Answers About Cat Heaters
forlorn-kumquat
I cannot fathom living in a place cool enough right now for heating pads. Is it nice in the cold? It's almost 90 degrees inside my house and I'm dying, please let me live vicariously through you.
Oh, it’s not particularly -- Chicago’s been between 70F and 90F for most of the summer. I have central air, but I keep the condo around 74-76F which is just barely uncomfortably warm for me (I run the fan without AC a lot). Polk just isn’t truly happy unless she is roughly the temperature of a dry sauna.
Happily, now that she knows the warmer is The Source Of Heat, she’ll curl up on it and be mercifully quiet even if I don’t turn it on.
knitmeapony
I assume you know this, but in case you do not, there are pet heating pads that are designed to be on for long periods of time at relatively and safely low levels of heat. I got one for my cat last year and he pretty much draped himself across it for 18 hours a day last winter
meninkimono
Did you know you can buy cat beds with pet safe heating pads built into them with a pressure plate thing that only turns it on when the cat is lying on it? I had several for my old blind cat scattered about the house before she passed. Now my younger (mature) cats enjoy the inheritance and pile two cats into one bed in the winter.
Sharing this so other cat owners who might not know can be made aware. I haven’t found a pet-safe one that the girls will actually sleep on; they all tryo improve on the “piece of plastic covered in cheap velour” model and while I commend them for that, a piece of plastic covered in cheap velour is all my spartan babies will accept. I’ve tried a few different pet ones, but the beds are too soft and fluffy (mine won’t touch a “pillow” bed, it has to be felt on cardboard or nothing), and the one designed for dogs (hard plastic covered in fleece) was scary to them.
Their preferred heating pad (and mine too if we’re being honest) is the heated mattress pad that I put on the bed in the winter, set to low and covered in bed linens. But it traps a lot of body heat just existing on the bed, so I can’t put it on in the summer because I’ll never get cool enough to sleep.
