It seems like such a simple thing
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Cooling blankets do exist – in healthcare they exist to actively cool patients (for example after cardiac arrest). There just doesn’t seem to be a public demand for cooling blankets so you don’t see them in shops.
edit; I can’t find the name of the cooling blankets we used to use in the ICUs I work in, which used a refrigerated pump to pump cold water into a top and bottom blanket to cool patients. Nowadays we use a device called the Arctic Sun, which uses pads with refrigerated water.
Most cooling systems work by evaporation – either open cycle (swamp cooler evaporating water) or closed cycle (air-conditioning unit evaporating freon) . Indeed the natural way humans cool is by evaporating their perspiration. You can make a simple swamp cooler by lying with a damp towel over you, but plumbing your bed into the aircon is a bit harder.
The other way to cool is using the Peltier effect but I don’t think we can do that with flexible materials (to make a bed cover) yet.
Generating heat with electricity is really simple – it happens almost without any effort as a byproduct of electricity… making cold is far more complex and requires a lot of other equipment to make it work.. there is is such thing but it involves pumping coolant through tubes in the fabric
Easy to make heat… but “making cold” actually requires the removal of heat, which is a more complicated process.
Because you can just take the blanket off if you’re too hot. If you’re sick or live in a cold area you’ll want a heated blanket for the extra comfort/warmth.
Heat is easy, just apply electricity to resistive wires that run through the blanket. Cooling is harder. You need a refrigeration unit to cool a fluid and pump it through the blanket.
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