DIY Bed that feels like Sealy Astral Firm or Tempurpedic Rhapsody?

[phoenix]

Hi restless,

I guess part of me just wants to believe that a company like Sealy has woken up and is putting better materials in their “top of the line” mattress…

I wish this was true but unfortunately it is the other way around. The major manufacturers don’t sell mattresses as much as they sell profit margin to their customers (larger chains and outlets) and over the last decade they have consistently lowered the quality of their mattresses in favor of a “showroom feel” that uses lower quality materials that doesn’t last.

The difference you may have felt in the Tempurpedic (which at least uses higher quality materials) may have been from foam softening or from subjective memory. A mattress will go through an initial breakin period where the foam softens over the first few weeks at a more rapid rate and then this is followed by a more gradual softening over a longer period of time. This will happen faster with lower density/quality foams.

It seems like selectfoam and memoryfoam.com (discovered through your links, thanks) provide beds that mimic tempurpedic, but for the Contour line they list Deluxe Bed as the equivalent of their Conform Select, instead of the Tempurpedic Contour Select. I’m assuming there’s just been some updating and name changing…?

The Deluxe Bed is an older model name and part of their comparison section hasn’t been revised. In the description it says …

This mattress is constructed and feels just like the Tempurpedic® Contour Select, and each Conform Select memory foam mattress comes with a Full Lifetime Warranty and 90 Day In-Home Sleep Trial. For a limited time, Delivery is Free.

The other big issue was coolness, and though select foam says their foam is cooler, their was a noticeable difference, even within 20-30 seconds, of coolness with the Astral and the Tempurpedic (the Astral being noticeably different). Sounds weird but it was noticed by both of us separately.

Tempurpedics are in the warmer end of the memory foam temperature range (less open celled) and there are many mattresses that use more breathable foam and are cooler. Tempurpedic has just come out with some new models to try to compete with all the cooler memory foams that are being made (after denying that their previous models slept hot). Lower density memory foams are more open celled and tend to sleep cooler but many of the higher density memory foams being made today are also more open celled and cooler than memory foams of a few years ago. The mattress cover, mattress protector, and sheets along with the thickness of the memory foam layers also makes a difference. There is more about memory foam and sleeping temperature in post #6 here.

I’m loathe to buy a Sealy, but it’s just soooo right for my bod. And it’s presently priced at around $1450, which is only a few hundred more than selectfoam’s Conform Select.

I certainly understand this but the problem is that the Sealy uses lower quality foams and still charges higher prices. I normally don’t go looking for specs with major brands because they can be difficult to find and the outcome is always the same but in this case the Sealy Canada site gives the specs of the foams used in the MemoryWorks here and as you can see they use 3.0 and 3.5 lb foams (they all use different combinations of these two foams) which are very low quality. The base foam is 1.9 lbs which is reasonable. The gel foam uses particles much like the Serta iComfort which carries the risk of breaking down what is already a lower quality memory foam even faster. Overall … this mattress uses low quality materials and yet the price is more than a mattress (such as the Select Foam) that uses much higher quality materials.

What a mattress feels like in a showroom and what it will feel like in a year or longer is very different when they use low quality materials.

Phoenix