New Bed Needed - Thinking Latex

[phoenix]

Hi wacomme,

Most of the choices you are making are “best judgement” choices that will be need to be based on all the parts of your personal value equation that are most important to you and on whether you and your wife can agree. Hopefully your choices will be based on “factual” information.

Having said that … other than the previous link about making final choices I can make a few comments that may help.

It’s so easy to be led astray. Since David at Verlo was talking about “Faketex” in reaction to my wife’s visceral response to the smell of 100% Talalay latex at Boulder Comforts, she’s now paranoid about buying a latex mattress that is not “Faketex”. Now, my wife did react quite strongly to the smell of the latex mattresses at Boulder Comforts, and smell can elicit a strong emotional response. But the false information of “Faketex” is worrisome. The mattress we were looking at Verlo was blended latex. I just wish David at Verlo didn’t imply (knowingly or not) that the latex at Boulder Comforts might be “Faketex”. Argh.

Considering that the blended Talalay at Foamsource would be the same type and blend of latex as the blended Talalay at Verlo … if they consider the blended Talalay at Boulder to be “Faketex” then their own latex would be the same thing.

Having bought the 8" latex mattress at Verlo (delivery scheduled for Thursday), I started to wonder about the no return, no exchange policy, so I call David on Sunday. He confirmed that while their non-latex mattresses have a comfort guarantee, this guarantee doesn’t apply to their latex mattresses - thus buy the mattress with no recourse.

The “short” story is that last night I was reluctantly able to convince my wife that we should buy the 10000 bed from SleepEZ - firm (38-40 ILD), medium (30-32 ILD), soft (19-22 ILD) blended Talalay from Radium. So today I called David at Verlo to cancel my order. He immediately got in touch with the owner and offered a 30-day return policy (sans cover - cost $175 and pickup, $150).

It’s sometimes amazing what a “lost sale” can do for store policies. I was curious about the lack of a comfort guarantee on your mattress so I talked with another store and they told me that the most likely reason there was no comfort guarantee for your specific mattress was probably because the layers are glued so they wouldn’t be able to remove a layer and add a different layer and that they also wouldn’t have other firmness choices available for latex. Interestingly enough they also told me that they were gradually introducing component mattress options to their lineup with zip covers that allow for individual layers to be exchanged (like Foamsource, SleepEZ, and Arizona Premium) and that the latex version of their component mattress would probably be available in 3-4 months. There is also more about the construction of the Verlo Harmony Virtue in post #1 here (unless they’ve changed it) that may be a useful reference point.

4. I have tried the Verlo mattress in the showroom floor - not so with SleepEZ; though the mattress we’ll receive will be new in both cases. Plus, how much can one tell by laying on the mattress in the showroom for 10 minutes?

In most cases careful testing using the testing guidelines and spending 15 - 20 minutes on a mattress can come close enough to predicting your actual sleeping experience that only minor fine tuning would be necessary if any is necessary at all (see post #4 here). Of course this would be true for “most people” but not for “all people”. There is always some additional risk with an online choice where you haven’t tested the mattress in person or the mattress is different from a specific design that you have tested locally but return and exchange options can lower the risk of online choices. There is more about the different ways to choose a mattress (either locally or online) that is the most suitable “match” for your specific needs and preferences and how to identify and minimize the risks of making a choice that doesn’t turn out as well as you hoped for that are involved in each of them in post #2 here.

Also, I’ve read that a split mattress (and non-glued layers) are NOT a problem, that you don’t feel the split, and the layers don’t move around. Now, my wife often moves over to my side of the bed during the night, laying in the middle of the mattress and pushing me to the edge. Would a split mattress be of concern in this case?

You can read more about the pros and cons of split layers in post #2 here. She would probably be able to feel the difference in firmness on each side if she was lying across the middle of the bed but not the actual “split” itself. For most people the pros of a split layer would outweigh the cons and the different firmness levels on each side isn’t an issue but this is another one of those issues that your own personal experience will be the only way to know how she feels about it and if for some reason it was an issue then you would would have the “backup” of being able to exchange a layer so the firmness of the top layer at least was the same on each side.

I hope that you and your wife can find a consensus … but that’s not something that I can help with

Phoenix