I haven’t really seen this addressed much but me and my gf can’t be the only ones who sleep like this. We are both mostly side sleepers and usually fall asleep spooning in the middle of the bed. At 180bs and 130lbs? (she wont tell lol) we are effectively one 300lb person sleeping in the middle of the mattress, yet we have the softness needs of 180lb and 130lb people, not a 300lb person.
I am leaning towards the 8" elite edge coil unit. I’m concerned with us sinking in too much and wearing the mattress out prematurely. Anyone around that weight or a couple we sleeps like us have any insight?
My plan is 2" of 28 ILD as a transition layer and 2" 19 or 20 ILD for comfort layer. This seems like a common build for side sleepers but I don’t know how both of us spooning in the middle is going to affect how much we sink in.
Unless you both are litterally sleeping on top of each other (highly unlikely) then in reality the mattress will still handle the load separately (there may be some slight overlap depending on how close you are to each other but not likely as much as you think). Pressure is force (weight) divided by surface area (total body area contacting the mattress cover) so since your weights are the same (not overlapped) and the surface areas touching the mattress are the same (still not overlapped even while spooning) the equation doesn’t change. There may be some slight variations from the ideal equation due to tension in the materials but overall the effect should be minimal. I would make sure you get a very stretchy mattress cover and loose fitting sheets so you can take advantage of the full characteristics of the talalay latex and coil spring layers but otherise you should be fine with this setup.
Thanks, that makes sense. I’ve just been burned in the past with mattresses sagging after a year and started wondering if this maybe has something to do with it.
We arent sleeping on top of each other but spooning. So I figure roughly the same width as a 300lb person, maybe a little bit wider. Do you know if the 8" Elite Edge coil unit is stiff enough to support 300 lbs without starting to sag? As I understand it is the softest spring unit available to DIYers (but still pretty firm).
I agree with you the biggest concern would likely be how is the coil layer going to perform for you. In regular off the shelf mattresses you have several modes of failure. The materials are usually lesser quality polyfoams and memory foams so you can have issues with the foam breaking down too quickly. You can have issues with the coil layer creating impressions in the foams above. Finally you can have breakdown of the coil layer itself (ie not as springy or loss of spring height). There may be other modes but these are the most common. Using latex on your DIY will take care of the first two issues but there’s not much you can do about the last one except make sure the coil layer is sized properly for your application. Unfortunately there really isn’t alot of public data available on the force/displacement relationship for coil spring layers. Instead more often you’ll see people mention certain rules of thumb (gained from their own experience with the product) such as “I don’t recommend folks over XXXlbs to use a hybrid design”. Again this may be a case where it’s very hard for us to guess how well it will work in your application beforehand. Sleeping seperately you should be fine since you’re both well below 200lbs but while spooning it all comes down to force/area so if you start to reduce your area being super close together it may have some real world effects on how the mattress reacts which could be very hard to quantify beforehand. I know my wife and I (125lbs/250lbs) will often do the same as you guys and we have no issues doing that with our latex mattress (latex layers will not be your limiting factor) so you could always change your design later and go that route if the hybrid option didn’t pan out as planned.