Hot spot heating pads

I’ve had this little self heating heart for a while now. I think everyone knows them: You boil them, let them cool down and then re-activate them by “breaking” this little thingie inside.

I’ve been using it quite a bit, but it does annoy me that I can’t keep it ready to go in my storage. It seems to activate on its own, so I have to boil it, wait for it to get cool enough to activate and then use it. Meh.

I found these little one time use-ones. At first glance they seemed better: Lighter, bigger, flatter.

But I think they have a few problems: First of all, they took a while to activate. You just peel them out of the protective plastic cover and use the little fabric-like inner pad. Good in theory, but I’d say it took like an hour to properly heat up. That’s about when I’m done with my deep conditioning.

Second, they seemed to cool down at random intervals too! I did a really thorough deep conditioning and when I re-adjusted the cling wrap and warm hats, there were a couple of times when they were almost cold.

Huh.

Do these depend on oxygen for the reaction maybe?

If that’s the case, they’re fairly useless to me. I would want to have them inside my mess of cling wrap and warm hats when I deep condition.

Surprisingly, they seemed to stay warm a whole lot longer than they advertised. The pack said they would stay warm for 6 hours, but once I was done conditioning, I just left them in the bathroom and they were still warm the next morning.

Meh. Not really sure what to make of these.