With winter’s arctic blasts and summer’s swampy humidity, a Goldilocks sleep in Texas is elusive.

We’re either clawing for the covers or flapping our arms and legs akimbo, hoping to find cool spots on the mattress. And maybe your bed partner prefers a different temperature. So when a couple of friends told me about a high-tech mattress topper that changed their night life, I ordered one to test.

Eight Sleep offers a solution driven by technology and water. Thousands of microtubes and computerized sensors are embedded in the Pod 3 Cover. These cool or warm the mattress and also monitor heart rate, respiratory rate, body temperature, sleep stages and even how many times you toss and turn during the night. The Pod 3 Hub, which you fill with distilled water every two months, sits next to your bed and connects to the back of the cover via a large tube.

An app allows you to control each half of the bed independently. Chill the mattress as low as 55 degrees or warm it up to 110 degrees. Sleeping in a refrigerator or a toaster oven doesn’t appeal to me; my comfort zones hover around the average daily high-low temperatures in Hawaii, something I learned from the app’s detailed sleep report.

After experimenting with the settings for a few nights, I let the app’s autopilot take over. It fine-tunes the temperature based on your previous nights’ sleep and current sensor data, which is helpful with Texas weather’s wild mood swings. Plug in your usual sleep time and the Pod 3 preheats your bed (a nice touch), cools the mattress when it detects you’ve fallen asleep, then warms it up when you enter REM or light stages of sleep. It’s nice to not wake up jostling the covers because it’s too hot or cold.

Program a wake-up time, and the Pod 3 raises (or lowers) the temperature and pulses a series of gentle vibrations at chest level until you turn it off.

With summer staring us down, I look forward to the Pod’s cooling features. It’s one thing to fight over the covers in the winter, but eliminating battles over the thermostat setting in July is worth every bit of the Eight Sleep Pod 3 Cover’s hefty price tag. (There’s a 30-night money-back guarantee, just in case.)

Michael Hiller is a Dallas-based writer who values his sleep at night as much as he does his coffee in the morning.