Who sells which of the two Carpenter Serene foams (IFD 12 and IFD 22)?

[phoenix]

Hi Rehoboth.

Thank you for the additional information you provided. These throw a better light on your choices.

Polyfoam layer above the spring unit appears intact visually, but is old. It is 1 inch thick. Do you think we should replace that while we have it apart? The springs strike me as more audible than they used to be, but it could well be simply that I’m paying far more attention to the mattress than I had in a long time.

Any additional layer will in one way or another affect the general feel of the mattress as a whole but, this layer being further away from the skin, and only 1", it will not add much to the comfort or support Generally a layer like this is placed just above the spring unit to act as a buffer for the mechanical stress of the coils against the comfort/transition layers. The springs should be fine if they are level and the nonwoven fabric and glue still intact.

My BMI is in the low 20s, mostly side sleeper, sometimes back, almost never stomach. The main health-related issue here is that I don’t have any built-in padding so a hard mattress feels like sleeping on a wooden floor. And since I don’t weigh much, a medium mattress feels hard. I don’t weigh less than I used to, but the average BMI has gradually gone up, so perhaps manufacturers are using slightly harder foams to compensate? (When I looked for commercial mattresses at the outset of all this, they felt firmer than when I had bought the current mattress 11 years ago.)

As the “average BMI has gradually gone up” you would sink in a little more and perhaps reach the firmer layer below more than with your previous BMI (sagging and foams that break down will further amplify this the sink into the layer below"

Both you and your wife have fairly low BMIs so you won’t need a thick mattress, once you know the general direction you want to go into (and it seems you have a fairly good idea) this goes also well with so your plan to start with building your DIY from the bottom up, from the firm to the level of comfort that you seek sounds like a very good plan especially as you love “tinkering and customizing things”

This is off topic, and I don’t think it will pertain to this project, but I encountered one component I don’t understand while looking for foam. DIY Mattress sells these 1-inch-thick “micro pocketed coils”. I understand that they’d go right over the existing coil layer, but how are they meant to change the feel of a bed? What’s the point of coils that thin? Or do coils that thin not really change the feel much at all?

Microcoils are a softer and thinner version of pocket coils that are used in comfort layers instead of as support layers. You can read a bit about microcoils in this article and a forum search on " microcoil " will bring up quite a few references to them and mattresses that use them as well.
• The microcoil layer position in a mattress depends on the mattress design. If used as a topper, for example, even though microcoils are a high-quality and durable material they are a much more limited choice for a topper and many people tend to feel them. You’d still need some type of foam on top of them as the cover may not be enough to prevent the sleeper feeling of the coil underneath.
• The microcoil material technology is still developing but has not achieved the support/pressure-relief capabilities of latex.
• have a “springier” feel. You can read more about microcoils in this article and in post #8 here and post #2 here.
• How they perform in each specific design that uses them will depend on the other materials that are over and underneath the microcells. They are certainly well worth considering as a comfort layer option for those who have tested it and like it.

Microcoils have a different response curve (more linear) than latex (which has a more banana-shaped response curve) They work well for those who prefer their feel and resilience or whose testing shows that they do better with this type of response vs foam.

I love both tinkering and customizing things, so this is right up my alley. In younger years, we had to be creative with the budget, and I found out that a cheap way to have nicer things was to find broken ones and fix them. It was amazing to me how people would throw away valuable things, just because one part (even a fuse!) had failed.

It warms my heart to hear that sentiment so well expressed. Indeed this attitude helps shift from “consumerism” to creating and recreating value.

I look forward to you receiving the foams and learning about the DIY progress.

Phoenix