My wife and I are in the market for a new mattress. We have a 4-year old Kingsdown bed that just hasn’t lasted in terms of resilient support. There are two body impressions that can only be felt and don’t measure enough for a warranty claim. Being a stomache sleeper, these impressions kill my lower back as I sink in around my mid section and my back arches.
We are thinking of going the foam route and looking at med to medium firm options. We laid on several latex beds and found them to be too bounce / spongy and were told that it their nature…if so then we are squarely in the memory foam category as most of those beds felt much better.
From an initial comfort standpoint we both liked the Serta icomfort insight mattress in terms of firmness. I see mixed reviews on this mattress however due to the density and type of foam used. Knowing that we have defind the level of firmness, I figured I would post here for alternatives.
The first place I would start is post #1 here which has all the information, steps, and guidelines you will need to make the best possible choice.
As you will see as you read some of the information there … who you deal with can be just as important as what you buy. A mattress is only as good as the construction and layers inside it regardless of which manufacturers label is on the mattress and your own personal testing is the most accurate way to find the most suitable mattress. In other words the “best” alternatives would depend on what area of the country you were in and what was available to you. Most of the better choices would be from local or regional manufacturers not national ones that are typically available across the country.
My goal is not to suggest “what” to choose but “how” to choose and help you know how to find and connect with better manufacturers and retailers in your area that have the knowledge and experience to help you choose the best quality and value and help you find the mattress that is the best “match” for your needs and preferences or what I call PPP (Pressure relief, Posture and alignment, and Personal preferences).
If you let me know your city or zip I’d be happy to let you know of any better options or possibilities in your area I’m aware of in your area.
I am in the Raleigh, NC area and understand that there are many variables to determining what mattere is going to suite me best.
I posted the reference to the icomfort insight just to help define my firmness preference and in the hopes of being able cross reference that mattress into quantifiable specs (as much as possible) that can then be used to shop more effecictively.
Thanks for the response and looking forward to your regional suggestions.
Comfort and firmness/softness is very subjective to each person and has many variables … especially with memory foam … and Serta doesn’t really provide any meaningful information about their mattresses outside of very generic information so they are not really suitable as a guideline except based on your own subjective perceptions of and comparisons with the mattress.
Post #2 here has more information about “matching” another mattress (or using it as a “quantifiable” guideline) and in this case the only way to use it would be as a very generic preference (such as I prefer firm mattresses which covers a very wide range of preferences and is subjective). I would suggest a more objective set of standards that you can use to assess all the mattresses that you test (such as rating each one on a scale of 1-5 for pressure relief, for support/alignment/ and for all the other preferences that are important to you). this way you have a way to assess different mattresses without the need to use one mattress as a “target” where there is no way to really know what the target even is or how it may compare to other mattresses outside of “real time” side by side comparisons which usually aren’t possible.
The better options or possibilities I’m aware of in the Raleigh area (always subject to your ability to find out meaningful specs about any mattresses you are interested in) are included in post #6 here.
We just got back from another round of shopping and have added the tempurpedic rhapsody to the top of our list. I will have to check your links for info o benchmarking this mattress, as it is by far the best we have laid on.
It may also be worth testing the Serenity at Original Mattress Factory (see post #2 here).
Many of the manufacturers or retailers that are in the online list here may also have a good idea of which of their mattresses would most closely approximate the Rhapsody.
I checked out the serenity but it felt completely different to my wife and I so unfortunately it will not work. I will need to give some of those other option a try.