Bedsure Heated Throw vs a Sunbeam Heated Throw: Which Is the Better Gift for a Grandparent?

If you are down to these two heated throws for a grandparent and you want the short answer, here it is. I bought the Bedsure heated throw for my husband Walt in October 2024, and it has lived on his recliner in the den ever since, October through April, usually on a low setting with the timer set for two or four hours. My sister Ruth, who is 68 and widowed and lives alone in Harrisburg, has a Sunbeam heated throw in her living room, and I have used hers on enough cold-weather visits to know how it feels across my knees. The Bedsure is the one I would buy again and wrap for someone. The Sunbeam is not a bad blanket. It is a different blanket, and there is one kind of grandparent it suits better. More on that below.

Walt is 75 and spent most of his working life at a lathe, so his hands ache from October onward and his answer to a cold evening has always been to walk over and turn the thermostat up two degrees. That is how a heated throw got into this house in the first place. I was tired of hearing the furnace run all evening. He was tired of being cold in his own chair. Three friends have asked me since then which one to buy for their own husbands, and two of them asked about Sunbeam because it is the name they remember from the seventies. So this is what I tell them now, in one place.

Bedsure and Sunbeam, Side by Side

	Bedsure Heated Throw	Sunbeam Heated Throw
Heat settings	Six levels, from barely warm to genuinely hot	Fewer levels on the model my sister owns
Timer options	Six choices: 1, 2, 4, 6, 8 or 10 hours	One shut-off, no choice in the matter
Preheat	Yes, it warms before you get under it	None on hers, it warms up with you in it
If someone forgets to turn it off	Defaults to an eight-hour shut-off	Cuts off sooner, less time unattended
Fabric and weight	Soft polyester flannel, a bit over three pounds	Thinner and smoother, less plush
How many decisions it asks of you	Six heats and six timers to choose between	Fewer settings, nothing to learn
Size	50 by 60 inches	Close to the same
Who it suits	The grandparent who likes to set things their way	The grandparent who wants one switch and no fuss

Where Bedsure Wins

The timer is the reason I kept this one. The Bedsure has six timer settings: 1, 2, 4, 6, 8 or 10 hours. That sounds like a fussy detail until you have watched a 75-year-old man choose two hours on purpose because he knows he will fall asleep in the chair and does not want the thing running all night. On Ruth's Sunbeam there is one shut-off and you take whatever it gives you. She has never once complained, because she does not care about such things. Walt cares, and not because he is difficult. He spent forty years running a machine and he likes knowing what a machine is doing. Six choices means he can set it for the length of a ballgame or the length of a nap, and those are not the same length. Last February he set it for four hours on a Sunday afternoon, slept through the last three innings of a game he had waited all week for, and woke up at ten past six to a chair that was still comfortably warm. On Ruth's blanket he would have had whatever the factory decided, and he would have woken up earlier, and cross about it.

The other thing is the preheat. In October the den stays cold until the radiators catch up, and the Bedsure warms before you get under it, so Walt can switch it on, go make his tea, and come back to a chair that is already warm. Ruth's Sunbeam starts cold and warms up around you, which works fine, but it means the first ten minutes are spent waiting. The Bedsure also gives you six heating levels, and the low ones are genuinely low. Walt runs it on one or two most nights, which is why it has never cooked him. It is ETL and FCC certified, and it defaults to an eight-hour shut-off, which is the kind of sentence I want attached to anything that stays switched on in the chair of a person in their seventies.

Where Sunbeam Wins

I will say plainly where Ruth's blanket is better. It asks less of you. Fewer heat settings means fewer things to think about, and there is real value in a blanket you switch on and forget. Ruth has arthritis in her thumbs and she operates hers without looking at it. Walt can operate the Bedsure without looking too, but it took him about a week to stop pressing the timer when he meant the heat. If your grandparent is the sort who gets flustered by a new television remote, the simpler blanket is the kinder gift, and I would not argue with anyone who picked it for exactly that reason.

The second place the Sunbeam is better is the shut-off. It cuts off sooner than the Bedsure does, and sooner is safer if the person using it is forgetful. Eight hours is a long time to leave something warm and unattended in an empty room. We have never had a problem and Walt is careful, but I have a friend whose mother left a heated throw switched on over a sofa for most of a day and nothing came of it. That is not a promise about the next person. If the grandparent in question has any memory trouble at all, a blanket that turns itself off early is the right call, and that is not a small consideration. It is the whole decision, in some families.

What the Controls Are Like With Arthritis and Bifocals

Both of us wear glasses, and I want to be honest about what that means for a controller. The Bedsure controller sits on a cord, and it lives on the arm of Walt's recliner rather than in a drawer. He has arthritis in his fingers and he manages it without picking it up, pressing what he wants with his thumb. That matters more than any list of specifications. A control you have to hold up in the air with two hands is a control that ends up on the floor, and then someone is on their knees at nine at night. If your grandparent has grip trouble, watch for that detail in whatever you buy.

I will also tell you what the printing on it cost us. The heat buttons and the timer buttons sit near each other and the labels are not generous, and for the first week Walt kept turning the timer down when he meant to turn the heat up. What fixed it was me cutting a strip of masking tape and writing HEAT along one row and TIME along the other, in marker, where he could see it without hunting for his reading glasses. It is ugly and it is still on there. He has not had to read it since November, because his thumb learned the way, but I would do the same for anyone over seventy and not apologize for it.

Setup took the two of us about ten minutes the first time, and most of that was me reading the manual aloud while Walt plugged things in. Our 19-year-old grandson has since done the same job at a friend's house in about three, so if you are handing this over at the holidays, plan on doing the plugging and the reading yourself and then giving over the controller. It comes with the controller and a printed user manual. That sounds like nothing until you have bought a gift that required an account and a phone call. Nothing here needs an app, a phone, or a login. For Walt, that alone is worth more than any feature I could name.

A Winter in the Den With It

The throw is 50 by 60 inches, which covers Walt from his chest to his feet with a little to spare, and it weighs a bit over three pounds, so he can pull it up one-handed from a half-reclined position. He is not strong in the shoulders anymore and that matters more than it sounds. The fabric is a soft polyester flannel, and it is built as a lightweight layer rather than a heavy quilt. In January he sometimes puts a second blanket over the top of it. In November and again in March he uses it on its own. It is not water resistant, which is worth knowing if your grandparent drinks tea in the chair, because a spill goes straight through to the cushion underneath. Walt takes his tea there most evenings, and in December he set the mug down on the arm, reached for the paper, and knocked it over. Nothing was ruined, because the mug was nearly empty by then. But the fabric was damp through in about a minute and I changed the cushion cover that night, and since then the mug goes on the side table and nowhere else. That rule has held for two winters.

One thing I did not expect: it made the den usable again. Walt used to drift out to the kitchen in the evenings because the kitchen is the warm room. Now he stays in his chair with the throw over his knees and reads, and the thermostat stays where I set it. That is the actual result of the purchase, and it is not a feature printed on any listing. It is also why I would buy the same one again instead of shopping around. A heated throw that gets used every night for six months is a good gift. A heated throw that gets used twice and folded into a closet is a waste of money and a quiet disappointment for whoever gave it.

Six timer settings sounds like a fussy detail until you watch a 75-year-old man set it for two hours because he knows he will fall asleep in the chair.

Three Things to Check Before You Wrap It

Before you wrap it, walk into the room where it will live and look for an outlet. A heated throw has to be plugged in whenever it is being used, and the outlet needs to be close enough that the cord is not running across a walkway. In our den the outlet is behind the recliner, which is fine. In Ruth's living room the nearest outlet is across the rug, and that is part of why hers stays on the sofa instead of on her chair. This is a dull thing to think about in December. It is also the reason some of these end up back in the box in January. I did measure the distance in our den before I ordered, and it came to about four feet from the chair arm, with slack left over. I will not quote you a cord length, because I never put a tape on the cord itself. I will tell you to get down there and measure the gap in December rather than find out in January.

Second, think about whether the person is cold in one spot or cold all over. A throw is for a chair, a sofa, a lap. If your grandmother is cold in bed, this is the wrong shape and you want something that fits the mattress, and I would rather tell you that now than have you find out. Third, ask yourself whether they would use a lap blanket at all if it were not electric. Ruth is the sort who would. Walt is not. He would never have bought himself a plain lap blanket in a hundred years, and he uses this one every single night.

Who Should Buy Which

Buy the Bedsure for the grandparent who is cold in one particular chair, who likes to set things the way they want them, and who has someone nearby to help with the first ten minutes of setup. That is Walt, and it is most of the people I know. Six heat levels and six timers mean the blanket is tuned to the person rather than the other way around, and the preheat means the first minute is as warm as the fortieth. Buy the Sunbeam for the grandparent who wants one switch, who will not read a manual, and who may forget to turn things off. If memory is a concern at all, the earlier shut-off decides it and the extra settings stop mattering. And if you are not sure which sort of person you are shopping for, watch how they handle a television remote for five minutes. That will tell you more than any comparison, mine included.