New mattress quest (Calgary AB)

[phoenix]

Hi teleute,

Thanks for your update.

I’m sorry your mattress turned out to not be the comfort that you desired. You never provided the exact specifications of the product you chose, so I can’t provide commentary on the overall “firmness” of your particular configuration.

Anyway, to try to summarize a relatively long process… They did their “pressure test” or whatever - a computerized thing that supposedly tells them what level of support works best for you based on pressure points and so on. I (against my instinct, irritatingly) went with what they said instead of what I felt, which was that the recommendation was too soft. I generally like a very firm mattress, but thought hey, if science is telling me it should be softer…

Originally, you seemed to think that your preference matched what you were being told ("I was happy to see our judgments aligning so well with the readings. Kinda reassuring."), so I know that can be disappointing.

I ended up having to put a sheet of pegboard between layers to firm it up enough to alleviate the pain.

That’s quite an extreme step that effectively minimizes/eliminates the contribution of the lower layers of foam within a mattress, which makes me curious of the ILDs of the layers within your mattress.

So yeah…if you like/need a firm mattress, latex (or at least the ones from Halstead) is not for you. They were overall good to deal with, but kind of frustrating at times when they’d just stop responding to email mid-thread.

I’m sorry you had some slower response times with your emails, which is one of the reasons I always recommend a phone conversation directly with any retailer/manufacturer when dealing with comfort preference issues. While the level of firmness may have not met with your expectations (some people simply don’t prefer the feel of latex), there certainly are some quite firm latex offerings, which again make me curious as to the overall layers that your mattress has (I know much of this is “after-the-fact”, as you’ve had your mattress now for two years).

Just don’t take their computer analysis as anything other than a data point.

Most of the pressure mapping systems are specific to a certain line of mattress and aren’t really relevant to mattresses as a whole which have different constructions. They also only measure surface pressure (which you can often feel in your own personal testing) but don’t provide input into alignment or how the pressure is distributed in the deeper body tissues or include the differences in physiology between people (pressure affects different people differently). There are a few more comments in post #2 here and post #4 here about pressure mapping systems.

Thanks again for your update.

Phoenix