coldSky Rechargeable Hand Warmers

Hi, I'm Mike with House on the Mend. In this video we're going to be reviewing the Cold Sky fully rechargeable electric hand warmers. So let's get started. Well, fall is in the air here in North America and winter's coming soon and my daughters play outdoor sports. So when Cold Sky reached out to me and offered to send me these hand warmers for free for my independent review, I was happy to accept their offer. Let's unbox it, see what comes in the package and get to some testing. All right, here's everything that comes in the package. What I'm most excited about is you get one traditional USB connection that branches out to two USB-C connections so you can charge both of the hand warmers off of only one cable. That's great. You also get a strap for each one. I'm not going to use those. All right, now these units just simply magnetize together. It's pretty good but I would be careful with them. I still prefer the magnets though to this set that I've owned for about a year or so where you need to turn them opposite of each other and then they click into place there. When it's cold out that's kind of a chore and when you do it sometimes it actually turns on one or two of the power buttons. Nonetheless, we have little buttons right here to turn it on. We have little LED lights right here that I'll show you in a moment so you can control the temperature. There's three ranges low, medium, and high. Nice. All right, let's start by charging them. So I'll slide over my power strip and we'll take these two, put them together, plug them in, and you could compactly charge it just like that at home. Let's break them apart so we can actually see what we're dealing with as far as lights and I'll turn my light box off. This should make it a little bit easier. We have two blue lights on the outside that are blinking and then the little three marks that show us if we're at low, medium, or high setting are also showing the state of charge. So let's see how long it takes out of the package to fully charge. We got two out of the three bars so it shouldn't be very long. So the three dots indicating charge level are all solid, which per the instructions means these units are fully charged, but the little decorative dots kind of blink oddly. So I set out to do some testing first in the controlled environment that is my office, which is a comfortable 70 degrees Fahrenheit, and here's what I found. The hand warmers maintain a very consistent temperature range based on their setting of low, middle, or high. In every test they were between 40 to 45 degrees celsius at low, 45 to 50 degrees celsius at middle, and 50 to 55 degrees celsius at high, as stated in the manual. Now in their Amazon listing, Cold Sky boasts a 12 hour, 8 hour, and 6 hour runtime based on the low, middle, and high settings. However, in my testing the actual runtime was 6 hours and 9 minutes on low, 5 hours and 15 minutes on middle, and 4 hours and 26 minutes on high, well below. So I just shut this one off since that one was already done, and they're both able to immediately start taking a charge. To completely charge the hand warmers from fully depleted consistently took just over four hours, which I think is way too long. I would like to see these hand warmers rated to handle a stronger charger than a mere 5 watts of input as you see in the instructions, especially when you consider your average household USB charger is between 9 and 10 watts. Finally it was time to use the hand warmers in a real world setting. I took them to my daughter's softball tournament where I record highlight reels for all the players college profiles. The hand warmers performed great and I really enjoyed them. It was around 50 degrees fahrenheit, so I only used the low setting which was perfect. So we're out at the ball field. We've had these on for a while. Let's check the battery life. Double click on the button. Still three bars. I turned them on at 5 p.m and they ran out of battery power about 4 hours and 37 minutes later, which is significantly below the 6 hours 9 minutes when testing at room temperature. So with this disparity in mind I went back to the house for more testing. I turned the fully charged warmers to the middle setting and I placed one in our small refrigerator as you see here. Now it consistently maintained the proper temperature range but ran out of charge after 4 hours and 8 minutes instead of the 5 hours 15 minutes runtime at room temperature. So clearly there is about a 25 percent battery life drop off in colder temperatures which equates to half or less than the claimed runtime in the Amazon listing. Now overall these hand warmers work great and have 26 percent more battery capacity at 2000 milliamp hours than the pair I purchased from Amazon which have only 1480 milliamp hours. I would just recommend that Cold Sky replace the obviously inaccurate and arguably deceptive slide in their Amazon listing. Now if you found this video helpful in making a purchasing decision will you please give it a thumbs up. It's really helpful to the channel. Also please consider subscribing. I'm working really hard to put out good quality tool reviews and there's a lot more of those to come. Now I'm gonna leave a link to these hand warmers in the description below. Full disclosure that'll be an Amazon affiliate link so if you click on it and end up making a purchase of any kind it won't cost you a thing but I do get a small reward at the end of the month. I'd also like to thank Cold Sky for sending me these hand warmers. They're going to be my primary go-to ones and I think it takes a lot of courage to send out a product with no pre-arranged agreement on what I'm going to say in this review and I respect Cold Sky for doing that. Until next time, thank you for watching.