My husband & I thought we had picked a great mattress, it’s a new brand from Intellibed called Gelee and after 45 days of trying to “break it in” we can’t take it anymore. It’s nothing like what we laid on in the store. It feels like a plank, with a tiny bit of foam around it. So, in an attempt to not waste $4k we spent, we have to trade and are now limited with a few mattress companies to choose from: Sealy, Stearns & Foster, Serta and a handful of Therapedic mattresses
At this point, pretty much every mattress I lay on in store feels incredibly soft and great. I really don’t know how to pick. We do prefer a more medium feel. My biggest concern is durability and the mattress not sagging. I don’t want sagging spots in the bed after a couple of years.
My husband and I are both combination sleepers with me mostly on my side and him mostly on his back. I’m 5’2" & 140 lbs., He’s 5’8" & 180 lbs.
I am sorry to hear about the 40 nights of “sleeping on a plank” experience on the IntelliBed Glee. You’d certainly need to do a bit of damage control with some creative solutions to make the best of this odd predicament.
The Buckling Column Gel in your IntelliBed is certainly an interesting material but like any material, some people will do well with it and some won’t. The thing that’s most unusual about it is that it has what could be called a negative compression modulus. Compression modulus is the rate that a foam becomes firmer with deeper compression. The equivalent with a spring is called the spring rate. With buckling column gel instead of getting firmer when you compress it more deeply like foam materials … it starts off firmer when it’s not compressed and gets softer when the columns buckle under pressure.
I don’t know for how long they had the Glee you tested in their showroom but judging by the bed’s release date I am guessing that it would be around one year. It may be that the gel columns do soften a bit with use, temperature, and other factors so you may want to ask them some questions about that. If you still like the Glee in the showroom you can ask if they are willing to trade the floor model for your bed, otherwise, you are certainly limited in your options.
Therapedic, like most mattress manufacturers, has agreements with different licensees throughout the country to produce their mattresses, and they offer hundreds of different models. While Therapedic does have some consolidated “national” lines, they also allow some flexibility for their local licensees to produce products of their own unique specifications to meet demands in their particular region. This is why any information you’d want to acquire should come from your local retailer, and this is why there is no grouping of products based on price (pricing is dictated by the retailer and won’t tell you anything about the mattress or quality of materials used within).
You are quite right, and that is certainly the place to start. I’d make sure that for any mattress that you are considering you find out the information listed here so you can compare the quality of the materials and components to the durability guidelines here to make sure there are no lower quality materials or weak links in a mattress that would be a cause for concern relative to the durability and useful life of a mattress before even trying the bed or making a trade. Even though you may end up trading for a lower price bed, it is worth getting good nights of sleep.
Next, once you have a reasonable pool of beds that meet the durability guidelines you’d need to carefully test them for alignment and comfort to make sure they meet your preferences. While nothing has a 100% success rate … with a local purchase for the majority of people … careful testing using the guidelines in the mattress shopping tutorial here(rather than just testing for the more subjective “comfort” of a mattress (which often won’t predict how well you will sleep on a mattress or how it will “feel” when you sleep on it at home) and some good guidance from a knowledgeable and experienced retailer or manufacturer will usually result in a mattress choice that is well inside a suitable comfort/support range and will generally be “close enough” so that if any fine-tuning is necessary it would be relatively minor and involve different mattress pads, sheets, mattress protectors, or perhaps even a topper if a mattress is too firm (see post #4 here and post #10 here).
I’d be interested to learn about your further experience and what you find out from the retailer.
Phoenix
