What makes a mattress firm?

This will be looking at the technical and terminology that is involved in the bedding industry, we will be looking at one of the perhaps greatest impacts on how your bed feels, and that is the ‘wire gauge’.

The gauge of the wire, or how thick it is weighing on the massive bearings on the tension of a mattress that is particularly in a coil sprung mattress. It measures the diameter of the wire and the lower the gauge number the thicker will be.

The important reason is that the thicker wire will have less give and flex which means it will create a firmer tension mattress. The wire will have to be much tougher to compress so the spring with a lower gauge is around 12.5g which can typically be found in an orthopaedic bed.

The wire gauge can make a huge impact for example if you look at the Deluxe cosy coil mattress that has 12.5g wire you can see that the mattress has a ‘5 feather firm rating’. But if you compare it to the Deluxe rhapsody micro coil mattress with 13.5g springs, you can notice that it’s considerably softer. The 1g in the spring diameter can have a big impact on how soft and firm the mattress will be.

However, the gauge of the spring has the primary influence on the tension in the mattress, that isn’t the only thing that can affect the overall feel of the mattress. You must distinguish between the mattress tension and the mattress feel, as they both have an impact on how comfortable you will find the bed when you sleep on it.

Research shows that experts think that tension is the core of the mattress, the spring unit, and the wire gauge. Then the feel is comprised of the other filling that is put into the mattress. what would happen when you use the same gauge with different fillings?

The deluxe Cheltenham coil sprung and the sweet dreams Trafalgar mattress both have 12.5g spring but have the quilted fillings, of the sweet dreams
mattress that makes it feel slightly softer than the deluxe Cheltenham. So if you were to add into the mix fillings that are contained in other mattresses such as memory foam, cashmere, or wool all together will change the feel of the mattress even if it has the same gauge wire.

Lastly, the most important thing when you try any mattress before buying is that it’s sometimes impossible you fit in a visit a bed store, where you can spend hours upon hours testing various beds. The companies would believe that is a good thing as you can try to put more information online, but it can be very difficult to be accurate to describe the comfort that you will feel.