Tempur Pedic Mattress
... but it's not been that great for my back.
I now have a king-size tempur pedic mattress which I dearly love, but as I'll explain, it's not as good for my back as the advertising would have you believe.
I first became aware of Tempur-Pedic (just "Tempur" here in the UK) when a friend showed me a small 3" cube of strange, spongy material. You could squeeze the cube and it would slowly reform - it made for a great stress-relief executive toy on my desk at work... The tag attached to the sample described it as a memory foam deveoped by NASA (for the astronaut's chairs during lift-off) and now called Tempur. And you could get yourself a bed made of it and float yourself off to sleep in zero gravity and cure your back pain - or something like that.
Anyway, I was intrigued enough to drag my wife to a showroom (Peter Betteridge in Kingsbridge, Devon - I was on holiday at the time) to get the full salesman treatment. Tempur-Pedic stockists have a sort of "Tempur pedic mattress experience" which you can try out to see if you're going to like the mattress. So we did - and we spent time with the salesman and tried out different mattresses.
(I also asked the salesman if he used a Tempur mattress. I always ask this, particularly if I'm about to spend a large amount of money. In this case he hadn't, which is never a good sign.)
Tempur Pillows
To start with, we decided to buy a pair of Tempur-Pedic pillows and if we got on with them, we would buy a mattress.
(One reason for not buying a Tempur pedic mattress then was that we were in the process of moving house and a) finances were a bit uncertain and b) we didn't want it delivered and then have to move it. So we waited - and as luck would have it we timed it just right to hit the sale!)
The pillows were a great success. They took a bit of getting used to, but we both found them very supportive - and we ended up taking them with us when we visited friends and relatives. They're certainly a good way of testing the water before deciding to spend big money on a mattress.
My Tempur Pedic Mattress Review
About three months after visiting the showroom, I ordered a mattress and it turns up a few weeks after that. So what do I think?
I don't know if I was expecting a miracle, but that's not what I got. Sure Tempur mattresses are extremely comfortable, but the advertising hype has them fixing all sorts of back pain problems. Not for me, unfortunately.
However, I am very pleased with it. First, it's very comfortable. While I've never felt as if I'm floating in zero-gravity (I think that's what i've seen adverts say), it is still one of the most comfortable mattresses I've slept on
It's also very warm. Foam is a great insulator and it's great for cold winter nights. (And not too hot during summer, either.)
And perhaps the most surprising benefit is that because it's not a sprung mattress, I don't wake my wife when I turn in bed. And that's really good - because she's a light sleeper and on other mattresses I regularly wake her up.
The main bad point has actually been using the Tempur pillows with the Tempur mattress. I got neckache from using the wrong size pillow with the mattress - I find that I'm sleeping much heavier than I used to but that means that if I am in a bad position, it gets worse. Happily, replacing the pillow with the correct size has sorted that problem out.
The other thing I probably object to is that whenever you're searching Google or Yahoo for bad backs and troubled sleep, you inevitably end up at a site that sells Tempur pedic mattresses. Unfortunately, I haven't found that they've helped me at all.
Tempur pedic mattress tips
Now that I've lived with a Tempur mattress for nearly two years, here are my tips:
- If you're getting Tempur pillows, make sure that you get the right size for you. The key dimension is bit that goes under your neck, against your shoulder. If it's the wrong height, you'll suffer.
- Check that your mattress is thick enough. They come in three sizes, and we found that with the thinnest if we sat on it, we sank through to the base. (We're not particularly heavy, either...) There was no problem lying on the thinnest mattress, just sitting on it. Anyway, we went for the next size up.
- Wait for the sales. You can save about 20% at the sales, which on a mattress costing over £1,000 can save you over £200. You should be able to ask your nearest stockist when they're next sale is.
Here's the Tempur website: http://www.tempurpedic.com/
Your tips
If you have comments or tips or a story about tempur pedic mattresses, please let me know so I can share it on this site. Click here to tell me your story.
- Valerie writes: "I have a bad back which has recently been helped enormously by having BOWEN treatment after my usual visits to an osteopath stopped working. BUT I think my back has been made worse by my Tempur mattress (bought at great cost) & for the moment I have returned to using a normal sprung mattress which seems to support me better. I found it very difficult to turn over on the Tempur & the twisting to try & turn made the pain in my back much worse."
Written by Steve Hatherley.