Hi Phoenix,
Thank you for the detailed thoughts.
It would be great to have more information on the support used in each situation, and the size and number of people on the bed. Maybe Dreamfoam will chase that down eventually.
I agree that knowing and choosing the composition should be the best defense against early mattress failure.
The need to have realistic expectations makes some sense. As for me, I slept fairly happily on a single Sealy from 1994 through 2011. It had probably âdented inâ after ten or twelve yearsâI remember sleeping diagonally for a whileâbut it didnât become a problem until much later. So thatâs where my expectations come from.
The warranty process is, I think, where the whole industry, with the big S companies in the lead, has really failed consumers. The 1.5" threshold is an ancient rule of thumb that may have made sense in the âold daysâ when top layers were thinner and more resilient (hope Iâm using the right word there). The problem is that even when new poly and memory foam layers lose resiliency, they still spring back when you get up, making almost every warranty claim pointless. Companies are applying an old standard to new materials, which basically cheats consumers. As one of those cheated, Iâm not happy about it.
Things need to be warranted as they are actually used. Imagine if your car warranty was only valid if the symptoms were evident with the car parked and the motor turned off. âWhat do you mean the brakes are squealing? I donât hear anything.â
To warranty a mattress, its performance while in use must be measured. Ideally one would warranty that the mattressâs total ILD would not decrease more than x% per year. But probably field-testing ILD is too difficult, so how about a standard weight, say a 24" round 50lb. dumbbell weight. Placed anywhere on the mattress, if the bottom sinks in more than x inches below the edge of the mattress, too much resiliency has been lost.
Probably preaching to the choir here, but if the materials of an entire industry change, the warranty needs to change to keep up. It would be nice to see some of the smaller vendors take the lead in offering fairer warranties that more accurately reflect how the product should perform in normal use.