Foam mattress advice

My wife and I have been sleeping on a foam mattress with a memory foam topper for the past eight years, and it’s definitely showing the effects of years and the student budget it was purchased with. We’re consequently looking for a new mattress setup. Thanks largely to reading this forum, I’ve narrowed the options down considerably, but have a few remaining questions.

First, we’re both back/side sleepers; I’m 6’1"/165lb while she’s 5’7/140lb. We strongly prefer memory foam to latex toppers, so we’re leaning towards another all-foam solution. This is especially the case because we need to go with our queen size bed frame for now, but may well be interested in expanding to a king in 5-10 years after we’ve settled down and so have no need for a 15+ year lifetime.

I’ve looked at various options for DIY mattresses, but it looks like it’s hard to beat the standard options such as the Rocky Mountain Mattress Sensus 8" on price alone. This is particularly attractive due to the two internal layers with different ILDs, which we found to be essential when we tuned our current mattress. That said, if it’s possible to get the same type of mattress more cheaply DIY, suggestions on foam providers would be much appreciated. In this case we’d probably stick with the 3" Sensus as the topper.

However, the Eco-Friendly Memory Foam mattress sold through the Arizona Premium Mattress Company also looks interesting and even more reasonably priced. It does make me suspicious due to a lack of general reviews around the web and their insistence that it’s somehow a completely non-synthetic memory foam made from castor oil. It seems rather unlikely that you can get the same properties from castor oil cheaply. More, their inordinate emphasis on Brazilian soy farms destroying the Amazon - which was true but the most recent research indicates that soy farms are much less prone to continued destruction than the grazelands strategy they replaced - raises warning bells, as excessive and usually inaccurate “we’re eco-friendly!” advertising suggests an unwarranted price markup. Given the reasonable-seeming price, that makes me highly suspicious of the quality. My wife does suffer from some allergies, but we haven’t found foam to be a problem in the past, so I have no particular preference for a supposedly “eco-friendly” solution that is likely no more environmentally friendly than a simple petrochemically-derived foam (which would keep the carbon fixed and doesn’t compete with actual human food crops). The link to “reviews” links to one single review. All that said, if this forum endorses it, we’d be willing to try it.

Thoughts and suggestions on the Rocky Mountain Sensus option versus the most reliable DIY sources versus this “eco-friendly” alternative would be much appreciated.

Hi kme,

Just in case you haven’t read it yet … the tutorial post here has the basic information, steps, and guidelines that can help you make the best possible choices.

You can read a little more about plant based polyfoams or memory foams (including soy and castor) in post #2 here and about Acella-flex in post #4 here. In general they are a small step in a “greener” direction but all polyfoam is primarily a petrochemical product.

Both Arizona Premium and Rocky Mountain Mattress are members of this site which means I think highly of both of them and they both compete well with the best in the industry in terms of quality and value but Arizona Premium tends to specialize more in latex mattresses while Rocky Mountain tends to specialize more in memory foam mattresses. As in any mattress purchase … you would need to talk with each of them to find out the specific density of the memory foam and polyfoam layers along with the other parts of your personal value equation to be able to make meaningful comparisons between them.

There is a list of some of the better online memory foam retailers and manufacturers I’m aware of linked in the tutorial post but Rocky Mountain is the only one that offers a range of “kit” memory foam mattresses where you can choose individual comfort and support layers in a memory foam mattress.

If you decide to go in a complete DIY direction where you buy all the separate layers individually (rather than as a kit from a single manufacturer) I would read post #15 here first which also has a link to some of the better options I’m aware of for individual layers and components.

Phoenix