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Bedding experts agree that the standard useful life of a mattress is 7-10 years. However, a short shopping trip to any furniture row in America will reveal that 10-20; even 30 year warranties are the general rule in the marketplace. There seems to be a disparity between how long manufacturers tell customers they should sleep on a bed before replacement and how long manufacturer’s warranties imply their products will last.
How can you evaluate the length of time before you will need to replace a bed with seemingly contradicting information coming from manufacturers?
When to Replace Your Mattress
First let’s explore the recommendation to replace your bed in 7-10 years. It’s a generalization. Quality beds may last longer while lower end models wear out sooner. But the meat of the recommendation centers around the fact that the normal wear involved with sleeping on a bed 8 hours every night will substantially decrease a mattress’s comfort and support level after 7-10 years.
The other part of the 7-10 year replacement recommendation has to do with cleanliness. How long will your mattress stay clean? How long will it be before your bed becomes a negative influence on your health? After several years of use, a lot of stuff (skin cells, spills, food crumbs) will filter down into your mattress providing sustenance to living organisms. This is a natural thing and not a big reason for concern for the average healthy person. But after so long, it’s just time to replace your bed.
What Does a Mattress Warranty Cover?
So the criteria for replacing a mattress are comfort, support, and cleanliness. Your mattress should be replaced when one of these factors changes from the original quality. Which of these should your warranty cover? Intuitively, we all know a manufacturer can not warranty a mattress to stay clean. So we will pull that element out of the equation, but, what about support and comfort? Is a manufacture responsible for a loss of support or comfort?
If you read your mattress warranty carefully, you will find that neither of these qualities are covered in a mattress warranty. In fact, most warranties will expressly state that they do not cover these things. They will also state that body impressions and softening of foam layers are a result of normal use and should be expected.
Mattress warranties promise replacement or repair of your mattress if you have issues with material or workmanship. This ensures that things like stitching and construction of material layers will withstand normal wear and tear. Memory foam mattresses warrant that they will stay within a certain distance of their original height.
Comfort Guarantee
Most mattresses come with a comfort guarantee. This is part of a 30-90 day sleep trial that says the retailer feels confident that you will feel comfortable on your new bed or you can return it for a replacement or refund. Comfort guarantees are separate from mattress warranties. Their time period is much shorter and they are not meant to address the same issues. They are meant to give the customer a reasonable time period to return the bed if they don’t like sleeping on it.
How Long Should a Mattress Warranty Be?
Warranties on home appliances like washing machines and toaster ovens are usually 1-2 years in length. Even new cars, ranging from $10,000 to $100,000, only have 3-5 year warranties. So why do mattresses have 10-30 year warranties? Is this reasonable?
Well first, materials and workmanship in quality mattresses is superb. It’s true. Most likely, the stitching won’t pull out of the ticking, the springs won’t fail, and the memory foam won’t collapse within the manufacturer’s warranty period. Warranties only cover things that the manufacturer know won’t fail. And this is as it should be. We want mattress maker’s to do a good job and feel confident in their products.
However, mattress makers and retailers know that customers associate warranty length with usable life. It’s not spoken, but most people infer from a 20 year warranty that the product will last that long, despite a salesman recommending a 7-10 year replacement period.
A more reasonable mattress warranty period would be 1-3 years. This would give customers plenty of time to address material and workmanship issues and give them a more realistic understanding of the cost of their bed over time. 1-3 year warranty periods would also help encourage people to replace their bed in a more reasonable 7-10 year period as needed.
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