I tried a £14 gadget Martin Lewis says could be a way to keep you warm without heating – the result surprised me
HEATING the human rather than the room is one way of coping with the energy crisis, according to money expert Martin Lewis.
This was all I needed to hear to splurge on a pair of heated laptop gloves to warm my freezing chapped hands, which are currently so dry they resemble sandpaper.
The new innovation is designed to keep our hands toasty as we shiver away with the heating off.
In November, it was among the gadgets recommended by Martin as a way to avoid pressing the button.
To test, I picked a well-rated “half-fingered” pair from Amazon costing £13.59.
The gloves, which each have wires that merge into a single USB plug, heat up to around 40C automatically when the laptop is on.
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The first issue was realising my laptop doesn’t actually have a full-size USB port, just a mini one.
I dug out my adapter - which allows me to plug in normal-size USBs - but the gloves wouldn’t heat through it, creating an immediate spanner in the works.
Luckily, I have another older laptop with a USB hole built in.
Having plugged them in, it was seconds before I could feel the pads warming up against the palms and backs of my hand.
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They were pleasantly hot enough to make a difference, but not so much that they were burning my skin.
I had doubted the gloves by themselves would be enough to make me feel warm, but curiously the heat seemed to spread across my body, or at least it distracted me from feeling cold in other areas.
Wearing a couple of jumpers and thick socks probably helped to insulate the heat.
My study is a dungeon-like garage conversion which is only tolerable with an electric radiator on in winter.
But with heated gloves, I managed to sit and work in the cold space without touching the radiator, which costs a whopping 70p an hour to run on full power.
At the time of testing, the temperature outside was 8°C.
How much the gloves cost to run
My smart plug found that an hour of using my laptop alone consumed 0.01kwh of energy, costing £0.003.
With the gloves plugged in, it used 0.02kwh, costing £0.007 per hour.
In other words, the gloves cost me 0.004p an hour to run.
If I swap the radiator for gloves for three hours a day over the next month, I’d save myself around £58.50.
As well as the heat there were added bonuses.
The wires on the gloves effectively tie you to your computer as you can’t leave your desk without peeling them off your hands.
So any inclination I had to wander off for snacks or other distractions was curtailed by the fact I couldn’t be bothered to extricate my hands from my gloves.
Typing in fingerless gloves initially felt odd but after about 20 minutes or so I didn’t notice.
The reviews are mostly positive, although I did notice some people saying the heating pad had burned through the gloves.
For this reason, I wouldn’t leave them plugged into the laptop if I wasn't in the room.
All in all, I get on really well with my new gloves, although they did feel cheaply made and I wonder how long they’ll last.
I would have preferred buying a set from a big retailer like John Lewis or Argos, but these products seem to be mostly made or sold by little-known brands on Amazon.
I hope they’ll catch on as it’s a fantastic idea and one I’ll certainly keep using in the future.
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In other energy news, we round up ways to get free cash in the cold weather to help with energy bills.
Plus, Martin Lewis has issued an urgent warning as thousands "fall through cracks" and miss out on £150 energy bill help.