Just buy another brand for less. They went so far as to Photoshop ‘enhance’ my warranty photos to increase contrast to support their claim, and they admit it.
My very expensive Tempur / Tempurpedic mattress is cracking all over on top after 8 years, and my wife can’t sleep in it. Tempur quickly voided the warranty claim saying it’s water damaged - after they ‘enhanced’ a single image, mostly highlighting shadows.
I think the memory foam bed is actually only good for 4-5 years depending how big you are and you local humidity. The warranty at 10 years is a total scam for anyone but tiny fairies living in a plastic bubbles. If they said “this lasts 5 year’s” sales would crater or cheap alternatives would win out. Instead they say ‘full 10 year warranty’ but Don’t honor it.
There is no water damage on my bed. Some slight soiling on the mattress cover where you lay (8 years, not washable) plus some shadows due to the window, and they say stained and water damage no warranty. ‘Enhanced’ my photo to make it look worse. Wouldn’t even look at additional photos or send someone out.
I’m not gonna defend Tempurpedic not honoring their warranty but it’s disingenuous to say it failed “quickly” after 8 years of use for what sounds like normal wear to me. A lot of warranties in the mattress space have riders like using a mattress cover (which is a sensible investment regardless) and might have prevented this.
Tempur sounds like they suck, but you should probably have realistic expectations
Fair point. It lasted 4-5 years solid. 6-8 clearly rapid failure.
Quickly is relative to the 10 year warranty.
I paid (usd 5k plus - king size) with a warranty in mind. Was told ‘our material is different, worth it’ - Full sales job. I’m technical, but details matter and they’re proprietary. I trusted the warranty + brand, which was a bad, expensive move.
Realistic expectations - memory foam lasts 4-5 years, more or less depending on pressure and humidity, and should be priced accordingly. YSK!
Since no one has posted this yet so far, the Mattress Underground is the place to go for high-quality information about mattresses.
You’ll learn far more than you’d ever want to know about mattresses. And you’ll probably end up paying more too if you buy from one of the recommended retailers. But if quality is your main concern, then this is how you figure out what’s real and what’s not.
Thanks. Turns out I’m also mattress shopping! Appreciate the alternative option.
Your post has reminded me of this video that calculates how many mattresses you might own if every time a mattress company tried to get you to buy mattress, you did.
It goes rather off the rails once the problem of where to put them becomes a concern. It’s worth a good laugh.
This is another really good reason to be upset with the 10 yr warranty. It implies a longevity well beyond what this product can do.
And the waste. My god the waste. Piles upon piles of unrecyclable petroleum derived foam. Ok, in relative terms to our modern lifestyle it fits right in, but that’s not good.
And if it lasts half as long as they say, and they won’t touch it at the end of its life, what does that say?!
Slightly off-topic: Is there a similar website for sofas?
When I moved out, I was in a hurry and bought one after testing it for comfort for about thirty seconds. Turns out, it is, and most their product are, drop-shipped, low quality garbage.
It started falling apart after a month. Been postponing the purchase for about two years because I am not able to find reliable sources of information to guide my purchase decision.
Great sources for a mattress though. Guess I will cop one soon, as I bought my current one from Wayfair, same shit. Good riddance!
I own a skoolie (a used school bus converted to a motorhome). I acquired two sections of one of those giant sectional sofas from a woman on Craigslist who was giving them away for free. She paid $4000 for the entire thing and when I deconstructed my sections to build them into the bus I was astonished at what incredibly poor quality the things were. The framing (such as it was) was unbelievably cheap wood that looked like it was cut by a beaver, and the ends were made from OSB scraps - not even cheap plywood. The backs underneath the cushions were entirely made from nylon lawn chair straps haphazardly stapled down.
The cushions and fabric were decent enough, but the thought of paying $4000 for furniture that shitty underneath is pretty hard to imagine.
That sounds awesome! I am curious about your journey of owning a skoolie. I sometimes daydream about building a similar motorhome. Watched too many videos of Steve Wallis these days…
Is it your main residence? If it is, what do you miss the most about owning a regular home? How long did it take you to adjust and finally feel home?
The bus is not my main residence. I live in a place (Philly area) where residence in a motorhome is not really a legal option. I embarked on the skoolie journey without a realistic plan for actually living in it and so far it’s been nothing but a gigantic time and money sink. But it has been fun and I’ve developed a lot of skills (mainly metalworking like welding and riveting) that I didn’t have before. You may enjoy my build thread.
I do hope to someday be able to live in it for a few years at least. We’ll see if that’s possible.
Nice! Plenty to read before bedtime. Thanks for that!
I also build a lot of things, mostly programmable electronics housed by 3D prints. I learned so much on the journey. What I learned, in my case, are mostly transferrable skills but I don’t care very much because I like it. I see it same as collecting vinyl records. It’s fun to build stuff without financial motives or external pressure.
Hello from the other side of the world and thanks for the chat and info on your motorhome. Enjoy it! :)
This is a list of notes I put together when shopping for couches. Some of it requires getting hands-on with the couch so it won’t work well for online purchases, but you should be at least sitting on a couch before buying it. My notes were cobbled together from information I found online, so big grain of salt.
Old couches are almost always going to be better than new ones because so many companies have dropped in quality over the years.
Take a black light to look for pee spots or stains. Look for bugs (fleas, bedbugs).
Things to look for:
- Touch back of sofa & area under arm rest and see if it’s just fabric. Something solid usually means attention to detail / quality
- Seat cushions that are solid foam wrapped in breathable layer (cotton, down, etc) are the worst quality cushions (degrade quickly over time)
- Seat cushions that have layered foam or glued foam is a good sign and may mean springs in the foam (springs are generally a good thing)
- Take off the seat cushions and see how far apart the springs underneath the cushions are / how many there are. More & tighter packed the better
- Take off seat cushions and look for horizontal connection wires. There should be 2 minimum. Should be able to feel and see through fabric
- Lift up the sofa. If it’s light weight, that’s bad. If it flexes, that’s bad. Good sofas are heavy and don’t flex when lifted
- Don’t buy leather, buy polyester. This is personal preference, but leather is a lot more work to take care of & keep it looking nice
- “Eight way hand tied” isn’t necessarily a sign of quality, but it’s better than s-springs. There can be fake “eight way hand tied”, which is why it isn’t always better
Good brands:
- Room & Board
- What A Room
- Arhaus
- Maiden Home
- Stickley
- Thos. Moser
- Ethan Allen
- Stuart David (Amish)
- Hancock and Moore
- Bradington and Young
- Classic Leather
- American Leather
Ok brands:
- Bernhardt
- Palliser
- Lovesac
- La-Z-Boy
- Flexsteel
Bad brands:
- Crate & Barrel
- Ashley
- Article & Joybird
- Wayfair
- Natuzzi
- Restoration Hardware
When I bought my couches a few years ago, I got them used off Facebook Marketplace. It took a couple weeks for some decent Ethan Allen couches to pop up, but I got them for ~$400 each.
Thank you!
I might try to get a couch with my next paycheck. This is all really good to know, thank you. I’m saving your comment for reference when shopping.
Would love this for sofas. Last one I got was crap and I find myself regretting not continuing to fix up our old 80s era leather sofa. That thing was built to survive the Cold War.
I can recommend a very good brand but you’ll hate me for it, it’s expensive as fuck and will last your lifetime (I have a 50 year old sofa that is still comfy as fuck, I just need to get it reupholstered because the fabric is wearing a titch after living through two families) but like, we’re cultists about our couches
You forgot to mention the brand I think :^)
us stickley owners can get weird about our couches
My sister-in-law had a victorian-era sofa in their house for a few years. Incredibly well-built piece of furniture and quite beautiful, but truly uncomfortable. Also heavy as fuck – I’d rather move a piano.
Oh yeah, I have no idea how we got ours in the room it’s in. If we have to move it we’re gonna have to knock out a wall. Ours is comfortable tho
Derek from NapLab is also a great source. I did my own research before finding his website, but his recommendations matched what I had chosen. It also makes me chuckle to tell friends that a man named Derek will personally email you to tell you what mattress to buy.
Maximum Derek!
Not only will he personally email you, but he will keep engaging to help you out. He recommended a mattress that fit the budget but didn’t ship to Alaska. After I told him that, he went out of his way to help me find another company that did. Ended up emailing back and forth with him a few times before landing on one of his recommendations.
I found him via and old AskReddit thread he started and kept going.
A+ effort from him.
The website looks interesting, but mattresses are a regional deal. Yaay!
Meaning people from North America will find the website very helpful I’m sure. But I go there and I see a bunch of mattresses I literally can’t buy.
I think the only mattresses available on both sides of the Atlantic that I can look up reviews on are the IKEA ones. Which don’t get glowing reviews.
I wonder if anyone can point me to a similar site for mattresses available in Europe. I currently have a Sleepwell Red Orthopedic which I’m pretty happy with, but it’s damaged (not warrantyable either - damaged during moving. Only the cover of it, but I can’t find a new one anywhere. TECHNICALLY it might be possible to replace the zipper, but it looks like a pain to do) and I’m wondering if there’s something even better for me out there.
You may want to check bett1 out. If I remember correctly, the founder created the company after being frustrated with the marketing tactics and cartelization of the industry. Their product range is small, no marketing fluff, but they are quite popular and in Germany and very well rated.
Hmm, I like how easy it is to select sizes and things on their website. I dislike one bit so far:
BODYGUARD® Box Spring Mattress
Boxspring Feeling without metal springs made of 100 % solid foam. One side medium, the other firmer
Feels a bit misleading even if they do clarify it.
Lol!
Anti-cartel matress :D
https://www.sleeplikethedead.com/ is pretty good, too.
Wow, their website is really shitty on a phone, though (not sure about on a desktop). Half of all the pages are taken up with ads. Much too easy to hit one by mistake.
Sorry. Didn’t notice with pi-hole.
If only there was some sort of…blocker… of ads… on websites…
I feel like a lot of people don’t know you can use ublock origin on Firefox mobile but hopefully now they will :)
And for folks in the Apple walled garden with Safari, there are options paid and free that work well too!
You could take them to small claims court and you’d likely win. A headache, but a solution.
A slightly smaller headache in the US is to file a complaint with your states attorney general.
Adding onto this, every state AG regularly pursues companies for not honoring their warranty. It takes some paperwork (usually original purchase receipt, original warranty terms, and your desired resolution), but it’s usually not too bad. Yours might even list it as a common category for your complaint. Probably takes about 20 minutes.
Companies don’t usually fuck around when the AG is watching. You probably aren’t the only one to complain, and too many complaints can lead to a full-blown lawsuit from one of the most capable organizations in the state. The penalties can include your entire company - including parent, children, and sibling companies, being banned from doing business in the state.
Unless they are yet another company hiding behind bullshit arbitration T’s and C’s.
those arbitration clauses generally only cover class action, but regardless in this case going through arbitration would be cheaper for them anyway since it’s very likely the third party will side with them. Additionally, I’m fairly certain if they went through the AG it becomes a criminal case not a civil due to them violating consumer protection laws, which would likely make the arbitration clause obsolete anyway as a consumer contract or agreement can not override law.
While the AG has a number of options available, most common are civil suits. But even before that, simply having the AG in the middle is putting them on notice that they need to really, REALLY be confident that they are in the right. In most circumstances, they will simply approve your warranty claim to avoid the risk.
When you see headlines of “[state] AG sues XYZ Corp for not honoring warranty claims”, it means there have been a ton of complaints, or a lot of complaints where they still refused. You should never purchase from a company that’s had one of these headlines recently.
At this point, I assume about any warranty is bullshit. I definitely won’t pay extra for a warranty, because these companies aren’t in business to give money back.
A “great” warranty has always been the clearest sign of a shit product, but even so, defects do happen, and plenty of warranties are real and valid.
Our perception of warranties is distorted because we sell purchase protection and breakdown insurance for damn near everything now, and we call it an “extended warranty” rather than the insurance product it is.
This one is tough. A longer warranty is a way to reassure customers that it’s made better, with the promise that it will be repaired/replaced if it breaks. And if they honor their warranties as promised, it’s probably valid. Warranty claims are expensive, regardless of industry, so they go to great lengths to minimize claims. Whatever the warranty is, you can reasonably be sure that it will last that long, but probably not a second longer. Again, assuming a trustworthy company that will honor the warranty.
Otherwise, anyone can shit in a box and mark it guaranteed. If it’s from Amazon/AliExpress, the company probably won’t even exist in 6 months (but a strangely similar new company will).
The flip side is that an unusually short/weak warranty, below that of its competitors, is almost certainly a shit product. They aren’t even going to pretend it’s up to industry standards.
Right? I just spent 4 hours troubleshooting and fixing my “10 Year Warranty” Maytag washer. This is the third time it has broken in the 2 years I’ve owned it. Fuckin junk.
Tempur-Pedic are super expensive too. Can’t imagine why water would lead to cracking in any case.
I don’t see mattresses as a BIFL item because they get dirty, full of dust mites etc. I currently have a midrange IKEA (I don’t think they sell it anymore; it’s foam but didn’t come vacuum-packed) and it’s working well but after 6 or 7 years it’s getting a little flat where I sleep. But it was $500 or so, not $3500 like a mattress store wanted.
IMHO everyone should invest in waterproof mattress barriers. Being waterproof, they prevent all the night sweat and body oils from soaking in and degrading the mattress faster (which is a legit issue that contributes to the body valley), but it also makes them dirt and bedbug proof. And if you put it under a mattress pad, you won’t even know it’s there. They aren’t like the thick noisy plastic of days gone by. If it’s directly under sheets you might hear it, but they are not particularly loud.
They are also dirt cheap; the last one I bought was $13 for a queen size, and as long as it doesn’t tear, it’ll last basically forever. It rarely even needs to be washed. Small price to pay to keep my mattress a bit nicer a bit longer, even though it won’t make it last forever. :)
The vast majority of memory foam is made in bulk by only a few companies, who sell to all the various mattress makers. So with memory foam mattresses, pillows, etc, it doesn’t really matter which brand you buy; the foam is coming from the same suppliers regardless. And the foam itself is actually dirt cheap. The raw materials for the mattress are only like $50-100 total when they’re bought in bulk.
The only real difference between a $3500 Tempur Pedic and a $300 Amazon Basics mattress is which warehouse it was assembled in and shipped from. And you could buy a brand new $300 mattress every single year, spend less money, and be more comfortable at year 10 than someone on a decade-old Tempur Pedic.
I fully agree.
I bought like a $400-600 Costco mattress because one of my friends has one that’s super comfy. But it’s only been two ish years and I’m ready for something new.
To be fair, i think I did get my money’s worth.
I don’t see mattresses as a BIFL item
Absolutely they aren’t. You could maybe make a case for a waterbed mattress, provided you never move it. Those can hold up for a long time because they are impermeable.
I work in this industry, and Tempur is notorious for declining a warranty. Every claim I ever heard tried for compressed foam is declined due to “normal wear and tear” or other cause such as this.
I’ve had mine for 20 years and still like it but I think that’s because they just don’t make them like they used to…like most things
I also have a Tempur bed with mattress and it’s still going strong. Before I got it (maybe 4-5 years ago?) my dad owned it for maybe 10 years.
The only problem with it is that my stepmom didn’t like it and that’s why I bought it from them. And right now my current girlfriend doesn’t like it… But she doesn’t live with me and I still like the bed.
Yeah I havnt met many people that like it. Mine is super firm and I also side sleep and use their wavy pillow and have always liked it. I just cannot sleep on a soft bed and i have no back or posture problems so im gonna keep it until I can’t.
Ill probably get another one but it’ll be fun to do some research when the time comes
I think the memory foam bed is actually only good for 4-5 years depending how big you are and you local humidity.
Yeah my Casper was noticeably worn in the center (single life) after about 3 years. I’m now onto like 4.5 and it’s really starting to annoy me. Trying to sleep on the sides makes me roll into the center lol.
Firm innersprung IKEA, still going strong after around 14 years. Wish it was a.little softer tho.
I have an IKEA latex one, and I can’t think of a day when something happens with it, or if I decide to switch to the king size: they don’t make them any more (at least not in the US)
I was always under the impression that mattresses should be changed every 7 years or so. I mean, that’s a lot of use over a long period of time! A quick Google suggests a lifespan of 7 to 10 years is about right. One article on this topic is here:
If that’s the case then Tempurpedic shouldn’t offer a 10 year warranty they don’t intend to honor.
Every mattress company is the same. Mattress warranty is basically fake and they will use the same water damage excuse
Eh, the article even says with proper care you can push a mattress well beyond 10 years
The only reasons mattresses aren’t lasting long is companies are making crappy ones and people aren’t caring for them
How do you care for it?
Mostly rotating, flipping, and keeping it protected/cleaned
Now that you mention it, it’s time for me to rotate my mattress.
My wife and I have been on our Sleep Number for almost 6 years now and it’s still going strong. Never had an issue with the pumps or anything. We got the thinnest top version and put our own 4 inch memory foam topper on top, it’s pretty nice.
We are thinking of changing to whatever they use at Disney World’s Grand Floridian Resort. Walked 30k steps in a single day, which for an overweight inactive guy like me was absolutely brutal. Normally the next day I’d be so sore (got bad joints, they hate me), but whatever magic is in those mattresses had me up next morning feeling just fine.
Simmons BeautyRest Pillow Top mattresses from the BeautyRest Hospitality Collection. Apparently you can buy them even if you don’t own a hotel!
We picked a Sleep Number because we have different firmness preferences and because I knew 3 couples at the time with a bit over 10 years of use at the time. The only complaint was one person has to air up every few weeks. It’s set to 100 and probably sags to 90 lol.
That being said, Lemmy, get the pitchforks. I wasn’t able to get a basic pump/controller, only the wifi-enabled “smart” pump. Paid $50 extra for a Bluetooth remote to not use their app. I don’t have it on the network. If the pump dies, fuck 'em. I’ll put a Schrader valve on the tube and get the tire inflator. If an RV thread is correct that 100 is 0.6psi and if my fuzzy math is correct, half a queen is the same total amount of air as a typical car tire. ~30x the volume but 1/50th the pressure
