I’ve spent the better part of the last 3 hours reading the materials on your site to help in the pursuit of purchasing a new mattress. About 5-6 years ago, my wife and I bought a TemperPedic mattress because I’ve had long term back problems from playing soccer for about 25 years earlier in my life. After what I thought had been a decent amount of research done, we “tested” out the TP mattress in what amounted to all of the things listed on this site as no-nos or the traps you fall in to at a name brand store. Fast forward 5+ years and I’m waking up every morning with pretty severe lower back pain and am now looking for something new. My question though is one of “did the mattress break down because of things we did” and I’m wondering if anyone has any educated answers. There are two things that we’ve done to alter the TP.
The first is we have a heated mattress pad on it. My wife is incredibly cold natured. We are native Texans, but in the pit of August, her feet are frozen. She’s always got a blanket around her, so we naturally picked up a heated mattress pad and use it frequently for her.
The other is the TP adjustable bed. It allows you to adjust the height of feet or head and has a vibration option. I know they test this before releasing the product, but I’m just wondering if this still plays a role in the break down.
Would either of these two factors lead to the early breakdown of the mattress?
I personally don’t think either of these caused early breakdown of your mattress. It is true that if you use an adjustable base and have your head and feet up you are putting more weight on the middle of the mattress but if the memory foam was a good quality (please see the shopping tutorial for Phoenix’s guidelines for memory foam density) than this shouldn’t pose too much of a durability issue.
Heat can certainly affect the feel of memory foam as it does tend to soften up when it is warmer either through body heat or a heated mattress pad but again I don’t think this would cause the mattress to break down early the more likely cause was the use of lower density memory foam and/or poly foam.
Any regular bending or compression will add to the wear and tear of the materials in a mattress to some degree but with good quality and durable foam materials the affect of an adjustable bed with normal use wouldn’t be particularly significant.
Using a heating pad with memory foam can have a much more significant effect on durability though and it can certainly lead to the premature softening or breakdown of memory foam (see post #2 here). Most manufacturers recommend against the use of heating pads or even electric blankets with memory foam.
Wow, I learned something new today. I would have never guessed that this was an issue but I guess it does make some sense since memory foam is so temperature sensitive and like you said would make you compress the memory foam more since it does get softer when it is warmer.
Phoenix, I know some people are really attached to their heated blankets, maybe this should be added as a con for memory foam on the tutorial?
FYI, I went to Matress Land Outlet in Plano, one of your suggestions. You might consider taking it off the list. I started asking the guy questions about latex and he didn’t have a clue. He kept directing me to their plush coil springs and was more interested in the World Cup game than getting me specs.
I don’t know if you were dealing with one of the regular staff there or an employee that wasn’t as knowledgeable or helpful as some of the others but they do carry some mattresses that are “possibilities” so I generally wouldn’t take a retailer off a list based on one person’s experience with one of the staff. Some of the specs are also available on their manufacturer’s websites (Golden in particular) which can be very helpful when you are dealing with less knowledgeable salespeople.
Having said that … it’s certainly not great to hear about the type of experience you had there and if there is more feedback of the same type that becomes a pattern then I would certainly consider removing them.