Just 10 months after we bought it, our Beautyrest PressureSmart 12.25" Plush Mattress developed a sinkhole deeper than my disappointment with the whimsically named chain store we got it from: 4 whole inches.
Now this thing is advertised as having a total of all of 2" of various comfort layers, half of which is quilted to the top cover, and even though I grew up using centimeters, I have it on good authority that 4" is more than 2", so I suppose I could have seen it coming that there was damage to the actual springs. But, encouraged by statements on the internet to the effect that polly-put-the-kettle-on foams wear out fast but springs are usually fine, I figured I’d open the thing up, just in case the springs were salvageable for use with a new topper of some sort. No such luck.
This thing is clearly not designed for long term use by two adults. It’s definitely not designed to support a human being of 330 pounds. I want to get a new mattress. But for now, I and my partner have to sleep on this mattress-shaped object, and the hole was not exactly conducive to that. Not only did it hurt the back of whoever had the misfortune of lying on top of it, but it also caused the other person to gradually slide down toward and partially on top of the hole dweller, which sounds more hilarious than it is when it wakes you up at 4am. Thus I proceeded to consider how our bed might best be mended.
As you can see if you look closely, the springs are enclosed in tubes of non-woven, very flimsy fabric (polypropylene?), with lines of stitching between each coil, and some sort of reinforcing tape roughly in the middle. This produces lines of loosely coupled coils that are arranged down the length of the bed, and every coil is then attached to its width-wise neighbors with what looks suspiciously like 2 globs of hot glue. (To be fair, hot melt adhesives are common in textile manufacturing, and there’s “fusible” interfacing aplenty in most shirts and suit jackets. But this stuff really looks like hot glue. Or maybe it’s just the actual fabric melted together. Not sure.) In the area of the 4 inch sinkhole, the upper glue joint between each pair of adjacent coils had either failed itself or ripped a hole in the “fabric” around it.
Trying to reattach the fabric seemed like a fool’s errand on account of its overwhelming flimsiness, so instead I opted to attach the tops of the actual coils to each other. I grabbed a spool of the strongest thread I could find (some sort of upholstery grade polyester) and ran blanket stitches down the rows like so, and for good measure covered the whole thing up with a scrap of strong, lightweight polyester fabric that I don’t especially like anyway.
With all the “PressureSmart™ Gel Memory”, “AirFeel™” and “Plush Comfort” foam back in place, the side that had the hole now feels… about the same as the other side, which still isn’t great, but should do until we can get something better. I’m actually surprised the repair worked this well. I don’t think I’ll bother re-attaching the top for now; we keep the whole thing inside of some sort of zippered pouch anyway.
And now: some questions.
- How common is this failure mode?
- How would you go about repairing this, if at all?
- Do you think it makes sense to incorporate the mended spring layer into a DIY springs-and-latex mattress, or should I just buy all new?
! Thanks for your question.
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