About 6 months ago i happened upon this site looking for a new King bed for my wife and I. Adhering to the advice given hear we ended up with the Majestic Dream from Jamestown and have been very happy with it.
We are now looking for a bed for our toddler thats going to be good for his sleeping but also last a good long time. As much as I’d love to go with one of these “green, organic, natural, etc” mattresses its just a really tough sell with the price they command. We’ve got two kids now and plans for more, just not going to be able afford one of those for each of them. I looked through a lot of the threads on kids beds first but they mostly speak to $500-1000 mattresses and none to Jamestown specifically. I did take note that we should be looking for something on the firm side of the spectrum.
Going back to Jamestown Mattress tonight, we looked at a few in the $200-300 range (no box spring, we just got a bunk bed). Pretty much everything more expensive than that is too thick for the bunk bed its going in anyway. The ones we looked at were the Prestige Firm, Posturize Euro, Posture Premium Firm and Comfort Trend Firm. The Comfort Trend Firm seems to the high end one in the bunch, though its only $5 more than the Posture Premium, so i was probably going to go with that one just wanted to check back here first. It has 14.5 in coils vs the 13.75 gauge in the others, 330 coils vs 252 coils in the others and a 10 year warranty vs 5 years, so it kinda seams like a no brainer, but say ye?
While coil counts and warranties aren’t particularly meaningful or a good way to compare or evaluate mattresses … I do agree with you that the Comfort Trend with the Symmetrics innerspring is probably a little better mattress than the Posture Premium (which has a different type of offset coil called a Verticoil) and out of the ones you mentioned that’s probably the one I would have chosen as well.
Thanks for the reply. I understand what you’re saying about coil gauge, count and warranty not being meaningful in an absolute sense, but since theres precious little otherwise separating the mattresses from the same company, I thought those features would be somewhat meaningful?
The other thing i remember the salesman saying was the Comfort Trend has a foam encasement around the outside, whereas the others have metal edge support, is this important at all?
Different types of innersprings have many different features including the number of turns in each spring, the coil gauge, the diameter of the springs, the shape and design of the coils, and the number of coils that all combine together to produce the response of that particular innerspring. The most meaningful spec for an innerspring is the weight of the steel that is used and this isn’t a spec that is disclosed by manufacturers. You can read a little more about innersprings in this article and post #10 here. Having said that … I would think that the Symetrics innerspring has more steel than the Verticoil and has better overall performance so it would be a more costly and higher quality innerspring.
Warranties only cover defects in a mattress and for the most part defects will show up early in the life of a mattress. Foam softening or the loss of comfort and support that goes with it that doesn’t also have actual visible impressions that are deeper than the warranty exclusion aren’t covered by a warranty even though they are the main reason a mattress needs to be replaced. While warranties don’t reflect the useful life of a mattress … it is true that a manufacturer will usually put a longer warranty on their higher cost or quality mattresses but this is as much about marketing than it is about the actual usefulness of the longer warranty itself. You can read more about warranties in post #174 here.
On the other side of the coin … warranties with smaller manufacturers like Jamestown are also more valuable because they tend to give their customers more credit in the grey areas of warranty coverage while the larger manufacturers are more focused on denying warranty claims or making their customers jump through hoops to have a warranty claim approved.
The durability of a foam encasement depends on the quality/density of the foam used and on how well it’s glued together and to the springs. Using foam for edge support is generally less durable and less costly than using steel because the foam replaces a couple of rows of coils and steel is more costly than foam. Either one can work well for those who sleep on the very edge of their mattress or for people that sit on the edge of their mattress (as long as the foam is high quality because lower quality polyfoam will soften and sag more easily than steel and can become detached from the innerspring) but it’s not likely that either one would be quite as important for a child as it would for an adult.
In most cases the “value” of the mattresses that are produced by the same manufacturer is fairly consistent throughout their product line and higher priced mattress would generally have higher quality materials (the foam layers appear to be the same although they don’t mention the density of the foam) and I think that the one you purchased is a better mattress overall mainly because of the higher quality innerspring and I would have purchased the same one if I had the same choices you did.
The most important thing you did was buy your mattress from a local manufacturer that has better quality/value overall than the larger brands regardless of which of their mattresses you ended up choosing
