Review: Moona Smart Cooling Pillow Pad

Introduction

We first came across Moona a couple of  years back at the Somnex show in London. I didn’t get to try it out at the time, but recognised its unique place in the market as  a science-backed, easy to use sleep-health product, based on temperature regulation.

But fast-forward and I’ve finally got the opportunity to try Moona out in this review.

🔥 Update 10/22 Moona 2 is on Kickstarter now!

Hailing from France, co-founders David Stoikovitch and Coline​ ​Juin​ founded Moona in 2016, having both experienced sleep problems in their lives. With backgrounds in science, engineering, data analytics they conceived of a brand new way to help folks get to sleep, and launched their idea on Kickstarter in 2017.

And unlike a lot of hardware startups, Moona is still going strong, no doubt because they’ve identified a strong niche and their product doesn’t have any real peers or competitors. So let’s get into it and find out what Moona is all about and what I thought of it.

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Overview: What is Moona?

Moona is a smart bedside device that regulates the temperature of your pillow to help improve your sleep at night. There are three components to Moona:

1. the bedside unit itself or the Pod – this contains a heat pump and uses water to regulate your pillow temperature
2. the pillow pad which circulates cool water throughout your pillow and also contains a tiny movement tracker to monitor your sleep
3. the mobile app which allows you to set schedules, temperature wake-alarm and get insights about your sleep

Moona is designed to fix a common problem that keeps people awake – getting hot in bed at night. Getting the right temperature for your body at night is crucial to maintaining a restful, deep sleep, so if your core temperature is too high, it’s likely your sleep will be disturbed.

There could be a number of reasons why you get too hot in bed; perhaps you’re just a hot sleeper and suffer from night sweats, perhaps you have hot flashes/flushes due to menopause, or it could be any of a number of other reasons, your sleeping environment, medications, or an unrelated, underlying medical issue including autoimmune disorders, arthritis, cardiovascular health, obesity.. the list goes on.

Bottom line is, wayward body temperature regulation at night is a common problem and Moona offers an elegant, tailored technological solution.

How does Moona work?

Moona regulates your pillow temperature through the night by circulating water between the pod and the pillow pad. When you fall asleep, Moona will actively reduce the temperature of your pillow which can you to fall asleep faster and maintain deeper sleep. Conversely, in the morning, Moona can progressively raise your pillow temperature to wake you up gently. Temperatures can be set on the mobile app to suit your individual preferences, and sleep/wake timings.

The motion sensor inside the pillow pad also tracks your sleep so you can get insights about what settings work best for you so over time you can optimise your sleep quality.

Moona Price and Specifications

Unboxing/ First Impressions

As a premium-priced product, I was glad to discover the company had put some effort into the whole packaging/aesthetics side of things. It may seem trivial, but attention to detail in these areas is often an indicator of the care that’s undertaken in other areas, including engineering, technical performance etc.

So in that respect the package arrived in nondescript brown cardboard which on unwrapping revealed the actual product box, replete with colourful, snazzy branding illustrations, the cute snuggled up fox logo, and a summary of product specs and contents. Lovely packaging, top marks so far.

Opening the box lid you’re greeted by a quick start set of instructions, and then underneath, the Pod, nestled in against a fabric case which kind of looks like an oversized pencil case (more about this later). The Pod is decked out in a white/faux wood effect – it’s not particularly beautiful or ugly, but it has some curves, and looks quite similar to one of the new breed of aromatherapy devices. Whilst you wouldn’t go as far to say it’s a nice piece of decoration for the bedroom, it’s fine, not too big or small, and does just enough to hide its utilitarian nature. (Just breaking….. my partner who just walked into the office, when quizzed by me on the looks said ‘ I have no idea what it is, but I think it looks really nice’!)

Build quality is good. Empty of water, Moona has a substantial heft at around 1kg (2.2lbs), so it’s not going to be knocked over easily. I would have preferred more metal in the construction but perhaps plastics are a better choice when you’re mixing water and electricity!

Now onto the rest of the box contents.

Inside the oversized mystery pencil case, no surprises, this is where you find the neatly folded pillow pad, which again feels great quality. It’s made up of several materials; memory foam padding, a PVC liner that channels the water through, and a cotton-feel pillow case for the exterior. There’s also of course the hose, which attaches to the Pod, and is around 1.5 meters (~5 ft), plenty enough to stretch to the bedside table.

Also in the box is a rather weighty DC power supply – presumably the heat pump in the Pod needs a considerable amount of current, compared to your usual bedside lamp, or alarm clock. A length of velcro, to attach the pillow case securely an IEC mains lead, and the only disappointment, a small plastic funnel for filling the Pod with water, which sadly was broken on arrival – one brownie point deducted….

Design/Ergonomics/Functionality

The Pod

So we’ve already talked about the looks of the Pod, so what about the usage and functionality? Well, button-wise it’s quite sparse. On the back we have a small black power switch, and then on the top there are three rubberized buttons – a plus, minus and circle symbol – which are multifunctional and can also be used to operate the device in a completely manual mode, without the mobile app. More about these rubber buttons later.

Also around the back there’s the DC socket power and a single micro-USB  port. When I saw it initially I thought it it might be a night-time charging socket for a phone, but it turns out that this is the connection port for the inbuilt movement-based sleep tracker inside the pillow pad. And then underneath the power and USB are the two hydraulic outlets for circulating water in and out of the pillow pad – all pretty straightforward stuff.

Underneath the rubber buttons we have a neatly concealed LED display which can show temperature, time and water level.

Finally, the pod also feature two additional sensors which are used to collect the ambient room temperature and humidity of your bedroom throughout the night, which is used as part of the overall data analytics to determine how these metrics affect your sleep quality, and how this relates to your temperature settings in Moona.

The buttons

So, what do the three buttons actually do? Well, first off, you can pretty much use Moona without hardly ever touching these buttons. The only one you absolutely must use is the circle button which you press once when you first fill up the Pod with water.

The other two, the plus and minus buttons are multifunctional and can be used in various combinations to achieve the following:

• change temperature during the night
• snooze function
• initiating a night’s sleep without the app
• system setup (for standalone mode)

So, pretty much, if you’re using the app, the hardware buttons only need to be used in rare situations. However, if you really want to, there’s a way to bypass the app completely and use Moona in complete standalone mode. We’ll cover this later on in the review.

The Pillow Pad

Next, onto the pillow pad. The pad measures 48cm by 34cm (approx 19x 13 inches) long and is designed to work with any existing pillow including memory foam or feathers. You can either place it on top of your pillow or slip it inside your existing pillow case. At first it seems quite unassuming, but on further exploration it’s clear that a lot of thought has gone into the design and usability. So let’s break it down as to actually what the pillow pad consists of.

Outer sleeve

Well, on the outside we have a 100% cotton fabric sleeve outer case in a utilitarian shade of grey. The sleeve is very soft to the touch and can be removed completely so you can easily pop it into the washing machine.

Water hose and sleep tracking module

Next we have the hose attachment which connects the Pod to the pillow pad. This is around 1.5 metres long – plenty enough if you want to place Moona on your bedside table or alternatively, on the floor beside your bed. The hose is covered in the same cotton material as the pillow sleeve, which hides the ugly tubes and wires nicely out of sight. However the hose fabric is not removable – or at least doesn’t seem to be without considerable fiddling around.

Unfastening the press studs securing it to the main pillow pad exposes the two transparent plastic water hoses to circulate water in and out, plus the USB lead which attaches to a small white accelerometer (movement sensory) which provides the sleep tracking functionality of Moona.

Memory foam cooling pad

Finally we have the inner element that distributes the cooled water throughout the pad. This is a silicon-like, slightly squidgy flexible construction, which hides inside a network of tubes evenly distributed throughout the surface.

Both surfaces are lined with comfortable memory foam – the underneath being a solid slab, and the top layer being a matrix of foam squares, presumably to increase heat transfer/exchange between your head and the circulating cooled water when you lie on the pad. In case you forget there’s a useful ‘UP’ indicator on the hose fabric so you don’t end up sleeping with the pillow pad the wrong way round.

Moona – Setup and Installation

Whenever I get a new gadget to review, I always try to see how far I can get without digging into the user manual. The more intuitive a product is to set up, the more it indicates well-considered design throughout…. so I’m pleased to say, that for the most, Moona was pretty straightforward and not too fiddly to get up and running. If you want you can follow the step by step setup guide which is included in the app, but being an old-school, roll your sleeves up type, I decided to go for the ‘see how far you get before you have to read the manual’ approach. So here goes the set up procedure.
Postion

Step 1 – placement

First you’ve got to decide where you want to place your Pod. The optimal place is on your bedside table, because this means the water pump has to work less hard than if it were on the floor (gravity eh!). However, the consideration in this case is that Moona will be closer to your head, and hence more noise…. (Spoiler – Moona is actually not that noisy) So, that said I opted for the bedside table.

Then it’s time to place the pillow pad either inside your existing pillow or on top, whichever your preference, making sure that the ‘UP’ indicator is correctly oriented.

Step 2 – connection

Then connect the tubing hose to the Pod until you hear a firm click. Also connect the USB cable for the sleep tracking metrics. Finally plug in the DC power lead and connect the Pod to the mains electricity and switch the power on.

That’s it for all the connections.

Step 3 – fill with water

Now it’s time to fill her up. To keep everything ‘flowing nicely’ it’s vital that you use the right type of water. We all know what happens when you don’t descale you kettle regularly – mineral build up… a scaly mess. So, in the worst case scenario, using tap water in your Moona could cause scale build up and calcification, impeding the network of fine tubes inside the pillow pad.

For that reason, Moona recommends only using distilled, demineralised or filtered water. Initially I thought this was a bit of an inconvenience, and ending up Googling ‘how to make distilled water at home’, which, naturally, after discovering it wasn’t really very easy, then led me to take a visit to the supermarket to pick up a 3 litre bottle of deionized water that you use inside steam irons. But the truth is, this bottle looks like it will last me along time, so it’s a minor one-off cost, that will pay dividends in increasing the life of your Moona.

So, using the opening at the top, when you first fill the post you need to pour in around 800ml, which is the level that will take you to the ‘MAX’  indicator – make sure you don’t exceed this level. Once you’re filled up, press the O button once, the water will leave the pod and flow into the pillow pad, a ✓ symbol will appear on the device screen…. and that’s it for the hardware set up.
Thankfully I’m glad to say all of this went pretty smoothly without hiccups.

The Moona App

Even though it’s possible to use Moona without an app, Wifi or Bluetooth, unless you have a real, genuine reason, you’re advised to sign up for an account and download the app so you can benefit from all of the features and functionality.

Setting up the app was the usual case of creating a user profile, as well as a load of personal information – gender, age, type of pillow, and a bunch of other personal questions that are obviously used to help the data analysts hone the user experience, but always feel a little intrusive – I mean, do they really  need to know how tall I am??

Beware software updates…
Anyways after completing all the profile information, you need to connect your app to your Moona. Now this is where I encountered the first hiccup in my Moona experience.

Whilst I was able to easily pair my phone with Moona via Bluetooth, it seemed that  before I could do anything I needed to do a software update for the device. But when I tried to update, the download was either so large, or the connection to the Moona server so slow, that it kept failing.

Frustratingly the update process told me not to close the app, close the phone screen, or use any other apps in the background, but after around 10 minutes, the download progress bar was still at only 1%. The download was literally taking hours, and at one point the battery even died on my phone.

Hence after 5 or 6 failed attempts, I decided to just leave the phone next to the bedside table, plugged into the charger, and eventually, after leaving it to update overnight, I woke up and it had completed. This is a small user-design problem that’s not really a big issue, but slightly spoilt the initial user experience and could have easily been avoided with just a little more consideration from the coders at Moona. Note.. please try and do better with your software updates…

App Features

Happily, once this initial update blip was sorted, I was pleasantly surprised to see that there was actually a lot more in the app than I was expecting. To briefly explain, there are broadly two main components of the Moona app – the temperature functions, and then a range of sleep tracking,  coaching and analytics. Plus of course, a host of options, settings and tweakability functions. So let’s take a more detailed look at the app. Design-wise the app is laid out in 4 sections, accessible at the bottom of the screen – Temperature, Alarm, Sleep Data and Coaching – so let’s take a look in turn at each:

Temperature

This is the most important screen in the app. And it shows a graph of your temperature profile – the target temperature ranges of your pillow throughout the night. This profile will be automatically generated based on the answers to the questions you were asked when you created your account.

Your temperature profile splits the night up into three phases: Fall Asleep, Night, and Wake Up. For each of these stages you can override any of these temperatures by simply clicking and dragging on the graph and adjust from 71°F (22°C) up to 95°F (36°C).

It’s important to remember that the temperatures listed in the app are not the same as the ambient room temperature, ie the setting you would use for your heating thermostat – instead, this is the direct temperature of the pillow in contact with your head – a useful analogy instead is to think of this as the temperature of the water in a swimming pool. So, whilst you might be inclined to adjust Moona’s settings based on your idea of what you think a cool room is, it’s better to go with the automatic profile settings, and then adjust according to your personal preferences.

So why are there three different temperature settings I hear you ask?

Well, it’s a good question, and the answer is slightly counter-intuitive. You see, although sometimes we associate a warm bed with snuggly comfort, the science tells us that if we’re too hot, it disrupts our circadian temperature regulation mechanisms and can cause us to wake up – our body’s core temperature naturally takes a temperature dip during the night – and we need to stay within a ‘coolish’ temperature range for optimal sleep.

However, at the same time, when we get into bed, psychologically, we may want to feel warm, just to feel relaxed enough to drift off. So, that’s why there’s a separate setting for the Fall Asleep temperature, a temperature throughout the night, and a separate (higher) temperature for waking up (more about this later). The default duration of the Fall Asleep and Wake Up phases is 20 minutes although you can dig into the settings and change them to whatever you like.

Alarm

The next screen is the alarm. What this means in Moona terms is not an audible, or vibrating alarm, but a temperature alarm. So, as we just mentioned, when it gets too hot in bed, it can cause us to wake up. So, the idea here is that, instead of being startled out of bed by a nasty, angry beeping alarm tone – instead you set your desired wake time, and 20 minutes prior to this, Moona will gradually increase the temperature of the water inside the pillow, to the point you specified in your Wake Up temperature, which will have the effect of gradually, gently rousing you out of slumber.

There’s also a separate function for napping. This is useful if, like me, you like to incorporate regular power naps when you can to boost your energy in the day. Again, you can adjust the temperature profile settings for napping.

Sleep Data

The third tab is where you can find all of the sleep data collected during the night. To be perfectly honest, these days I take most sleep tracking data with a pinch of salt.

Unless you can book yourself into a sleep clinic for a polysomnograph – where you’ll get clinically validated measures of dozens of metrics covering your brainwave data, eye movements, breathing, heart-rate, muscle tone etc – it’s extremely difficult, arguably impossible to get ‘accurate’ measurements of your sleep duration, wake incidences, light, deep, REM sleep stages. But that’s a whole, separate discussion (check out our deep dive podcast episode about sleep tracking here)

That said, Moona does contain a movement-based sleep tracker inside the pillow pad, and this is used to calculate a range of metrics include fall asleep time, sleep duration and wake time. Plus, on the bedside device there are also sensors to measure ambient light, ambient temperature and humidity.

These are all reflected back in your Sleep Data dashboard and you can review daily or weekly – which opens up another realm of analytics, with further metrics representing ‘Bedtime consitency’, Bedtime Score, as well as tips for your sleep environment such as decreasing the room humidity.

All in all the data is recorded and presented neatly and in a well laid out user interface, which no doubt some users will get a lot of value out of. But here’s the thing…. Moona’s sleep tracker is only movement based, and that means it can’t really tell whether you’re lying in bed awake, or if you’re actually asleep.

Comparing one night’s Moona data with my FitBit Charge 4, it’s clear that Moona recorded my falling asleep and waking up pretty accurately, but in doing so, Moona’s sleep tracking algorithm calculated I was asleep for 9 and a half hours, when really, as my Fitbit revealed, I was actually awake for a big proportion of this time.

So, whilst Moona measured my Total Sleep Time as 9 hours 21 min, FitBit told me I actually had 7 hours 42 min of sleep, plus 1 hour 26 min of wake time in bed, totalling 9 hours 8 min.

The takeaways from doing this comparison are that Moona was actually pretty damn good in determining time in bed – within a few minutes of the Fibit – but what it didn’t record was the time in between when I actually woke up. It counted every minute in bed as being asleep.

This is not uncommon amongst movement only-based sleep trackers. It’s notoriously difficult to estimate sleep, and the jury is still out as to how useful even the most sophisticated consumer sleep tracking devices are for ordinary folks.

So as long as you consider these factors when you’re delving into your Moona metrics, and don’t rely on them as a clinical-grade measurement, then I think the addition of the sleep data in the Moona app could potentially be a valuable tool in assessing your sleep behaviours and maybe even modifying some of the for the better.

Coaching

Finally, the last tab is labelled ‘Coaching’. Now, not to be a downer again, but I’m not the biggest fan of the idea of sleep coaching in general. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge advocate for sleep education and awareness, but I think that ‘coaching’ is probably better suited to something like sports, or business, rather than sleep, where often it treads into areas of health and disease, and hence, better left to health professionals.

That said, inside the coaching section there’s a good selection of articles and sleep tips which are informative, but generic. Plus there’s also a guided breathing exercise called ‘Cardiac Coherence’ which guides you into a relaxed more meditative state of breathing by slowing your respiratory rhythm.

All in all, the Coaching section a nice addition, but in the big scheme, a little underwhelming

Connectivity

Moona is a sophisticated device so first of all, let’s talk about connectivity. Some users have complained about having problems with the Moona app but I didn’t experience any major issues at all, apart from the initial software upgrade annoyances.

Moona can connect to the outside world with both Bluetooth and Wifi. This seems a little confusing at first, but there’s a reason for this. The minimum recommended mode of operation is to connect only pair your Moona via Bluetooth to your mobile device. This will enable you to change all of the settings, and user functionality options, as you would control any other smart gadget.

But if you want the most seamless mode of operation you should also connect the Pod to your home Wifi network. What this enables is for your device to automatically upload your sleep data every night to the cloud, where you can store and access your sleep data. If you only connect via Bluetooth you must wait until you connect your phone with Bluetooth, which will then sync with the cloud once you’ve opened the app. Bluetooth mode is also useful if your bedroom doesn’t have a stable Wifi connection.

Another mentionable feature is that whereas normally, Moona stays connected to either your Wifi or Bluetooth throughout the night, you can use a toggle setting to disconnect Moona completely from all wireless communications at night, and then your data is transferred when you wake and connect again in the morning.

Personally I’m not someone who is particularly affected by these things  (at least to my knowledge) so I kept Bluetooth and Wifi connected at all times. And if you do things this way, my experience was that connecting with Moona was actually pretty slick and  straightforward.

At night I just opened the app, Moona connected automatically, and then I would set my alarm time and press the ‘ZZZ’ button to initiate a nights sleep and that’s it.

Even better, something I discovered later on is that once you’ve set Moona up, you don’t even have to use the app every night. As long as you’ve stored your preferences, you can launch the device at night just with a long press on the ‘0’ button on the top of the device. This is a great feature and very beneficial for everyone who wants to minimize phone use in the bedroom.

Using Moona without Bluetooth or Wifi

Now, all this said about connectivity – if you’re really, really concerned about EMFs (remember Better Call Saul anyone?) you can actually use Moona without the app, or ever connecting to Bluetooth or Wifi at all!

This is not optimal as you obviously don’t get to benefit from any of the app features, but you are able however to set the time, your alarm time, and your desired temperatures for falling asleep, night time, and wake up. The. downside is that if you want to use Moona this way, or if you’re a caveman who lives off the grid with no internet connection, then you’ll have to set this up with a tedious routine of button presses on the top of the device – reminiscent of how we used to record TV programmes on VHS (if anyone is old enough to get this reference, award yourself an extra brownie point 🙂

But despite the fiddly-ness, this is actually a great option for people who want to be tech savvy, but prefer their gadgets to be standalone devices.

Whilst we’re on the subject of standalone usage, the buttons on the top of the Pod can be used for a few functions regardless if you’re connected or not. Here’s a summary of what you can do just with the buttons:

• launch/stop the night (‘0’ button long press)
• change temperature during the night ( ‘+/-‘ buttons)
• snooze (‘+’ button during alarm phase)
• display current temperature (‘0’ button)

Moona In Use

OK, so enough of the descriptive stuff, what’s Moona like to use in the real world? What about the nitty gritty?

Well first off, let me caveat by saying that despite being someone who’s heavily involved in sleep products I don’t particularly have any sleep issues per se, so what I can’t do is tell you that Moona improved my sleep, either objectively or subjectively. What I can do is talk about the user experience, and whether or not Moona does what it says in a satisfactory way.

The first night…

So, after everything was set up, at bedtime, eagerly looking forward to the first night’s use I climbed under covers, fired up the app, and hit the ZZZ button in the app.

Head on the pillow, seconds later I could feel (and hear) the water starting to circulate in the pillow pad. The awareness of all that water gushing a couple of millimetres from my head was a little un-nerving at first, but that was soon replaced by the noticeable immediate cooling effect I experienced as my head lay on the pillow.

You might be wondering why this is an instant effect, and the reason is actually nothing to do with Moona, it’s about physics of heat transfer, aka thermodynamics. Liquids (ie water) and gases (ie air) have completely different thermal properties. So, even if a body of water was exactly the same temperature of the air in your bedroom, because  water has a much higher specific heat capacity than air, it conducts heat away from the body way faster. In practical terms, if your body comes into contact with water (even if it’s the same temperature as the ambient environment), water feels much colder, because it’s drawing heat energy away from your skin at a much faster rate than the air in the room.

So, with Moona, whilst it seems that cooling starts straight away, in reality, this effect is just a by-product of room-temperature water flowing through the pillow pad very close proximity with your head. Once I’d got my head around this, I actually looked forward to the nightly routine of turning Moona on. As we come into summer, the night temperatures aren’t stifling, but still, that cool, initial rush of water through the pillow pad became something of a soothing ritual as I closed my eyes.

Noise and light

One area that Moona scored unexpectedly high for me was the amount of operating noise the device made. I’m someone who’s pretty sensitive to noise, especially at night. Part of this probably comes from the fact that I used to work in the audio industry and my ears are trained to pick out even the most subtle nuances and noise disturbances at night.

Having reviewed bed cooling devices in the past, including the water-cooled Ooler and the air-powered BedJet 3 I was aware that these machines, whilst both great products, put out a fair amount of noise at night, even at the lowest settings. So my expectation was that Moona would be similar in this respect, ie noisy enough to be an annoyance. But I was really pleased to find out that Moona performs extremely well in terms of how much noise the device emits at night.

Even though I chose to use it as a bedside device and it ended up being probably around 1 metre away from my head, I never found the noise of the pump and the internal mechanisms to be a disturbance at all. Hats off to the engineers for noise performance!

In terms of light, Moona does have a while LED display, but it’s completely dark at night. The only time it was an issue was a couple of days after using it, when I woke because the device was flashing an icon. On closer inspection, it was the refill indicator, showing that I needed to top up the device with distilled water. This only happened once, so again, no problems with light in this respect.

How did I feel using Moona?

So, as I mentioned earlier, I didn’t set out to see if Moona could ‘fix’ a sleep problem of mine. I just wanted to test the device, see how easy it was to use, and subjectively report back on what it did for me.

The good news is, I actually really enjoyed the experience. I’m a pretty hot sleeper, and in the highest heat of the summer my head can get pretty sweaty. So timing wise, it would perhaps have been better to do a review a few months later. But even now, I can say that Moona worked pretty flawlessly in terms of doing what it’s supposed to do.

All throughout the night, whenever I briefly awoke, the pillow felt cool to the touch, and I managed to find a sweet spot,  just like Goldilock’s porridge, where the temperature was not too cold, not too hot, but just right.  I never felt uncomfortable using the pillow pad, and as mentioned above, the noise of the unit didn’t ever bother me to the extend that it disturbed my sleep.

Subjectively, in terms of how I felt in the morning, I can say that yes, I did feel good when I woke up.  I certainly didn’t feel worse for using Moona! Now, of course, this review isn’t a scientific study, and there’s no way to truly objectively know if my feeling good in the morning, and my use of Moona were connected in any way at all. But establishing this would be difficult to achieve, even in a clinical trial.

So, sadly the best I can say to you is that; yes, Moona works brilliantly; yes, it really does cool your pillow effectively; and yes, I felt good in the mornings after using the device. After that it’s up to you to make your own judgement call on whether it may be a sleep solution for you.

Summary

I’d read a lot about Moona before I started this review, and I knew what the device was purporting to be able to do. But for some reason, I was a little sceptical that 1) the manufacturers would be able to produce a well-engineered, user-friendly device you’d actually want to use every day in the bedroom, and 2) the cooling effect would be noticeable and make a marked difference to how I felt in bed.

Well, despite my scepticism I came away quite impressed with this little French invention. Moona ticks all the boxes in terms of product design and engineering. It feels like a solid piece of kit that’s built to last. It looks pretty good, and not out of place in the bedroom.

The app has a simple UI, but there’s quite a lot of hidden functionality if you want to dive in and tweak the settings. I particularly like the fact that the designers have thought about sleep habits in general, and made it possible to use Moona every night without your smartphone – or, even off the grid completely with no Bluetooth or Wifi connection at all.

I’ve got a few minor criticisms. First, I don’t really see the need to always have an alarm function. In healthy sleep terms, the best way to wake up is naturally, without an alarm. Whilst you can get round this with Moona by setting the alarm temperature to the same as the night temperature, in our post-lockdown era, where many more people are able to set their own schedules and have flexible wake times, I would have preferred if you were just able to switch the alarm off completely.

Also the sleep data and coaching parts of the app are, not really that useful, except perhaps if you were to use Moona for the long term, after which, the machine learning aspect might be able to make some specific recommendations based on your own personal data. I didn’t test Moona for long enough to verify this.

Lastly, Moona isn’t cheap so not everyone will be able to afford to get one (finance options would be welcome here). But then again, it’s around half the price of a comparable whole-bed cooling system like Ooler. And, perhaps, more importantly, if it genuinely does fix your sleep problems, then what price would you put on that! My general mantra on this topic is that if you think a certain sleep gadget/device might work for you, but you’re wary of the cost….. only take the plunge if there’s a guaranteed trial period where you can get your money back if it doesn’t work out.. Simples!!

So, yes, in summary we’re fans of Moona, it’s a unique product and we think it’s a great complement to all of the other temperature regulation systems on the market. Recommended 👍

Moona is available from $399 from their website or pay in 4 x $99 installments

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