Sleep wellness research that other mattress manufacturers don’t want you to know
Courtesy Intellibed, Salt Lake City LIVING WELL Magazine
Doctors told us the ideal mattress should properly support your back, relive pressure on your body, be made from safe materials and last for years and years. Below, we’ll look at the research we conducted on how different mattress materials provide support.
The Durability Index rates the lifetime performance of materials used in mattresses. However, you the consumer, cannot consider the durability of different materials when making a decision between mattresses because manufacturers don’t release this information to the public, so you are forced to decide almost solely on what feels best to you at the time.
So, what often happens is you buy a bed that may be a couple hundred dollars less because it feels as good as the more expensive one, only to find that you can’t sleep on it after a year or two. Our goal is to help you make a complete decision so that this does not happen.
Research shows that a mattress is only as good as the materials it is made with. So in our quest to define the ideal mattress we learned that it was important to use materials that would perform well when new and continue to perform at that same level throughout the entire warranty period, ideally 20 to 30 years.
There is an industry standard to test the materials used in a mattress called the rollator test. It consists of a 230 lb. 6-sided roller that when rolled back and forth over a mattress 200,000 times simulates the amount of wear that will occur during the mattress’ life. Leggett & Platt, the leading supplier of mattress materials, conducted tests on the leading types of mattress materials.
They found that traditional polychemical foam used in most mattresses suffered an astounding 49% change during the test; popular memory foam showed a 17% change, latex, 23%, and foamed gels, 14%, while a copolymer gel called intelli-Gel® showed only a 4% change during the entire test making it the most durable material used for cushioning in a mattress.
While, the industry recommends that you change your mattress after 8 years of use, recognizing the wear factor of the materials used, one manufacturer, Advanced Comfort Technologies is building IntelliBED® mattresses to wear properly and meet our goal of changing less than 5% during the entire warranty period up to 30 years.
Read more on our blog at intelliBED.com/blog.
