The benefits of a hot water bottle include:
Providing comfort on a cool night
Easing pain
Easy to move around with
Not worrying about getting wrapped up in a cord
I had a few things in the US I knew I couldn’t bring to Europe with me. One of those things was my heating pad. I actually should say heating pads because I had three of them. I had a plug in kind and that wouldn’t work since it was a Type A American plug and I would need a Type C 220 European plug. (And no, I am not going to use my adaptor/converter on something like this). I also had a clay heating pad in the US. It would go in the microwave for 2 minutes and it would slowly cool off throughout its use and that was nice. But it was too heavy to take with me. I also had a stuffed animal heating pad that I wrote about in October 2016 here on our blog. It was also too heavy to take with me.
When I arrived here in Europe I started looking for a heating pad. It was chilly – especially in bed at night! And it Italy they shut off the boilers at night in the buildings to conserve energy (we were told this is actually an Italian law where they regulate how many hours your boiler can run each day). I couldn’t find a plug-in style heating pad anywhere!
So I decided to try a hot water bottle. I was a little nervous about pouring hot water into a small opening – I didn’t need to burn myself just to stay warm. But once I got used to doing it, it was easy! I have only splashed a little hot water on my hand once and it wasn’t too bad. The hot water bottle seemed so “old fashioned” to me but now I realize I should have been using a hot water bottle all along! I like how it starts out warm like my clay pad and then slowly gets cooler through the night. I’ve even found that it can warm me up enough after 30 minutes or so of reading before bed and I don’t need it to sleep!
My cute little hot water bottle and my warm sheep wool slipper booties which I posted about here:
