump would get noisy every 6-8 weeks. To fix, you’d add some water to the tank and press a button in the app to "prime the pump." Now, the pump can be primed automatically each day at your set time. Now, the only manual maintenance required is adding some tap water to the tank every few months to change out the filter every six months (Eight Sleep will mail you a new filter).

As far as durability, I had the Eight Sleep Pod 2 Cover for close to a year and ran into no issues until I took it off to test my Pod 3. When taking off the Pod 2 cover, I noticed a ring from the hydrogen peroxide near the pump connection on the encasement cover. It wasn't a major leak because my sheets were never wet, and the mattress was unstained. I told Eight Sleep about my leak and they sent me a free replacement Pod 2 within a week.

The customer service was awesome, but I worried about Eight Sleep because there was a small yet noticeable number of people on the internet who had leaks with their Pod 2 too. If the cover didn’t last a year without leaking, how many people would get through five years of ownership with a leak-free cover?

Fortunately, after a year of sleeping on the Pod 3, I didn’t have a leak and it doesn’t look like the internet did either. And after six weeks of sleep with the Pod 4, everything’s golden. Eight Sleep likely addressed the leak issues with the Pod 3 and Pod 4, but we’ll have to see how these Pod covers up hold after more usage (I’ll add more to this section as time goes on).

Either way, the longevity of the Pod 4 is something you should consider when dropping thousands on a cover. If longevity is a major concern of yours, consider upgrading to Eight Sleep's Enhanced subscription plan. It's essentially an insurance policy for $100/year.

Cost and Value

Eight Sleep put the majority of its features behind the paywall. Now, the Autopilot Standard ($199/year) subscription is mandatory for the first year of ownership.

The good news? You can cancel the subscription after the first year. The bad news? You'll only get one feature: manual temperature control of the cover.

Health and sleep tracking metrics, along with the vibration alarm, and the scheduled heating and cooling are all disabled without the subscription.

If you don’t care about sleep tracking, can you get by without a subscription? Maybe! But remembering to manually turn on your pod 30 minutes before sleep each night (to get it to the proper temp at for sleep) isn’t ideal.

Subscriptions for fitness gear aren’t new—no one likes them. However, Eight Sleep customers should frame the subscription differently. If you plan to keep your Pod for five years you’re looking at $955 in membership fees, on top of the $2,549 (King in this example) for the cover. It's not just a subscription; it's part of the deal.

So the real question is: are you cool with shelling out $3,544 for the Pod 4? Eight Sleep likely can’t sell this Pod profitably at the current listing price, which is why they’re sneakily charging an extra $995 for it.

That being said, I’d rather see Eight Sleep do this to survive if the alternative is disappearing. I’m grandfathered in and have the Eight Sleep free for life, but if I were a first-time buyer again, I’d still buy the Pod 4 and reluctantly subscribe. However, the subscription will rightfully dissuade a lot of people from pulling the trigger.

Who shouldn’t buy one?

Personally, as a busy entrepreneur and dad, I want to get the best sleep possible and I'm fine spending extra for my health. But the Pod 4 won't be for everyone. Here are four types of people who should think extra hard before buying one:

1. Single people. If I were single and could control my bedroom’s temperature, I'd save $3,000 and keep a window AC at its lowest setting in the summer or use minimal heat in winter. I've slept perfectly most of my life that way. 
2. Extra hot room. An Eight Sleep won’t be a game changer in a 90-degree room; you still need a reasonable baseline temperature if you want to feel cool.
3. Content with your sleep. If you’re already sleeping well, the Pod might not be worth it—it’s expensive and won’t magically boost your energy like the marketing and influencers might want you to think.
4. Like to snuggle. The dual zones create a weird situation if you have different temperature preferences than your partner. There’s a temperature barrier and going over to the other side makes sleep tracking less reliable.

However, if you’re in a good spot financially, and set on getting the Pod 4, I won’t talk you out of it, even if you fit one of the categories above—it just might not be the best value.

The ideal buyers for the Pod 4 are couples who fight over room temperature.

And if you've recently been uncomfortable while sleeping, the Pod 4 is worth trying with Eight Sleep's 30-night trial. See if it makes a difference for you, and send it back if it doesn't.

And if you’re wondering whether to upgrade to the Pod 4 from the Pod 2 or Pod 3, I’ll cover that in a separate comparison.

I believe I've addressed almost everything in this review, but I created an FAQ page with additional information too. If you have any questions that I didn't cover, feel free to ask them in the comments section below.

Disclosure

Three years ago, I didn't have a relationship with Eight Sleep when I wrote my original Eight Sleep review. I was just a happy customer. Eventually, Eight Sleep reached out because they liked my review and wanted me to join their official affiliate program.

I joined their program under a few conditions:

• I won’t accept free products and will continue to buy all products for this blog.
• I won’t change or tweak content to their liking.
• I don’t work with Eight Sleep to optimize my sales or have any of my content used in their social campaigns.

Basically, I bought three covers with my money and provided reviews as unbiasedly as possible and Eight Sleep cuts me a check if people buy through my link. In a perfect world, I’d have no relationship with Eight Sleep, but this allowed me to provide free content while still keeping this channel alive. They’ve provided me with a $200 off discount code, but there’s nothing special with my discount specifically—it can be from thousands of other sites with a quick Google search. I won’t be offended if you don’t use mine, but I always appreciate all my subscribers who do.