In this review, I'll explain the room this is installed in, what problem I was trying to solve, why this product is better than alternatives, how I installed it, and how I use it.

My room: I'm using this in a large basement where I work from home every day in a northern climate. Not all the walls are insulated and the floor under me is carpet + pad on top of cement. It's heated, but poorly. In the winter, it's common for the room to be around 64-66*F. I have a 120V electric oil radiator heater that can bring the temperature in my office up to around 72*F, which still feels a bit chilly due to the radiating cold from the walls and the floor.

The problem: My hands and feet physically ache by the end of the day in the winter because they're so cold from the walls and floors being so cold, despite the ambient air temperature being 70-72*. (Physics lesson: all surfaces provide heat through infrared radiation. When surfaces are cold, they don't give off as much heat so your body emits more IR than it receives and thus: you're cold. Even if you have a carpet under your toes that doesn't feel cold or you're sitting 10' away from a poorly insulated wall, the lack of IR from the cement under the carpet and the cold wall drastically impacts how cold you feel. This is why houses feel significantly colder in the winter despite the ambient air temperature being the same.)

My experience: I bought an under rug heating mat from a different company that cost slightly less than this one, but it only lasted around a year before it burnt out. They offered to repair it for free, but the cost of shipping to them and paying for return shipping would have been almost the cost of a new heater. I have degrees in engineering and electrical engineering is a hobby, so I decided to just take apart the module myself and fix it myself. It ended up being a severed wire in the rug from where I roll my chair, but after seeing how thin the wire gauge was and how thin the insulation was, I opted to not keep using it and started searching for another under rug heater with thicker wires/insulation.

Enter Cozy Winter. The wiring on this unit is _substantially_ better than the previous under rug heater I was using and that alone absolutely makes the price justifiable. It also has in-line GFCI protection, which is an absolute must for something like this. My previous heater wasn't GFCI, but the circuit was -- but having it built-in and seeing the quality job of the wiring gives me a lot more confidence that they had real expertise when designing this product and confidence that it's not going to break after a year, catch fire, or injure me should I sever another wire and make contact with it.

I installed the rug heater over their insulated pad and under a large wool rug where I sit at my desk. The insulation is absolutely necessary to avoid losing heat to the cold surface under the heater. From there, I have it plugged into a smart outlet that's rated for more amperage than this rug uses and it turns on during the week when I think I might be downstairs. My work schedule varies, so I just set it to turn on for 14 hours a day M-F and manually turn it on Saturday/Sunday if I go to my office.

My Suggestions/Explanation: A lot of reviews here complain that it doesn't get very warm and that's really missing the point. You'll be able to feel that the rug is warm and it may raise the ambient air temperature in your room, but the rug will not be hot to the touch because the point is radiant heat. Because the floor under me is warm, I have warmth radiating toward me making my feet/legs/hands much more comfortable. Even if I turn off my radiator heater in the winter, the air temp in the rrom drops significantly but the aches in my hands and feet are gone thanks to this rug heater.

If you buy this product, buy the thermal insulation pad to put under it or install some sort of insulating pad under it. This will ensure you're not losing heat to the ground because you want to warm you up not the floor.

If you're skeptical this is doing anything: turn off the rug, let it cool off, and try sitting in the room for an hour. Then turn the rug on, let it get warm, and try sitting for another hour. You'll notice you're probably a lot more comfortable this time due to the radiating heat from below you instead of the radiating cold below you.

I even use this rug in the summer because the cement under the rug is still too cold to sit on for hours a day and I can tell within a half hour if I forgot to turn the rug on over the weekend.

I am writing this review as I noticed people finding it not feeling very warm in the questions. If you want it to hold the heat in its own footprint, you have to put a pad that will insulate it from the floor under it, then the rug on top of it. The rug pad has to be able to block the heat from transferring to the floor underneath, especially if the floor is made of a material that is a thermal sink, such as stone. When I bought mine over ten years ago, I ended up trying different materials for the rug pad, the denser and more insulating, the better. If you isolate it from the floor, the heat will stay in the footprint of the pad. I also used a plug thermostat with a clock in it- it was bought to be used in front of a couch in a south facing bow window, so in the winter during the day the area was cozy with thermal gain from the sun, but once the sun set it got chillier than the rest of the house. So I set the clock for it to go on from early evening until bedtime if the temperature dropped below a set number in that spot- so it only went on when it needed to. You could tell it was on as the rug was warm within minutes.

Electrician reassured the safety of this item so I finally execute my order. Theater room on back of garage was on concrete slab so by using this RugWarmer (60"x93") below rug (also carpet and carpet pad below), the room went from average 52' degrees to 72' degrees within 3 days. Now I'll research in using proper timer to minimize the rug warmer having to always be on.

Super cozy. It keeps the dogs off the couch(they prefer to lounge on the carpet now.

Great for under a carpet next to sofa. We even enjoy it in Florida since our house sits on a concrete slab. Our cat loves it too and spends most of the winter curled up on it under our glass coffee table!! You need to purchase a carpet pad for it to work well but unfortunately they don't sell it with one and you have to try to match up the correct size.