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I went on the mattress search some years ago. I found the best bet was what they now call the "sleep number" bed with the pillowtop.
The memory foam mattresses are great in the winter, but not your best friend during the summer. Many of the cheaper copies also break down in an inordinately short amount of time.

Marty "who now sleeps on a KMart futon, but is grateful to have his own place to sleep"

Bloke is right, but . . .

I've had a good experience with the Costco memory foam mattress. Got a king sized one a few years ago for about $800, still working great. I have not had the problems with this when the temperature is warmer - and trust me, I get warm easily.

I ordered it from the Costco website, it arrived folded up in a box and took a half day or so to decompress. Smelled funny for the first day or so.

Costco has a great return policy, too, if you don't like it.

Bob's Discount Furniture has the Bob-O-Pedic, which sounds really cheesy but is pretty much every bit as good.

Before you buy a Sleep Number mattress, you should google
"sleep number class action lawsuit"
and decide whether this problem has been solved.

cktuba wrote:Our mattress is waaaaaaaaayyyyyy past it's prime and I never seem to get a decent night's sleep anymore. Sleep Apnea??

You use the pronouns "we" and "our" in this inquiry, so whomever is sharing your bed with you can confirm whether if you're sleeping soundly, snoring constantly, or some other deviation from a restful night's sleep. If you think sleep apnea is a possibility, have your G.P. (since this is TubeNet, albeit on the "Off Topic" Board, I'd better clarify that I'm not referring to Gene Pokorny ) order a monitored sleep test.

My wife's misery over my snoring plus her concern for MY welfare drove me to have a sleep test a few years ago. As a result, I was prescribed a CPAP. From day 1 of using the CPAP, I was alert through the entire day and never felt the urge to take a nap or close my eyes at the dinner table (for which my unknowing siblings teased me incessantly). I never knew how much sleep I was missing and what a deleterious effect it was having on my waking hours until I began using the CPAP. It has made such an incredibly positive change in my productivity in the day and eliminated a possible life-threatening situation at night (my wife reports that I used to stop breathing for seconds at a time before the CPAP). BTW, I was never grossly overweight, and I'm slimmer now than I was when I had the sleep test. FWIW, the most significant inconvenience about the CPAP is not the mask; it's going through airport security with it. You have to take it out of its carrying case and let TSA inspect it EVERY time you go to catch a flight. OTOH, it isn't counted as on-board luggage (it's medical equipment), so you can take it on board with you and bypass the baggage carousels on trips where you're not bringing much luggage (or a tuba or two).

we tried a TempurPedic at the store and really loved it, for the 15 or so minutes we got to try it out. But the price...

It's worth it (the store granted us 12 month 0% financing). Several years after having treated ourselves to a TempurPedic mattress with the adjustable bed (which itself would put more than normal stress on an ordinary mattress), my wife and I continue to enjoy our mattress without one hint of wear and tear nor loss of its support and comfort. Another advantage of TempurPedic besides the obvious one is that one can climb into one side of the bed without moving the other side and waking your partner (unless [s]he is lying in wait to growl at you for staying on TubeNet or FB until well past midnight...never happened here...).

For me, none of the above - I'd rather sleep on the floor, than a big hunk of polyurethane or whatever they make that stuff out of.

For more on that theme, cf.
http://www.chem-tox.com/guest/guestbook.html

For those who are committed to the idea of spending the night with that kind of stuff, I pass on some buyer advice.

I've been sleeping on a futon for lo these many years. Plenty comfy, and has the virtue cited above where a person can exit or enter without disturbing other person(s) on the bed.

I often suffer from some kind of apnea-like symptoms, when I sleep on my back. So ... I don't sleep on my back!

Well, I'm certainly not overweight!

I bought the Costco memory foam topper, actually two of them, and stacked them up like a mattress. There ensued after that a spate of sciatica, that I finally traced down to the bed. The only way I could get up and walk in the morning was to sleep on the floor, on my thermarest, so that I was completely flat. I had gotten the memory foam because previous to that my most comfortable sleeping was on a soft air mattress while camping; but apparently it was also "flat."

I decided that what was going on was that instead of my bone structure holding me up as it did when I slept on the floor, with the softness of the memory foam the muscles were doing the work, hence the sciatica. The sciatica was permanently fixed, BTW, with one session with a competent neuro-muscular-therapy guy. My sciatca had nothing to do with a back problem; it was due to a glut muscle having tensed up to hold me up in the night, and not letting go (google wallet sciatica.) When glut muscles (and sometimes leg muscles, too, even the muscle that goes across your kidney) tense up, it can put pressure on the sciatic nerve that is going through or nearby.

I also had a treatment by a non-competent NMT practitioner, that made me worse. Massage therapists put so much pressure on the muscles that they fight back, or at least mine do, and become even more tense; the competent NMT practitioner, it felt like he was doing almost nothing, because what he was doing was "encouraging" the muscle to relax, rather than trying to force it to.

MA

Most of my sleep difficulties are due to cats, when I'm home.
I'm fortunate enough to still fit beneath the steering wheel of a 240 Volvo, seat back.
Two tubas (King 2314 sideways, DePrins vertical) in the back.

we got a waterbed about 20 years ago and i will never go back to a normal matress. I also enjoy sleeping on an air matress when we go camping. I think they are just about as comfy as the water bed. A nice feature of the water bed is the heater.. nice and toasty when you get in. In the summer you can lower the temp a little (not too much though!)

ken k

ken k wrote:we got a waterbed about 20 years ago and i will never go back to a normal matress. I also enjoy sleeping on an air matress when we go camping. I think they are just about as comfy as the water bed. A nice feature of the water bed is the heater.. nice and toasty when you get in. In the summer you can lower the temp a little (not too much though!)

ken k

Still using ours after 20 years, as well. We got a soft side system so we can use the beautiful cherry four poster around the water matress.

Hey,
I just bought a tempurpedic yesterday and had it delivered to my new place. I'll sleep on it Tuesday night and I'll let you guys know what I think. My queen mattress came out to $1800, some of the other conventional mattresses were much more expensive than that. It would be worth it to go to a mattress store, try out what they have and compare prices in the store. I think you might be surprised, I know I was.
Bill