Best Hybrid Mattress For the Money
What is a Hybrid Mattress?
A hybrid mattress is just as it sounds, a cross between different types of mattress materials. The most popular ones utilize a spring base (usually pocket coils) and a combination of different types of foam. Others will mixup poly foam with memory foam and either latex or proprietary foams. For example Casper uses a polyfoam base then 1.5″ memory foam and 1.5″ synthetic latex. A little of this and a little of that but not enough of anything to make it a great mattress. It’s really more for marketing purposes than anything. Tuft and Needle is another so-called hybrid mattress that uses polyfoam and a proprietary memory foam. I know, sounds like just about every other mattress out there.
What Makes a Great Hybrid Mattress?
That’s an easy one, great components. Let’s start with pocket coils, these are all over the place in quality. Two things to look at when choosing them as a component to your hybrid mattress – gauge of wire used for the coils and number of coils. Arizona Premium Mattress makes a model called the Ultimate Hybrid which uses a state of the art pocket coil system made by the largest coil manufacturer in the world Leggett and Platt. It’s an 8.5″ tall spring system that utilizes over 1300 individually wrapped coils in a king size. It also uses zoned coils which means it has stiffer gauge coils on the edges and lumbar area and lighter gauge coils for the rest of the bed. But where the rubber meets the road (pardon the pun) on this hybrid mattress is the use of 3″ of all natural talalay latex over the pocket coil system. By combining the state of the art zoned pocket coil system with the gold standard of latex you have a dynamite combination of components and all for around $1300 in King size. Also, the latex topper is available in many different firmness choices, no other spring based hybrid can say that.
Foam Hybrid Mattress Comparisons
There are only about a couple hundred that fit this fastest growing niche in the mattress industry. Mainly because they are cheap to produce and China has factories making these left and right for private label buyers. Many of the foam fabricators here in the U.S. are also getting in on the action by adding cut and sew rooms to their factories so they can easily pump out a finished product for anyone who has a website. Those companies like Casper, Tuft and Needle and so on virtually make nothing. They are simply paying a price to have someone else do all the work and they just market the product which greatly limits their ability to offer any kind of options and customization. The “one size fits all” marketing strategy is backfiring in a big way based on all the returns these companies are receiving.
Basically foam hybrid mattresses consist of a high density polyurethane core with a variety of memory foam, gel foam or latex foam on top. Some of the companies even claim to have proprietary foam which means that exact formulation is reserved for them but a slight variation of that can be used by someone else so it really means nothing in the foam world where there can be thousands of formulas used. The one type of foam that is very consistent and not proprietary to anyone is Talalay latex foam. There are only 2 manufacturers in the world and both excel at what they do.
Talalay Latex Used in the Best Hybrid Mattresses
Although Casper does use a small about of latex in their design its not Talalay. It’s synthetic latex made by TempurPedic owned Mountain Top Foam in Pennsylvania. On a quality level its definitely at or near the bottom. The one company that does use Talalay latex and quite a bit of it (3 inches) is Sedona Sleep Products. Their foam hybrid mattress design is very unique in the fact that it’s a 2 part system consisting of a base core mattress and a separate Talalay latex mattress topper. Why not glue the topper to the base core like all the others you ask, well why glue it in the first place? Having the latex topper separate means you have the option to fine tune your hybrid mattress just in case you want it firmer or softer. This way the only thing to exchange is the topper itself which can be easily rolled and compressed back into the box for UPS. The most important aspect of this design is the fact that you can choose the firmness level not for just the whole topper but for each half of the topper as well. This means that a couple who are different in sleeping surface preference can each get what works best for them. One side can be softer than the other which plays out often when you have a side sleeper with a back sleeper or a heavy person with a lighter person. No other foam hybrid mattress offers that kind of choice.
