Thanks Phoenix! As always, you bring up such good things to consider and think about before making the big decision on a mattress.
So, I went to Original Mattress Factory today with my two little guys and laid on almost every single bed. Our salesperson was very knowledgeable and was able to answer almost all my questions. I laid on their latex model and wow, I can tell you the supposedly “latex” bed we bought 10 years ago with the “100% polyfoam” label on it definitely had to have been a scam by the mattress company. The latex bed I laid on today feels so different than what I’ve laid on the past 10 years. It was very comfy, but a bit too springy for me, and I actually liked their innerspring mattresses better. Go figure! All this time I thought I wanted latex, but at least with what I tried today, I really prefer an innerspring.
We are looking for a bed for my 5 year old son, too, so I was asking about the fire retardent in the mattresses and the salesperson told me they don’t use any chemicals in the making of their mattrresses. Then he showed me the layer of material they include for the fire barrier,although he didn’t know what it was made of. I did receive the following email message (I pasted a portion of it) from them regarding it - maybe you can make sense of this, whether the fire barrier has chemicals in it or not - otherwise I will call their cleveland factory which they recommend to do if I have further questions.
"…In order to meet the requirements of these federal standards, The Original Mattress Factory incorporates a Flame Retardant barrier just below the ticking on all of our products. We have purposefully selected barriers that utilize inherent FR fibers to use in the sleeping surfaces of all of our products. Inherent FR fibers are fibers in which the flame retardant (FR) properties are part of the fibers themselves - the fiber is not coated or treated after it is produced. The Original Mattress Factory does not spray or treat the sleep surfaces of our products with any chemicals or coatings to meet flammability regulations. Furthermore, The Original Mattress Factory does not use any internal components that are treated with FR chemicals or coatings of any kind.
We cannot make a mattress that does not meet FR regulations. Some manufacturer’s will do so with a doctor’s prescription, but to be quite honest I don’t know which ones. "
I also asked if their polyurethane foam was Certi-Pur certified and the salesperson did not know what I was talking about. The density of the foam, though, was 1.5, so at least that is good. But I do recall you stating somewhere that kids should not have foam on their beds, right, or at least very little foam? Does that have more to do with keeping the bed firm, or keeping away potential toxins that may be in the foam?
I’m a bit torn as to how green I want to be with my son’s mattress. Up until now, I haven’t been concerned, but then again ignorance is bliss. The OMF has great prices and if their fire barrier isn’t too terrible and the foam is certified, then maybe I can live with that without having too much mommy guilt. Otherwise, I guess we look into the Pure Echo from mygreenmattress.com. It seems to be the most economical “green” mattress available.
Also, we went to Furniture Mart to try out some Restonic mattresses. They carried a huge selection - I think I counted 12-15 models. I really wanted to try out the latex one, but I could only find two that showed “latex” on the info sheet on the bed and it was combined with other materials, so I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. The salesperson, of course, knew very little and couldn’t tell me about the density of the foam, or anything about the fire retardent, etc. I figured I would have to get all that info from Restonic, and then go back to the store to check it out. It was such a different experience than what we had at OMF. OMF had cutouts of all of their beds so you could see everything that was in each bed. They also had entire mattresses from Sealy, Serta and Simmons with the mattress cut away to show the components inside their mattresses. It was very interesting to see how much different they looked from the OMF mattresses.
Anyway, I’m not so concerned about having the greenest mattress in town for my husband and myself, (we’ve lived this long with whatever has been in our mattresses and neither of us has had a green mattress), but am thinking more for my son and to feel good about a mattress for him. I truly need to figure out how green of a mattress he needs.
Lastly, the OMF salesperson who was not pushy whatsoever, asked where else we planned to look. I told him possibly Restwell Mattress Factory. He told me they are a “kit bit”, and that they don’t make their own mattresses, but assemble them from kits they receive from mattress factories. Does that sound correct? If so, does that really make a difference in terms of getting a good value? Do they then become the “middle man”?
Thanks for your time once again. Don’t you ever get tired of talking about mattresses all day, and answering the same questions over and over? 