Six months ago my husband and I purchased the IKEA Sultan Erfjord Natural Latex Mattress. We chose this mattress for two main reasons: it's natural (85%) latex materials, and its price tag ($999). At first my husband loved its firmness…
…and I loved that I had no weird neck or back pains in the morning. However, after consistent use over the months we found ourselves waking up more and more throughout the night. Recently, Maxwell had a very similar experience with this mattress (read his review here). Unlike Maxwell, we weren't able to return our mattress and had to start looking at other options to make our sleepless nights a little more comfortable.
The biggest reason for going with latex rather than memory foam was because of the refinery-based products used to make memory foam mattresses. We had to find a compromise with something that was eco-friendly and also very comfortable. We didn't want a pure wool topper. The cost was prohibitively expensive and the reviews were mixed. We settled on this EcoMemoryFoam Topper which happened to be available at Costco.
Pros:
• Bio-based polymers rather than refinery-based polymers
• Halogen free
• Cover is already installed (more on this later)
• At only $229 for the King size, it was within our budget
• Since the latex mattress was around 8 inches thick, adding on the 3 inch topper made the combo around the same size as other standard mattresses. No need for for the oversized bottom sheet.
Cons:
• If your body temp tends to rise at night, it can be warm to sleep on
• My dog no longer wants to sleep on her dog bed
Overall we are hugely satisfied with the purchase. The topper has greatly decreased the firmness of the latex mattress. At first we had a mattress cover over both the topper and the latex mattress. We realized that since the topper already had a cover, this wasn't necessary and when we took it off discovered that the foam was even cushier than we had originally experienced! I would recommend this product to anyone that is currently unsatisfied with their mattress and is looking for an eco-friendly topper around $200.
Image: Micki Howl
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The same happened to me, my dog loves to sleep in my bed since I got foam topper.
We thought a nice memory foam topper would help our mattress woes. It is awful. My wife likes it for her back-aches- but it's basically thrown off any hope of sleeping for me. I'm in pain all the time. My wife is preggo- so I don't have a choice but to live with back-aches....
mattress toppers are not for everyone- and are not for every mattress.
That is one cute labrador...I'd let her/him sleep in my bed every night! ;)
We have the same Sultan mattress and I'm not fond of the firmness but I had the same dilemma about eco alternatives to memory foam toppers. May have to give this a go, thanks!
memory foam just creates a quicksand-like pit that I can't get out of. Forget rolling over.. where you lay is where you stay.
Our dog has his own foam bed and looooves it! :) It's probably more comfortable than ours...
We had memory foam and had to chuck it. It raised our sleeping tempuratre to uncomfortable levels. I would never get another such mattress again.
I want a mattress topper, but I'm afraid of the memory foam because of the heat retention. I like to be cool when I sleep.
What ever happened to the old fashioned egg crate mattresses? There is a 4" thick one on Amazon for $100. I'm thinking of trying that. It's very inexpensive, and the crates should give the heat a way to escape.
Has anyone tried one of those lately?