Hi,
My wife and I are looking at buying a new mattress. Originally we set out to buy a mattress with tight top - our current Serta has a pillow top that isn’t very good. We live in Ottawa, Ontario and have looked at Sleep Country and Mattress Mart. We have tried a variety of tight top and pillow / euro top mattresses and we were about to settle on the Kingsdown My Side 4 / 3 until I stumbled upon your site. Mattress Mart offered the Kingsdown My Side 4 / 3 in King size for $2199 (no foundation) which seems reasonable considering the prices we have seen on your site. The mattress components are as follows (http://www.mattressmart.ca/Product/Details/Kingsdown-Set/Myside-Set?size=King):
- 1470 Exclusive High Profile Fabric Encased Coil Twice Tempered Zoned in Center Third
- Accurate Support Motion Separation
- Full Body Surround Foam Encasement
- Exclusive 22 oz ‘cool comfort’ fabric (what is this?)
- 44oz. Gel & Hollo Fibre (what is this?)
- 1" High Density Foam
- ½" High Density Foam
- 1" BluTek Gel Visco
- 1" Talalay Latex
- 2 1/2" Solid Firm Foam
- High Profile PowerStack foundation.
- Made with pride in Ontario.
The salesman said all the foam was carpenter’s foam - which apparently is a high quality foam. I asked for the density of the foam and I believe he said 4.5lb, but I would have to reconfirm. The components seems high quality (high spring count, BluTek Gel / Latex, but questionable foam quality), but they seem to differ from other specs you’ve posted about the Kingsdown MySide. The price and the specs seem reasonable (but I’m no expert), but I am hesitant to purchase a mattress that has 6 inches or more of pillow top on top of pocket coil. I’ve read in other posts on your site that the Kingsdown MySide just doesn’t hold up after a few months. What do you think? Is there any thing that needs clarification? Any help is appreciated.
Thanks,
Hi buying_new_bed_,
The first place I would start is post #1 here. This will arm you with the basic information you need when you are mattress shopping. It will help you avoid the worst (or “blind”) choices so you can focus on the better ones.
Unfortunately the specs they gave you are not nearly complete (which is typical of Kingsdown) and you need the density of any polyfoam or memory foam in a mattress (unless it is less than an inch or so) to make any meaningful assessments of the quality, value, or durability and weak links of this mattress. It has 4" of polyfoam in it and I would never consider a mattress like this unless I know the quality/density or all the layers. Like all foam manufacturers … Carpenter makes some very low and very high quality/density polyfoams so the foam manufacturer means very little.
Overall … this is one of the brands I would avoid and I would avoid any mattress purchase where you can’t find the quality and density of what is in it. To use an analogy … the risk of paying “real wood prices” for particle board is just too high.
This thread includes the local factory direct manufacturers in the Ottawa area where I would put my focus.
Phoenix
Hi Phoenix,
Thanks for your reply. Let me also say thanks for your continued effort to help strangers better understand their mattress buying experience. As I had mentioned in my first post, my first mattress purchase was a name brand mattress, but it had failed to stand the test of time (5 years). To prepare myself for a new mattress purchase I did some research so that I could ask the right questions and hopefully get the right answers. The first store I went to didn’t list the contents of their mattresses and were very aggressive to make a sale - with so many mattresses to choose from, we obviously found one we liked. Their “sale” price was something like $2000 so I asked is that the best you could do? Immediately they found a rebate that magically applied to me and told me I can now get the mattress for $1600. I realized I was being jerked around and said “wow that’s a really good deal, I’ll get back to you today”. I got out of that store and never looked back. I went down the road to another national mattress retailer. This retailer was much different - the mattress contents were listed on each mattress and there was no pressure to make a sale. We tried a bunch of mattresses and finally had decided on one. We weren’t in a hurry to make a purchase so I decided to do some research about the mattress first. This is when I stumbled upon your site. I posted the specs of the mattress and as you pointed out, there was some key information missing - specifically the foam densities. When you brought this to my attention, I called the retailer, who called his boss, who then gave me a phone number directly to the brand name manufacturer. I couldn’t believe no one knew exactly what was in this mattress. At first this retailer seemed legit, but I decided otherwise when no one could give me a straight answer. I took your advice and visited a local mattress manufacturer (Hardy Mattresses) and I was pleasantly surprised. All the mattresses I tried there felt good. The guy who helped us explained that they also repair name brand mattresses. He then brought out a foam sample from the mattress we were seriously considering buying at the second store and compared it to the foams he uses in his mattresses - what a difference!. This is exactly what we needed to see - there was a remarkable difference in quality. We ended up purchasing a king mattress from this company with the following specs:
- pocket coil wrapped in cotton (not sure of the coil guage or count)
- 3" wide 2.7lb polyfoam encasement around the coils
- 1" of 2.7 lb polyfoam on top of coils
- 3" of 5.5 lb memory foam on top of polyfoam
Their mattresses come with a 20 year guarantee and if at any point, we aren’t satisfied with the firmess, they will pick up the mattress, play around with the foams and return us the modified mattress.
Pheonix, thanks again for steering so many of us in the right direction. In order to “pay it forward”, I plan to help Hardy Mattress get more local visibility and hopefully I will be able to convince them to become part of your discount list.
Hi buying_new_bed_,
Your experience is typical of the entire industry and it’s great to see “one more” consumer bucking the trend! At some point … snowflakes turn into avalanches.
Your mattress has significantly better quality materials than you would ever find in a mainstream mattress and of course they provide a level of service and knowledge that is much better as well. These are the kind of manufacturers that deserve to dominate the industry IMO (and of course that’s a big part of what this site is all about).
Thanks for your kind words … and most of all congratulations on your new mattress 
Phoenix
This thread, and another similar thread convinced me to cancel my sleepys order on a myside series 6 box pillowtop mattress. Even at a price of $700 on clearance, I’m not sure it’s worth the headache of having to deal with the breakdown of the pillowtop 4- years down the line.
After doing some research here I ended up calling both plushbeds and sleepez. I received good information from both, including the recommended bed configuration of SMF Dunlop from top to bottom for my wife and myself (I’m 5’7" 150 lbs and my wife is 5’1" and about 140-145 lbs). Shawn from sleepez advised that I try out the savvyrest serenity line at a showroom., which is similar to sleepez organic 10000. I actually ended up liking the SMF with the top layer being a talalay soft, as we both like the pillowtop feel. We will most likely be ordering this combination from sleepez.
I just want to thank this community for providing feedback on their thoughts and experiences.
Hi bgydwnbx,
Thanks for sharing your experience and there’s no doubt that you are heading in a much better direction … at least IMO.
It’s also great to see that you had the chance to do some local testing and have a very good reference point to work from so you won’t be making a “blind” purchase.
Phoenix