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(Note added in March 2012: Gave up on the old mattress & bought a new one. Added to this thread for continuity.) ======================================= (Note added in Jan. 2012: The topper-search saga turned into a mattress-surgery saga. Mattress surgery details are farther down in the thread.) --------------------------------------------------------- I'm looking for opinions on the next way to tweak my toppers. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Here's the current setup: Stats: 50-year-old woman, about 5'6", 120-125 pounds; side and back sleeper, but mostly side. A little joint pain in the hips now and then, but no serious illnesses or injuries to work around (knock on wood). (The 2" 32ILD topper is a new purchase. I read some old forum threads that I'd saved on my PC; waffled between 32ILD and 28ILD; thought about getting an inch of each; but that was more expensive, and I was most worried about getting something that would turn out to be too soft, like my previous attempts, so I went with the 32ILD.) So: With just those 3" of latex, I think my hips & back are OK, but my shoulders still get too crunched and I wake up with some arm numbness. When I add my 1"-thick polyfill fiberbed on top of the latex, my shoulders are good, but my hips sink down a little too far -- because this fiberbed is several years old and has flattened in just the hip area -- so I wake up with some low back pain. (The rest of the fiberbed is still in great shape.) One option: I thought about getting a 1" 20ILD layer from FoamByMail and adding it on top of the 3" of latex I already have. Recent posts seem to imply that FBM's quality has gotten better and more reliable than when I was here on the forums 2 years ago. But: Since I pretty much bottom out on the 24ILD layer, I'm skeptical that a 20ILD layer would help or would balance things out. (If I put the 1" 24ILD layer on the floor, my bony hips & shoulders go right down to the floor. If I fold that topper in half and lie on that, I still go right down to the floor. That makes me wonder about all the posts I see about 19ILD and even 14ILD layers -- I can't quite fathom how those would be useful, so I'm curious about that.) Another option: Get scrap foam and add some just in the hip area, under the part of the fiberbed that has flattened. SLAB sells some scrap latex of various sizes and ILDs. Maybe something like a 28ILD scrap under the hips would work? Another option: A 1" 28ILD layer (or equivalent in 100% natural latex) between the 24 and the 32? I'd like to avoid memory foam for now, because of the off-gassing issue, but won't completely rule it out. Thoughts? Other ideas? Thanks! Edited to add: 1) A thing called "Oodles" that had latex "noodles" in it -- great idea but poor execution. It would have been terrific if it had had at least twice as many baffles in it to prevent the noodles from shifting around within each baffled section. I half-heartedly attempted to hand-sew in more baffles but didn't know what I was doing and the thing is big & awkward, so that didn't work. (I used it on top of the 24ILD topper.) 2) Below the 1" 24ILD topper -- a 2" Dunlop latex topper from Overstock.com, unknown ILD & manufacturer. Wonderful for a while... but then it cratered in the hip area. Did not think latex was supposed to do that, but it did. [Edited to add: this was medium-firm synthetic, or mostly synthetic, Dunlop. Natural stuff would hold up much better, I'm sure.] This message was modified Mar 15, 2012 by Catherine
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So you sleep well on the couch? Have you ever tried just using a core of heavy duty furniture foam instead? Kind of a frowned upon solution around here, but might be worth a shot considering the best of HD/HR polyurethane foam costs less than any latex or new mattress, & it definitely won't sag under your hips like your springs are doing- the stuff can be had FIRM. I just removed a 5 year old block of it from a bedroom that was recently upgraded, & am amazed at how solid it still is. And the S&F eurotop they replaced it with is already forming a hill in the center. Of course pure foam of any type is just not going to give the same sensation as springs, & it sounds like that's what you want to stick with. So I'd try to give your setup more of a chance before ditching it, if you can handle any more nights on it. I can tell you're at the end of the line with it. I know that feel. At some point you do have to cut your losses & start fresh. Hopefully your toppers aren't part of the reason why your old setup all of a sudden quit working for you after a year either. Because while everything we read on the internet suggests latex is somehow impervious to the downfalls of other foams, with all the stories of seemingly magical decades old latex mattresses, they do break down just like anything else. Some of them prematurely.
Suggestions for pocketed coils? Yeah but it's a long shot. Those multistrand wire coils in beautyrest-black mattresses are incredible. Though finding a demo or someone trying to get rid one of those for cheap on craigslist or something is tough (am constantly looking), & way too expensive to buy new just for the springs. Not so much with posturepedics, they're cheap and common. If you start running low on budgeted time & cash to experiment with, considering so much in mattresses & components are non returnable & too expensive to justify disposable experiments, you could try no risk/hassle finished products at the big box stores that have liberal return policies with no restocking/shipping penalties. No fear of the suddenly quit working after a few months phenomenon- I once made a return at the very end of the 1 year window with no problem at sams. They have a 5lb memory foam over 2lb PU foam (3" + 8") mattresses there, & costco has 759 coil ultrafirm sealy posturepedics, either for <$800/queen set. Just throwing low hassle ideas out there for future consideration, because I wouldn't do anything out of frustration before completely ruling out what you're working with now. It sounds like you're patience is wearing thin at this point though.
Really want a set of those. Wish you could buy coils alone, but I've tried a few (US) component manufacturers both small & large, & it's hard enough to get a rep to even return my calls. They just don't want to sell a set of coils or two to an individual. This message was modified Jan 6, 2012 by JasonRatky
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If you're worried about your springs' performance, put on old clothes (they might get snagged), & lay down directly on them. You can tell right away if they're all just all mashing down together underneath you, or actually conforming like you know they should.
This message was modified Jan 6, 2012 by JasonRatky
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Sorry to hear your setup is not working at all. Does it seem to have more suppport or less after your removed the foam and use just your toppers? Is it possible that the springs are getting pushed to the side and not compressing downward, since you have to remove so much of the support structure? Is the edge support still in place? This is not an issue on my Sealy, since the coils are wired together and they are still encased in the foam and mattress cover it came. I can only guess that they use a fairly soft coil system. If they lied about the coil count, maybe the gauge is not what they said either. Possibly the matting provided some support until it started to wear down. Hard to say where to go from here. You may want to put your toppers directly on the foundation to see how that feels. You probably don't have enougth depth, but if you added 3" of base support you might have a decent latex/foam mattress. Is there a reason you want an innerspring? I think a high quality pocketed coil system is probably best for side sleepers. However, that would probably be pretty expensive, unless you find something used. It is hard to find anything reasonably priced that only uses good materials. As always, to a certain extent you get what you pay for. That is why some of us ended up doing surgery out of desperation. Certainly it is not the ideal solution. In my experience, the upper end Sealy Posterpedic coils provide plenty of support. I would not say that they conform to the body of a side sleeper the best, I have compensated by using 5" of foam above. So, the coils end up working like a mix between a box spring and a mattress. It would be nice is someone made a high quality innserspring with a zipper top, so it could be customized. Not aware of any though. |
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JasonRatky wrote: So you sleep well on the couch? Not particularly. I just couldn't take another night on the mattress, and the couch was the only available surface other than the floor. JasonRatky wrote: Kind of hard to show, & not sure this is even necessarily proper, but I think mine are barely compressing an inch under my hips & shoulders, then not much at all elsewhere. I pretty much stay on the top. If yours aren't mashing down too much more than this, I doubt they're the problem, & definitely wouldn't give up on them yet. Thanks for the measurements & pics; very interesting. My springs, uncompressed, are about 5.5" high. I tried to measure how deep I sink, and it's awkward to do, so I might be off a little, but when I'm lying on my side, it looks like the lowest part of my hip sinks down about 2.5" -- in other words, it looks like the top part of the compressed springs there is at the 3" mark on the ruler. It's hard to tell from a somewhat contorted angle, though; I'd have to have a friend measure to be sure.
sandman wrote: Sorry to hear your setup is not working at all. Does it seem to have more suppport or less after your removed the foam and use just your toppers? I can't even tell anymore.
sandman wrote: Is it possible that the springs are getting pushed to the side and not compressing downward, since you have to remove so much of the support structure? Is the edge support still in place? This is not an issue on my Sealy, since the coils are wired together and they are still encased in the foam and mattress cover it came. It looks like the springs get pushed both downward and inward (rather than outward) when I'm on the mattress. The spring structure does have some edge support built in, and there are the helicals going across, but without the whole mattress case keeping everything together, there seems to be more room for the springs to move around, sideways as well as down. I'm sure that's not helping matters.
sandman wrote: I can only guess that they use a fairly soft coil system. If they lied about the coil count, maybe the gauge is not what they said either. Possibly the matting provided some support until it started to wear down. I don't think anyone lied, and I don't want to disparage this company's reputation. I think the company is an honest one, and someone -- possibly me -- got mixed up. I think the company is making some odd configuration decisions, and I think it doesn't quite have its act together in some ways (as evidenced in the print & Web materials I've seen, and maybe in some inefficient computer systems leading to some disorganization & confusion), but I don't think anyone that I encountered there is dishonest. Everyone I've talked to, both in 2009 and recently, has seemed straightforward and been helpful. Just want to be clear about that.
sandman wrote: You may want to put your toppers directly on the foundation to see how that feels. You probably don't have enougth depth, but if you added 3" of base support you might have a decent latex/foam mattress. That is what I will try next, since I have so much latex here. (I'll try it first without adding more base support, to see how it feels. I'll use the old medium-firm Overstock Dunlop topper as the base for now.) I'm thinking that I'd still prefer an innerspring because I'm used to innersprings and this is the first time I've had so much trouble with one that was still relatively new. And I'd love it if the innerspring provided the proper support and spinal alignment so that I wouldn't need to mess around with trying to zone the latex. But we'll see.
sandman wrote: It would be nice is someone made a high quality innserspring with a zipper top, so it could be customized. Not aware of any though. I don't know how good the innerspring units are, but Bay Bed & Mattress in CA sells innerspring mattresses that use latex on top and are enclosed in zippered cases. It'd cost a bit to have them ship a mattress to me, but they do ship out of state.
Thanks for the help, guys. Much appreciated. I'm pretty tired of banging my head against the wall trying to figure this thing out, and I have spent way more time on this than I can afford. This message was modified Jan 6, 2012 by Catherine
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Hopefully using just foam will work. The dunlop should be a pretty good base. I vaguely recall Budgy at one point saying that the wires that connect the coils can be a weak link in the mattress. I don't remember why, but maybe they can stretch out or loosen up (or both). Especially if they are no thick enough or fastened well. That reduces the overall support because the surrounding coils are not helping as much. Just thought I would throw that out because your coils seems to be shifting more than I would expect. The fact that you had to remove the whole coils system probably did not help either. It is likely that there was no solution, but that is just a guess. 2.5" of sinking in does not seem like a whole lot, but that is almost 50% compression. That definitely seems like more than Jason or I experience, and we weigh more that you (at least I do). |
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sandman wrote: 2.5" of sinking in does not seem like a whole lot, but that is almost 50% compression. That definitely seems like more than Jason or I experience, and we weigh more that you (at least I do). I don't know how to judge what's proper compression and what's too much. I weigh less than you guys but have relatively wider hips, so... hard to know if that balances things out or not. Maybe my hips should sink in that much to accommodate the gap between waist & hips; but something just isn't working. Maybe the shoulder area is the problem.
Edited to add: When I lie on my side on my springs -- with zero foam, quilting, etc., below the spring structure -- there's a pronounced curve in my spine. And my spine is generally fairly straight, no scoliosis, no disc problems, etc. (I laid a board vertically under the mattress to make sure that the foundation wasn't a factor, since it's not solid.) At this point, I'm so turned around from all the experiments that I can't even tell for sure in which direction I'm out of alignment -- sometimes I think my shoulders aren't sinking in enough, and sometimes I think my shoulders are sinking in too much. (The bottom shoulder, on my side, feels crunched. If I push down on my bottom shoulder to raise myself up, then my spine finally straightens. I'm not sure how to interpret that.) Either way, I am out of alignment on those coils. Which would make the search for toppers rather fruitless, I'd think. I wonder if the LuraFlex open offset coils just don't work well for a skinny chick with an hourglass bone structure. Maybe the helicals get in the way? I have no clue.
My old mattress cost $300 in 1991, and I slept on it for 18 years, through my 30s and most of my 40s. It was uncomfortable for the last several years (I could feel the coils, and I woke up with numb or tingling arms & hands), but before that, I think it was fine. I don't remember it causing any back pain. It was probably a Bonnell-coil mattress, and it was on top of a real box spring. So this makes me wonder more about the best coils for me: low-gauge Bonnell for firmness, or pocket coils for their ability to conform to the body? Sure wish there was some way other than endless trial & error to figure these things out. I think Budgy needs to write a "Mattress Construction & Buying for Dummies" book. He can sell it to manufacturers and customers.
At any rate, I am done with this mattress. I've got 5" of latex on the foundation now, all of it medium or medium-firm. I'm leaving off all the 14ILD stuff for now, athough I'm wondering if I could artificially firm it up by putting it in the heavy-duty cotton non-stretchy topper-cover I have from FBM (got it a couple years ago to use with the Overstock Dunlop topper). This message was modified Jan 7, 2012 by Catherine
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Catherine wrote:
I don't know how to judge what's proper compression and what's too much. I weigh less than you guys but have relatively wider hips, so... hard to know if that balances things out or not. Maybe my hips should sink in that much to accommodate the gap between waist & hips; but something just isn't working. Maybe the shoulder area is the problem.
Edited to add: When I lie on my side on my springs -- with zero foam, quilting, etc., below the spring structure -- there's a pronounced curve in my spine. And my spine is generally fairly straight, no scoliosis, no disc problems, etc. (I laid a board vertically under the mattress to make sure that the foundation wasn't a factor, since it's not solid.) At this point, I'm so turned around from all the experiments that I can't even tell for sure in which direction I'm out of alignment -- sometimes I think my shoulders aren't sinking in enough, and sometimes I think my shoulders are sinking in too much. (The bottom shoulder, on my side, feels crunched. If I push down on my bottom shoulder to raise myself up, then my spine finally straightens. I'm not sure how to interpret that.) Either way, I am out of alignment on those coils. Which would make the search for toppers rather fruitless, I'd think. I wonder if the LuraFlex open offset coils just don't work well for a skinny chick with an hourglass bone structure. Maybe the helicals get in the way? I have no clue.
My old mattress cost $300 in 1991, and I slept on it for 18 years, through my 30s and most of my 40s. It was uncomfortable for the last several years (I could feel the coils, and I woke up with numb or tingling arms & hands), but before that, I think it was fine. I don't remember it causing any back pain. It was probably a Bonnell-coil mattress, and it was on top of a real box spring. So this makes me wonder more about the best coils for me: low-gauge Bonnell for firmness, or pocket coils for their ability to conform to the body? Sure wish there was some way other than endless trial & error to figure these things out. I think Budgy needs to write a "Mattress Construction & Buying for Dummies" book. He can sell it to manufacturers and customers.
At any rate, I am done with this mattress. I've got 5" of latex on the foundation now, all of it medium or medium-firm. I'm leaving off all the 14ILD stuff for now, athough I'm wondering if I could artificially firm it up by putting it in the heavy-duty cotton non-stretchy topper-cover I have from FBM (got it a couple years ago to use with the Overstock Dunlop topper). |
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sandman wrote: Are your shoulders not sinking in enough? That might be the problem; I'm not sure. When I'm on my side, the bottom shoulder feels crunched. If I push down on my bottom shoulder to raise myself up, then my spine straightens. I'm wondering if the springs -- even if they're in relatively decent condition overall -- could have started to wear down unevenly, since the mattress was resting on what is essentially a slatted foundation, not a real box spring. Dunno; just a thought. The problem might just be that these offset coils are not the right kind of coils for me, and either pocket coils or old-fashioned Bonnell would be better.
Some of the mattresses make the midsection firmer, so maybe that is what you want in order to get better alignment. The L&P 3-zone "Body Print" pocket-coil system uses 15.5-gauge wire for the top & bottom thirds of the mattress, and 15-gauge wire for the middle third. I don't know if that's enough of a difference to matter, and I don't know if 15-gauge would be too thin a wire to be durable. But it looks like Gardner Mattress uses these springs, and my impression from what I've read here is that Gardner makes good mattresses, so maybe these springs would be OK. (I don't live anywhere near Gardner; just using them as an example.)
No idea if the pocket coils in Simmons or Sealy mattresses are any good. (Never mind the rest of the junk in those; I'm just wondering about the coils themselves.) This message was modified Jan 9, 2012 by Catherine
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15 gauge sounds too thin, but you have to consider the coil count as well (which did not look real high either). Then trend seems to be to make the middle support area stronger, so that must be an issue for other people as well. Hard to say if that section is more worn out. It will wear out faster because of the greater weight on it, but 2.5 years would be pretty quick. If the wires holding the coils together are substandard (too thin or bad metal) or not fastened well, then when they go bad you would lose support from the surrounding coils as well. Do the center of the coils feel softer than the head and feet? Are you sleeping on just the foam? How is that working out?
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sandman wrote: 15 gauge sounds too thin, but you have to consider the coil count as well (which did not look real high either). Then trend seems to be to make the middle support area stronger, so that must be an issue for other people as well. Seems to be a common problem on this forum, anyway. .... If the wires holding the coils together are substandard (too thin or bad metal) or not fastened well, then when they go bad you would lose support from the surrounding coils as well. Do the center of the coils feel softer than the head and feet? I thought they did, but I'm not sure I can trust my perceptions about these coils at this point. I couldn't stand having mattress parts & foam layers filling up my bedroom, so this weekend I finally put the mattress back into its case and shoved it under my bed, just to get it out of my way for now. Are you sleeping on just the foam? How is that working out? I am. It's not the most comfortable -- I have some lower back pain, so if I stick with all foam (latex or otherwise), I might still need some zoning. Hope not, though. I have no time to mess with zoning right now; I have to get back to the projects I was neglecting all the time I was fiddling with that mattress & toppers. (I think I'd try an inch or two of 5lb memory foam before trying the zoning again.) I need to get some plywood to completely cover the foundation, so the slats are out of the equation altogether. Then I'll need to either try another innerspring or get some HR foam to use as a temporary base. (I don't think I want to spend the dough for an all-latex mattress right now... but I reserve the right to change my mind This message was modified Jan 9, 2012 by Catherine
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