3 years ago we bought a new mattress to replace our 8 year old support mattress bought from a specialist back shop. We went back to the same shop, and tried all their mattresses. The Tempur and other memory foam type ones are hopeless for me, too hot, too difficult to get out of.
They used their little device to scan to see which mattress gave our spines the best support, and suggested 2.
We picked a gel mattress from a company called Technogel. It was marketed as being cool (great, I was bound to be going through the menopause at some stage), and it felt supportive and comfortable. It was a lot of money, but it was guaranteed for 20 years, we assumed we'd keep it for 10, and the price per day wasn't so scary.
When it arrived I was surprised to find they sent two single mattresses with a superking zip up cover to keep them together. I queried this with the shop and they told me that was how the superking mattresses came for this brand. I was dubious, fearing an unncomfortable ridge down the middle.
It was fine. It was really comfortable. It was cool when I got in to bed each night, but that didn't last. SOme nights I was very very warm. I realised that the gel might well take a bit of heat away, but at some point the gel would warm up, so the cooling claims were a bit rubbish really. It was still comfortable. All was well for probably a year, maybe 18 months.
And then.
I realised that I could hear 'crinkling' in parts of the mattress. The area that 'crinkled' graduallygrew and, from a noise perspective, it sounded like I was sleeping with crumpled polythene underneath my sheet. Eventually, it covered a large part of the mattress.
When I realised just how far it had spread, I contacted the company I bought it from. I sent a video so they could see and hear the crinkling. There was correspondence between them and the manufacturer, and me and them. They sent someone from whoever-theindpendent-body is, to inspect the mattress. He turned up on a Saturday morning, with instructions to 'cut the mattress'.
I was horrified. Cut the mattress? Wouldn't the gel leak out?
He examined the mattresses. He said he assumed they meant cut the stockingette cover off the mattress. The problem with that is that once the cover was cut, it couldn't be put back on. There wasn't a seam which we could cut and then re-sew. Once it was cut, it was cut.
How would that work then? If they said there wasn't a problem with the mattress, I'd have lost one layer of protection between me and the gel. He tried phoning the manufacturer for advice. It was a Saturday. so he didn't have any luck getting hold of anyone.
The inspector said I could refuse to have it done, and he'd understand that. So that's what I did.
I waited a few weeks for them to work out what to do. Then DH had his accident, and everything slipped by. The mattress got noisier, and the whole of the surface was now affected. When I got into bed, all I could hear was the rustling and the crinkling. If I turned over, the sound - in the silence of the night - was disturbin.
When normality started to return, and DH stopped having restless nights, I realised that the noise was waking me up when I turned over. I contacted the shop again to ask what was happening. . They checked with the manufacturer and came back to say it was customer misuse, and the warranty had been voided. I asked for an explanation, and it turned out that on the other side of the bed there was a stain, and any stain (water, tea, bodily fluids, didn't matter what) was classed as misuse and therefore invalidated the warranty.
I asked how that worked when we actually had 2 mattresses, and the problem was on my mattress, which wasn't stained. The shop have gone back to the manufacturer, so we'll see what they say.
I've read up a lot about mattress guarantees, and I now know just how worthless they are.
DH said we should just buy a new one (although obviously we wouldn't touch TECHNOGEL with a barge pole now). I'm reluctant to do that though, because it's just so difficult to be sure that the mattress we get will actually be comfortable. I've seen the ads for the relatively cheap 'try for 100 days' mattressess, but I've also read just how those guarantees aren't quite what they seem.
Maybe we should go for a cheap mattress and replace it every 18 months.
In an attempt to do something to help in the short term, I bought a wool mattress topper from Devon Duvets. I already have a wool duvet (soooo much better than feather or synthetic), so I read about their toppers and decided to give one a try.
It arrived a few days ago.
