This entry refers to the older model of our mattress. It is not about our current mattress.
In most cases, yes, our mattress does decompress out of its compressed, vacuum packed roll in a matter of minutes (roughly 3 – 5 minutes or so as it did on the video we have on our mattress page), to its advertised 10″ thickness.
We recently had a customer, though, who received his mattress in the winter who experienced a much longer time frame for the mattress to come back to it full height . After he opened the mattress, it recovered almost to its full height within a short time, but it took the top layers several hours to fully recover. He called to let us know his experience was different than that we showed on our video on our site — and while we hadn’t thought about this we immediately knew why it took longer for his mattress to recover. Winter was the reason.
Why does winter make it take longer for the mattress to recover? The answer is due to the nature of memory foam. Memory foam is temperature sensitive, which means that unlike ordinary foams it responds to temperature. Memory foam will get firmer at cold temps and softens at warmer temps (like your body temp, which is why memory foam conforms to your body in a way that ordinary bedding materials don’t).
There is roughly 3.5″ of our mattress, and this layer will get firmer during shipping during the winter to parts of the country in coulder climates (such as New Hampshire, where the customer described above resides). The cooler temperatures can affect the characteristics and responsive of the memory foam layer – it gets firmer. So it may take longer for the mattress to recover in the winter — but once the mattress gets back to room temperature and the memory foam layers get warmed our memory foam mattress will recover back to its full height.
For more information on our beds, see our Memory Foam Mattress page.