Matbeby Cooling Mattress Pad Review: Five Months on Our Queen Bed

Five months ago I bought a quilted pad for our queen bed because I was tired of waking at 2 a.m. on a damp sheet. Not soaked. Damp. The kind of hot, sticky patch that builds under your back and hips while you sleep and announces itself the second you roll over. I am 55, I work the day shift as a pharmacy technician at a hospital in Kenosha, and I have to be functional by 7 a.m. So in April I ordered the MATBEBY queen size cooling mattress pad, and it has been on our bed every night since.

I want to be careful about what this thing does, because I read a lot of reviews before I bought it and most of them oversold it. The MATBEBY pad does not make your bed cold. It is not a machine, it has no cord, and there is nothing to plug in. What it does is take the heat-trapping edge off the top of the mattress so the hot spot under your back stops building into a puddle. That is a smaller promise than the product page makes. It is also, in my bedroom, the difference between three wakings a night and one.

How I've Used It

The pad went on the mattress the day it arrived and it has not come off since, which is a longer run than anything else I have tried in that room. Our mattress is a queen, the pad is 60 by 80 inches, and the deep pocket skirt is rated for mattresses up to 21 inches deep. Ours is nowhere near that, so the skirt tucks under with room to spare and the corners stay put when one of us rolls over. The closure is a pull-on style with no zipper, which matters at 11 p.m. when you are wrestling a pad onto a mattress by yourself.

The layers in order are the mattress, then the pad, then a fitted cotton sheet. It has been washed every two to three weeks on cold with our regular detergent and dried on low, so roughly nine or ten cycles since April. The quilting has not bunched and the loft has not gone flat. Greg, my husband, is 58, sleeps hot, and snores like a diesel engine. He has not complained about the pad once, and for him that counts as a five star review.

What I did not do, after the first week, was treat it like a cooling appliance. That first week I expected to get into bed and feel something on my skin. You do not. It feels like a soft quilted pad, because that is what it is. The effect shows up later, closer to the two hour mark, when the mattress underneath would normally have warmed up under your body and started handing the heat back to you.

One thing about the sheet, because it took me a month to figure out. I use a plain cotton fitted sheet over the pad, and I would not put flannel or a brushed microfiber sheet on top of it. Those two trap heat worse than the pad can shed it, and then you blame the pad. That is not a knock on the pad. It is just how the layering works.

What the Pad Actually Is

Strip away the language on the listing and this is a quilted polyester mattress pad. The fabric is 100 percent polyester, the fill is quilted in place, and the whole thing goes in the washing machine. It is soft, and the firmness description on the listing says soft, which matches what my hand tells me. It is thin enough that it does not change how our mattress feels, and I say that as someone who spent two years getting used to a mattress and did not want to start over.

I measured ours before ordering because I did not trust the size chart. A queen mattress is 60 by 80 inches and the pad is the same, so it sits flush rather than hanging over the sides. The 21 inch depth rating is deeper than most of what is sold in this category, so a pillow top or a deep mattress should still let the skirt grip.

The breathable part is where the actual function lives. A quilted pad with a little loft holds a thin layer of air between your body and the mattress instead of pressing you flat against it. That layer is what keeps heat from pooling in one place. It is the same reason a cotton blanket feels better than a vinyl one on a warm night. Nothing about this pad is electronic, and nothing about it is cold to the touch.

What Changed at 2 A.M., Month by Month

April in Wisconsin is not hot, so the first month was about the damp spot rather than the room temperature. Before the pad I would wake with a hot patch under my back and hips and have to roll to the cool side of the bed. With the pad, the patch was smaller and it cooled off faster once I moved. I still woke up. I just did not have to strip the sheet and start over.

June and July are the real test and that is where the difference showed. Our bedroom is upstairs and faces west, so it bakes all afternoon and holds the heat into the evening. We have one window air conditioner and Greg keeps the thermostat at 70, which makes the room tolerable rather than cool. Before, a hot flash at 1 a.m. meant a wet shirt and a changed sheet. After, it meant flipping my pillow and lying still for ten minutes. I still get the flashes. They just do not wreck the bed anymore.

There was one bad week in July, the week the humidity sat on us and the air conditioner ran all day without catching up. I woke three times one night and the pad did not save me. What it did was keep the third waking from turning into a full bedding change at 3 a.m. That is the honest version. It is a helper, not a switch.

August is when I stopped noticing it, which is the highest compliment I can pay a bedroom product. It is not something I think about. It is something I notice the absence of, and I know that because of the night in late July when I stripped the bed to wash it and slept on the bare mattress. I was awake at 2:40 with a hot back and no explanation for a good ten seconds.

The Summer Test: One Window Unit and a Fan

I want to be honest about everything else that was in that room, because a pad on its own is not going to rescue a hot bedroom. We run one window air conditioner. In July I put a small bladeless tower fan on my nightstand pointed at my pillow, set low with the timer when I go to bed. It moves air across my side of the bed only, so Greg is not sitting in a draft all night.

The pad handles the surface under my body. The fan handles the air above it. If you have a hot room and no air moving at all, a pad will help less than you are hoping. If you have air moving and a mattress that traps heat, the pad is the piece you are missing. My side of the bed also gets a cooling blanket that feels cool to the touch when I first get in. Between the pad, the fan and the blanket, most nights I sleep through.

Washing It Every Two to Three Weeks

This is the part that decides whether a pad is worth owning. A pad that is a nuisance to wash ends up staying on the bed too long, and then you are sleeping on five weeks of night sweats. Mine comes off, goes in on cold, and goes in the dryer on low. It has not shrunk, pilled or lost its quilting, and it is light enough that it dries fast when I hang it over the shower rod instead.

The care instructions on the listing say easy care and machine wash, and that has held up. The warranty is a one year quality assurance from MATBEBY, which I have not had to use and hope not to. Two things I would tell a friend: wash it alone the first time, because a new quilted pad sheds lint, and check the corners after drying, because the elastic can twist if you dry it with sheets wrapped around it.

Where It Falls Short

It is not water resistant. That is the one line on the listing I would make bigger. If you have a night sweat heavy enough to soak a shirt, that moisture is going through the pad and into the mattress. The pad will dry. The mattress will not, at least not quickly. If that is your situation, you want a waterproof protector directly on the mattress and this pad on top of that.

It does not make the bed cold. It does not change the firmness, it will not cool a hot room, and it will not stop a hot flash. It is 100 percent polyester, and if you are a person who finds polyester against your skin unpleasant, you will feel it through a thin sheet on a warm night. It is also a pad and not a topper, so if you are shopping for a thick layer of gel you can sink into, this is not going to be it.

One more small thing. Ours has a few loose wrinkles in the middle after a wash and they work themselves out in a night or two. If wrinkles on a bed bother you before you get in, smooth it flat while it is still slightly damp instead of waiting until it is fully dry.

The pad does not make my bed cold. It keeps the heat from pooling under my back, which turns out to be the part that was waking me up.

Who This Is For

This is for the woman who wakes with a hot, damp patch under her back and rolls to the cool side of the bed two or three times a night. It is for a bed that traps heat, a bedroom that runs warm, and a person who has already spent money on pillowcases and pajamas and wants the next thing to cost less and do more. It is also for anyone who wants the fix to be invisible, because once it is under the sheet you will never look at it again.

If one of you sleeps hot and the other does not, it works either way, because it covers the whole queen rather than one half. Greg runs warm and I run warmer, and neither of us has noticed a difference in how the bed feels.

Who Should Skip It

Skip it if your night sweats are heavy enough to soak through a shirt. You need a waterproof layer first and this pad is not one. Skip it if you are shopping for a thick gel topper and expect that feeling, because this is a quilted pad and it is thin. Skip it if your bedroom is hot and completely still, because a pad on top of a warm mattress will not fix a room with no air moving in it. And if you have not talked to your doctor about the sweats themselves, do that first. A pad is a comfort item. It does not treat anything.