In building Pod 4, we redesigned the heart of the Pod – the Hub – from the ground up. Every aspect of the Hub, from the thermal engine to the sleek aesthetic has undergone major upgrades to provide the best possible sleeping experience for members.
What is the Hub?
The Hub is the core part of the Pod system that provides a steady flow of chilled or heated water to precisely set the Cover’s temperature. The hub contains the reservoirs, pumps and thermal engine that work in perfect synchronization to quietly and efficiently set the cover temperature from 55 °F to 115 °F. It also hosts the connectivity and processing chips.
A virtually silent powerhouse
The main challenge of the Hub’s redesign was to increase the thermoregulating power of the Hub while decreasing the noise level. To achieve this, we redesigned the thermal engine with more powerful solid state heat pumps and a state-of-the-art heat sink, allowing it to heat and cool both more efficiently and with unmatched maximum power. We optimized the airflow through the hub using computational fluid dynamics simulations to put less pressure on the dual high-performance cooling fans, making this our quietest hub yet.
Even tiny details like the size and mounting of the reservoirs and pumps, or the routing of the tubing inside the hub have been optimized to reduce noise. We redesigned the control electronics to eliminate high frequency noise and provide a pleasing sound profile.
All these updates resulted in an impressive 40% decrease in sound pressure from Pod 3 to Pod 4, bringing it down to just 30 decibels on the -2 cooling setting. While Pod 3 was reasonably quiet, with these improvements Pod 4 is nearly silent in many cases, eliminating another factor in the way of your best sleep.
Faster, more efficient cooling
Hot sleepers know how important it is to reach their ideal sleep temperature quickly — especially on a hot night, or when experiencing night sweats. Our rigorous testing shows that the newly redesigned thermal engine cools twice as fast as Pod 3 when set to maximum cooling, and is able to maintain the coldest temperatures even in hot environments.
And though the Pod 4 hub can deliver much more cooling power under peak loads, the rest of the time it’s also more efficient than Pod 3. Under identical operating conditions, the optimizations in the Pod 4 thermal engine allow it to use as much as 30% less power to maintain the same temperature compared to Pod 3. This saves energy and reduces the amount of heat emitted by the system.
Plus a seamless installation experience
In redesigning the Pod’s reservoir and pump system, we were also able to improve the Pod’s setup experience, reducing installation time by 90%. Previously the longest step in the installation process was priming – the process through which the water goes from the Hub to the Cover and air is removed from the system. Pod 4 can now fill with water in less than 10 minutes, compared to 1.5 hours for previous generation systems. After setting up, the Pod will detect exactly how much water is left in the Hub tank (and when it’s time to refill), so you’ll never have to go a single night without the Pod’s next-level temperature adjustments to meet you and your bedmate’s needs.
