Testing mattresses may not sound like an actual job, but if you want to do it properly, you have to put in the work. That means turning your living room into a trial lab, enlisting your nearest and dearest as guinea pigs and, yes, sleeping.
When I set out to assess mattresses for the Filter, the number one rule was to kip on them for long enough to judge their impact on sleep quality. Lying on a showroom bed for 20 seconds won’t tell you much at all, and fancy lab-based tests will tell you precious little about what a mattress is like to actually sleep on.
Having only one tester for each mattress felt too subjective, so I also assembled a testing panel (who happen to be my relatives – there are certain liberties you can take with family members, you see). We tested mattresses side by side to assess various factors, including comfort and firmness. Each mattress was also subjected to a few repeatable experiments to assess factors such as motion isolation and temperature regulation.
Read on to find out how we used experiments, questionnaires, rolling around and sitting on thermometers to compare six (and counting) bestselling mattresses.
To find the perfect one for you, read my guide on how to choose a mattress
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Assembling the mattress testing panel
My testing panel comprised my dad (84) and my niece (22) – ably representing their generations – plus my husband, sister and brother-in-law, who join me in the ranks of the middle-aged. Menopause, family life and work stress have exacted occasional mischief upon our sleeping patterns.
We all had quite different firmness preferences; one person’s orthopaedic luxury is another’s torture rack. Body size and sleeping position also affect your preferences, as does what you’re used to (in our case, everyone testing was used to sleeping on firm pocket sprung mattresses). To help ensure we agreed what “firm” meant, we began with a showroom-style session during which everyone tried all the mattresses side by side (well, room by room) and offered our initial scores.
We each sat, bounced and lay down on every mattress, and I collected marks out of 10 for everyone’s impressions of supportiveness and other factors such as breathability, motion isolation and overall comfort. I then worked out our average for each mattress, with no major disagreements or wild outliers to skew things.
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Bottoms, bean bags and other lab essentials
Our score chart was useful for drawing up basic rankings for the test mattresses, but I also wanted to collect measurable results, so my husband, Alan, and I subjected them to a batch of identical experiments.
First, we measured each mattress’s firmness. We placed the mattress on our wooden living room floor and whipped out three 2.5kg weights, some string and a ruler. With the string pulled tight across the mattress and a ruler propped up against it, we dumped 7.5kg of weights in the middle of the sleeping surface and measured how far it sank. We then ran the test again at the edge to measure edge support, and at different surface spots to measure consistency. The softest mattress we tested (Eve Wunderflip Hybrid) sank a full 4cm under the weights, while the firmest (Origin Hybrid Pro) yielded a mere 1.8cm.
We then tested for temperature regulation – essentially, how cool a mattress stays under a warm body. Essential equipment included an infrared thermometer, thermocouple, microwavable bean bag, stopwatch and my husband’s bottom. For each mattress, we used the bean bag to warm up the sleeping surface to 40C, then removed it and Alan sat on the hotspot with a thermocouple wire under his bum while I measured how long it took to fall below 25C. Even with room temperature below 20C, this was more than 10 minutes in some cases, so Alan was glad he’d brought a book to read.
Next, I asked him to lie down while I placed a glass of water on the sleeping surface. If the water stayed safely in the glass when he rolled over, the mattress offered good motion isolation. This time the best performers were those containing lots of foam in the upper layers, because it absorbs movement and helps prevent you from being disturbed by your bed fellow’s tossing and turning.
Finally, we went at each mattress with scissors. Not too destructively – the mattresses would be heading to local shelters after testing, via poverty support group Scratch and survivors’ advocacy organisation Stop Domestic Abuse, both local to us in Southampton. But we wanted to peel back just enough fabric to see what lay beneath. Poking the different foam layers with scissors also helped us judge density, durability and how they were held together. We then noted how easily each mattress’s cover came off, how well its handles helped with manoeuvring, and how heavy it felt. We couldn’t weigh the mattresses, but I cross-referenced our impressions of their heft with information from each brand.
Specifications such as foam density and spring counts are also worth taking into account, but they’re often bandied about as marketing gimmicks in my experience. A mattress with more springs per square metre won’t necessarily be more supportive or bouncy; the springs’ height, thickness and design also matter. Foam density specs are rarely made public, with brands instead describing foam as “high density” (for base layers) and “high viscosity” (for adaptive comfort layers). I researched these specs for every mattress I reviewed but didn’t let them override our own findings on comfort, firmness and sleep quality.
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Measuring sleep quality
A mattress has one job, give or take: to help you sleep better. “A good mattress can’t guarantee a good night’s sleep, but a bad mattress will often lead to a poor night’s sleep,” says Simon Durrant, director of the Sleep Research Centre at the University of Lincoln. My main aim, then, was to measure how each mattress affected our quality of sleep.
Quality is hard to quantify by definition, and sleep quality is even harder to quantify – because you’re asleep. Durrant pointed me towards the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index. This seminal 1989 study asked participants to fill in a daily questionnaire to say how long they’d slept, how long it took to nod off and how refreshed they felt. I drew up a similar survey for my family and added questions about waking in the night, pain the next day, overheating and disruption from partners.
There are objective ways to measure sleep quality, too, says Durrant. “You could use polysomnography (full sleep monitoring using electrodes) or actigraphy (a wristwatch device). Polysomnography gives a more detailed breakdown, but a watch can give a fairly reliable indication of sleep quality and how fragmented it is.” So, we also recorded sleep-tracking metrics using our fitness watches, where possible and added them to our questionnaires.
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Sustainability and customer service
Mattresses are heavy, cumbersome and expensive, and you can’t chuck them in the recycling bin when you’re done with them. So assessing and comparing the durability and environmental impact of our test samples was vital – so too was evaluating each brand’s customer service.
Durability is hard to assess in a few months, but warranties are a good indicator. All our test mattresses are guaranteed for at least 10 years, with one stretching to 15 (Origin Hybrid Pro). However, small print such as weight per sleeper (about 20 stone max) and bans on electric blankets (which can soften memory foam) curb the appeal of certain warranties, so I took these limitations into account as well.
Delivery is a vital factor when testing bed-in-a-box mattresses. My own experience was excellent across the board, but I had to consider verified customer reviews on sites such as Trustpilot, too. If a mattress or brand receives significant negative feedback, I won’t include them in a rundown until things improve.
I took packaging into account, too, but there’s not much difference between the amount of plastic each bed-in-a-box mattress is wrapped in: it’s always vast. I gazed at the plastic mountain each time, with a sinking heart, before ferrying it to the dump.
There were points of difference between the brands’ green credentials, however. Simba, for example, gains plaudits for being B Corp certified, a unique achievement for a mattress manufacturer. I also looked for environmental and health accreditations such as CertiPUR for foam, FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) for wood and GRS (Global Recycling Standard) for mattress recycling.
