Sweda - Bliss

[phoenix]

Hi JohnB,

[quote]We tried putting a medium weight comforter (poly fill) on top of the sagging pillowtop, but that only worked for a day before we had pressure sores. Most soft materials will compress with a person’s weight over a short timeframe. We tried stuffing blankets on the sagging parts - helps a bit, not a lot.

I don’t understand how putting lumps of foam under a mattress helps, when the foundation is fine and the sag is only in the pillowtop.[/quote]

When you have sagging in a mattress the sagging area needs to be “lifted up” from the bottom rather than adding materials on top which will just follow the sag or soft spot in the mattress. A foundation has a flat surface that doesn’t provide any any “lift” under the sag. It’s certainly not a perfect solution but it can be helpful in some cases.

I would like to try a latex bed topper, but my wife is allergic to latex (e.g. in rubber gloves) so is concerned that she would have a problem with it.

Foamed latex is different from the dipped latex that is used in gloves, balloons, and condoms and the washing process removes most of the surface proteins and contact allergens from the foam (which are most often a sensitivity to the chemicals used in the curing process or related to the coating on the gloves and not the latex itself). There is also no contact with the latex in a mattress. There is more about latex allergies in post #2 here and if your wife has either an irritant contact allergy or a type IV allergy she will likely be fine. If the allergy is a true type I latex allergy which is much more rare then I would avoid any exposure to natural latex altogether.

I tried Tempurpedic memory foam a while back and felt like I was going to die from the fumes the first night - there wasn’t a second night, those chemicals are truly dangerous to your health.

You certainly aren’t alone in this complaint although it usually dissipates fairly rapidly. There are many memory foams that are CertiPur certified (although Tempurpedic isn’t one of them) so you would at least have some assurance that the smell isn’t harmful although some people are still sensitive to memory foam that has been CertiPur certified.

I don’t recall having to change mattresses so often in prior decades. I suspect that the big manufacturers are following the lead of appliance makers these days and using cheaper materials than before.

I agree with your assessment and the quality of many of the construction and materials in mainstream mattresses and the useful life of a mattress is lower today than a decade or two ago (see post #3 here) which is one of the reasons that I suggest only buying from manufacturers where you can verify the quality of the materials inside the mattress and make sure that they don’t have any weak links or “built in obsolescence” in their design.

Phoenix