Any experience with Naturally Organic Innerspring mattress from Sleeptek?

[dallasmom]

I found this mattress at the cleanbedrooms.com. Does anyone have any experience with these? They don't have a showroom where I stay so I am wary of spending a tonne later to be dissatisfied. I am mainly looking for a non-offgassing completely chemical free and firm mattress for my 3 year old kid. Does this mattress fit the bill?
Thank you.
DM.

 

[budgy]

Hello dallasmom,
Part of the reason I suggest this mattress is because I sell my own version of it in Canada. So I am happy to recommend a good retailer that can provide people with what they need south of the border. These mattresses are made in Ottawa by a small business that exclusively builds organic beds, if purity is what you want, it really does not get any better. I have also found that comparing this mattress to a lot of other similar sounding wool or wool/cotton quilted mattresses in the price range that these guys just put a lot more wool in the mattress, they are thicker and more sumptuous that any other I have come across other than Royal-Pedic which is in a totally different price category.

 

[dallasmom]

Thanks budgy.
Please suggest a US retailer. I stay in Dallas, TX. Do you know a local store that carries them to try out?

Another concern is for dust mites. There are conflicting reports of wool being dust mite barrier. Some say it attracts dust mites! My son could be allergic to dust mites too, not sure unless we do an allergy test. What is your recommendation or experience regarding dust mites? Do you recommend a dust mite mattress cover for this organic mattress?

Thanks again.

 

[budgy]

dallasmom wrote:
Thanks budgy.

Please suggest a US retailer. I stay in Dallas, TX. Do you know a local store that carries them to try out?

Another concern is for dust mites. There are conflicting reports of wool being dust mite barrier. Some say it attracts dust mites! My son could be allergic to dust mites too, not sure unless we do an allergy test. What is your recommendation or experience regarding dust mites? Do you recommend a dust mite mattress cover for this organic mattress?

Thanks again.


The claims that wool attracts mites is completely unfounded. The 'explanation' for this is that they like to live in areas where there is a lot of places to 'hide'...its always memory foam mattress makers that claim BS like this. Sheeps wool, particularly organic sheeps wool that has not been stripped of the lanolin fat or grease that is in natural wool is incredibly resistant to dust mites living in it. Lanolin is a natural dust mite repellent, as well as moisture repellent. Wool does not lock in moisture like polyester and polyurethane or memory foam's do. When we talk about dust mites, odour causing bacteria, mould, etc. Any micro organism that wants to live in bedding or tops of mattresses want to live there because it is typically a warm and moist environment, wool creats a more arid environment than other materials by easily releasing stored moisture into the environment. The lower the humidity the less chance there is for anything to grow inside the mattress.
I am not sure of any retailers in Texas that carry this type of product. I wish I was more help for you there.

 

[nridge]

I know you are looking for a 3rd party endorsement of our brand Naturally Organic made by Sleeptek in Canada and we are asking some of our customers to post their opinions to your threaded discussion. In the meantime, as the co-founder of The Clean Bedroom I thought you might like to hear our 'back story' on the Sleeptek products we have been selling since 2001. I tell all our customers Sleeptek is the most particular about the purity of their organic materials, more so than any other vendor we sell. My husband and I visited the Sleeptek factory two times in the past 7 years. We wanted to see their factory, inspect their materials, see how efficient their production was, evaluate the cleanliness of the facility.The factory is spotless. They wash the floor each night. Each mattress is handcrafted the old fashioned Euro-tufted way. They keep only the inventory of materials they need to keep up with current production, so materials are not laying around prone to dust collection. Their organic cotton is certified by SKAL, hand-picked in Peru.The wool batting is Argentinian grown and GOTS certified, is superior to cotton batting because it does not compress, provides superior moisture-wicking properties. We used to sell their cotton version of this mattress and find the new wool version much more comfortable. We have a lot of happy customers who have purchased this particular model, hopefully a few of them will respond to your discussion so you can make an informed decision based on customer satisfaction. Thank you for considering The Clean Bedroom for your purchase.
Sincerely,
Christine Chamberlin
Co-founder
The Clean Bedroom

 

[GuyMakesSense]

dallasmom wrote:
Thanks budgy.

Please suggest a US retailer. I stay in Dallas, TX. Do you know a local store that carries them to try out?

Another concern is for dust mites. There are conflicting reports of wool being dust mite barrier. Some say it attracts dust mites! My son could be allergic to dust mites too, not sure unless we do an allergy test. What is your recommendation or experience regarding dust mites? Do you recommend a dust mite mattress cover for this organic mattress?

Thanks again.

I do not have info about the retailer, but the dust mites I can give some info on:

• Dust mites burrow straight down in their environment
• Dust mites are everywhere
• Most people are not allergic to dust mites (but rather to their feces and exoskeletons after they die)
• When dust mites colonize a bed their entire life-cycle is found in the area so you get it all (some reports have a queen size bed almost doubling in weight over 10 years)
• Dust mites live off of the bacteria on our skin cells (not on our skin cells, which is a common misconception)...

So having said all of that, things that provide natural (not necessarily "green" or organic) resistance to dust mites are things that are a bit higher in acidic content (memory foam and latex are great examples) other things can help prevent colonization by preventing them from burrowing (water proof protective covers, micro fiber, some very tightly wound material (be careful for claims that are unsupported), etc. even some materials like wool can create an unhospitable environment for dust mites thus reducing the speed at which they colonize.
Depending on your desired end result (obviously the health of your son) concerning "green" vs. natural vs. hypo-allergenic your search could go a multitude of directions, but if it is strictly in response the the allergic reaction your son may currently have (becoming allergic over time after the first year or two sounds like someone is trying to create a fear tactic), then I hope some of this info will help concerning the dust mites themselves.
You and your son sleep well DallasMom!

 

[dallasmom]

GuyMakesSense wrote:

I do not have info about the retailer, but the dust mites I can give some info on:

• Dust mites burrow straight down in their environment
• Dust mites are everywhere
• Most people are not allergic to dust mites (but rather to their feces and exoskeletons after they die)
• When dust mites colonize a bed their entire life-cycle is found in the area so you get it all (some reports have a queen size bed almost doubling in weight over 10 years)
• Dust mites live off of the bacteria on our skin cells (not on our skin cells, which is a common misconception)...

So having said all of that, things that provide natural (not necessarily "green" or organic) resistance to dust mites are things that are a bit higher in acidic content (memory foam and latex are great examples) other things can help prevent colonization by preventing them from burrowing (water proof protective covers, micro fiber, some very tightly wound material (be careful for claims that are unsupported), etc. even some materials like wool can create an unhospitable environment for dust mites thus reducing the speed at which they colonize.
Depending on your desired end result (obviously the health of your son) concerning "green" vs. natural vs. hypo-allergenic your search could go a multitude of directions, but if it is strictly in response the the allergic reaction your son may currently have (becoming allergic over time after the first year or two sounds like someone is trying to create a fear tactic), then I hope some of this info will help concerning the dust mites themselves.
You and your son sleep well DallasMom!


Thank you GuyMakesSense!
The memory foam info does makes sense to me, as I have observed that when he sleeps on 2 of our beds with thin memory foam layer on them, he sleeps a little better! However they are also firm beds (rock hard), so I don't know if that is the reason. He suffers the most on a medium bed (soft but not a pillow top) that doesn't have the memory foam layer! All 3 beds are from Simmon's beauty rest and Sterns & Foster, so they are in general better quality beds. However they are still conventional and so must be off-gassing, one of them is a 2008 built (sterns& foster) so it might be conforming to the latest flammability standards. Pity I didn't know about these horrible standards back then!
Still very very confused. There is no way to know if he will develop allergies to latex, or even to wool. Is there a way I could convert the existing firm beds into non-off-gassing beds?

 

[budgy]

It takes a long time to sensitize someone to latex, and it usually has to do with other chemicals added into it. There are a lot of people that cannot wear latex gloves but can touch natural latex foam and not have any of the skin type reactions that they get from the gloves. The people that actually collect hevea milk for instance almost never get allergic to natural latex even though they touch it in the purest possible form every day.
Organic sheeps wool for example is a very safe choice...people have lived with wool for thousands and thousands of years...wool allergies are a fairly new thing in human history...used to be an extremely rare thing to be legitimately allergic to sheeps wool or lanolin. Now with all the chemical treatments done to standard mass produced wool we have a lot more people claiming allergies or sensitivities to wool. Peanut allergies share a similar history...after WWII and the widespread use of pesticides and insecticides came into use it changed the way the agricultural industry works almost completely. Take for instance cotton growing, it is the most heavily sprayed crop in the entire world...the land that normal cotton is grown on after enough time becomes to toxic that you can hardly grow anything in it anymore. But you can grow peanuts, and they just leach most of the chemicals out of the soil. Now we have tons of people that are allergic to peanuts.