Mattress Forum

MATTRESS SURGERY: performing a "foam-ectomy" on my Englander mattress - w/ photos
Sep 4, 2009 1:22 AM
jimsocal
Location: L.A. area
Joined: Jan 18, 2008
Points: 1161
Guess what? Englander is no better than the S brands (imho)...

As you may know, I bought the Englander (Malibu Firm) only for the springs. I PLANNED to give it a "foam-ectomy", getting rid of the junky cheap foam. But I wanted to see how long it might be comfortable before I did surgery on it.

Well, after about 4 nights I determined that it was not good at all for my back.

So I did surgery on it tonight. 

I'm going to adda link to or post pictures of the surgery in the near future, right here in this thread.

I did expect more from Englander...
I opened it up and was shocked to see that they had NO - ZERO - ZILCH!!! - good firm foam inside!

What it had was 3 layers of 7/16" very soft, white pu foam on top of the springs. That's ALL! NO firm foam, no support, NO WONDER it was hurting my back, and no wonder if you look around the web you can find dozens of posts about how people's Englander mattresses started hurting their back within a week to a month... just like the "S" brands...

On top of the 1 and 5/16 inches of soft junky pu foam, there was the whatchacallit, the top sewn into tufts, whatever they call that thing. (What kind of a mattress expert am I??!  I can never remember the name of that top piece! ) I removed that too because it's just  the same cheap junky foam sewn together with a cloth and tufted...

(By the way, if you buy the Malibu PLUSH instead of the Malibu FIRM, know what you get? Instead of 1 and 5/16" of junky pu foam, you get about 5" of junky pu foam!  That must REALLY hurt people's backs!) This kind of mattress construction - which all the major companies are using, now, STINKS! PU foam = Peee Eww!

So, I took off ALL the foam, and then replaced it with this, from bottom up:

1" of zoned HR foam: top = medium, middle = firm, and bottom = very firm (feet area doesn't really matter, imho)
3/4" of medium-soft latex (Talalay - not certain of the ILD - maybe 24 or 28?)
1" of Venus foam

So it's about the same amount of foam as it had - now 2 and 3/4 instead of just 2" - but the main difference is that now I have QUALITY foam on top of the springs, foam that gives SUPPORT as well as softness.

Will post more as the experiment progresses...

I'll be playing around with this combination, see how it feels. My wife has something very similar to this on top of her Sealy springs, and she likes it pretty well.-

P.S. the springs seem to feel pretty good. I can't say for sure though until I've slept on them with good foam for a while
This message was modified Sep 5, 2009 by jimsocal
Post Reply
View as Thread
Post Reply
View as Thread

Recent Posts