PURPLE --> The Mattress, Not the Color
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If you have ever owned an RV, visited with someone who owned an RV or known someone who owned an RV you have probably complained or heard someone complain about RV mattresses. It’s nothing personal RV manufacturers, but the place where RV owners place their heads every night while sleeping in their RV has a bad reputation. And since space is always at a premium when building and designing RV floor plans, they’ve even come up with special sizes and names for the mattresses they put in the RVs. RV Queen Short? RV King Short? Sounds more like some sort of medieval board game pieces than something I can comfortably sleep on every night. Enough complaining though. Here’s our experience with RV mattresses and, hopefully, our solution.
Betsy and I have owned three RVs since we’ve been married, including our current home, CHARLIE. Our first travel trailer, ME-LAS, was a 2013 Forest River Salem 27RKSS. Ah, memories! ME-LAS had an RV Queen Short bed in its’ bedroom area when we took delivery of it. Before ever sleeping a night in the bed, we had already determined that at a minimum it was going to require purchasing a mattress topper for the bed. At that point in our RV’ing career, an inexpensive foam mattress topper was sufficient for the amount of nights we would be spending in the bed. A handful of camping weekends and a couple of week-long vacations during the summer was really all we had to survive. Sleeping on MELAS’s RV Queen Short mattress, which measured 60” x 74”, would often end with Betsy and I’s feet hanging off the bottom of the bed during the night or in the morning. The mattress topper, and the mattress it was covering, were sold along with the trailer in of May 2016.
When it was time for us to purchase our first “home on wheels” we chose a 2005 DRV Mobile Suites 38RL3, aka CALVAN. CALVAN was a previously owned, well-built fifth wheel that we planned on updating with our personal touches and calling home. CALVAN had been updated with a Sleep Number bed by its previous owner, date unknown. We never quite bought into the Sleep Number concept. We’re not sure if that was due to the fact that ours was an older, used version of a Sleep Number bed, or if it was because the remotes didn’t really work and we never really knew what number we were sleeping on. Regardless, the two months we called CALVAN home we slept on our Sleep Number mattress and were left slightly unimpressed. The Sleep Number mattress stayed in CALVAN when we traded him in July 2016.
Also, in July 2016, we purchased our current home, a 2016 Heartland Landmark 365, with a Charleston floor plan, aka CHARLIE. Our shiny new home had many things that we loved and a lot of things we liked. One thing we knew that would not fall into either of those categories was the mattress! Our first order of business, after transferring all of our possessions from CALVAN to CHARLIE, was to purchase a 4 inch foam mattress topper for our new RV King Short mattress, which measured 72” x 80”. With the topper providing some comfort our manufacturer-provided mattress was almost, dare I say, comfortable. Well, that was a little over two years ago, and a piece of foam can only do so much for so long. Waking up in the morning with more than the usual aches and pains convinced us that the time had come to look into replacing our original mattress. When you realize that, if you are lucky like we are, approximately 1/3 of your life is spent on your mattress, you should really make sure it’s comfortable.
So that decision was the easy part. The next decision was also quite easy for us. We decided we would replace our RV King Short mattress with a Standard Queen mattress, which measures 60” x 80”. Yes, we would maintain the same length as our current RV King Short mattress, while gaining 12”, yes one foot, of floor space in our bedroom. Now this may not seem like a lot to most people, but I’ve you’ve ever tried to put your shorts on in an RV bedroom you’ll understand. And besides, losing the 12” of mattress width didn’t really bother us since, well, we like each other and don’t mind sleeping close together! The hard part was going to be which of the hundreds of mattresses out there were we going to purchase.
Ok, so that’s when the research side of me kicked in. The next couple of months involved reading any article, review or website I could find. Along with watching the many videos on Youtube where so-called experts review and compare mattress brands. As some of you already know, you can drive yourself crazy researching stuff like this. Well, I got to that point. (And I may have driven Betsy crazy also!)
One particular name kept coming up during my research for a mattress that would fit our needs and sleeping styles. (We are both side sleepers for the most part.) Purple Mattress. Can I really take a mattress serious that’s named after the color of Barney? No offense intended big guy! But Purple Mattress always fared well in the comparisons I saw and had thousands of good reviews. But before making our final decision and ordering a mattress we had never laid down on, or even touched, we decided to stop in to a Sleep Number store in Victoria and give them another chance. Mattress technology had to have improved since the Sleep Number mattress we had in CALVAN, right? We spent about an hour one evening with a young lady at the store trying out all of the beds and listening to their benefits. They were interesting, but we weren’t convinced that the benefits justified the price. Besides, one of Sleep Number’s differentiators is the fact that you can purchase a power base that raises and lowers your head and feet, and that type of base was not an option in our RV. Our bed is in one of our slides and is therefore a fixed base that can’t really be changed. So it was back to the Purple Mattress.
The All New Purple Mattress, as opposed to the Original Purple Mattress, seemed to have the right combination of coil springs, memory foam and the Hyper-Elastic Polymer layer, better known as the Smart Comfort Grid. Ok, you never actually get to see the Smart Comfort Grid but you can tell the top layer is something different as soon as you lay on it or press it down with your hands. Some benefits of the Smart Comfort Grid include; free air flow, temperature is cool to sleep on, pressure-releasing comfort & support, durable, no-feel motion transfer, and allergen-resistent and non-toxic. Yes, it all sounds like a bunch of marketing mumbo jumbo, but a lot of it made sense to me. Time to order our Purple Mattress without ever seeing or touching one in person. Sometimes you just gotta take a chance. Well, actually, as with most online mattress companies these days you’re not really taking as big of a chance as you think. You see, almost all of them have some version of the “Try it for 100 days and if you don’t like it just send it back” guarantee. So order we did.
Ordering our fancy, new mattress on the Purple Mattress website was as easy as any other online retailer. The last decision we had to make was how thick of a Smart Comfort Grid we wanted our new mattress to contain. You see, the All New Purple Mattress is available in three versions, with the only difference being how thick you want your Smart Comfort Grid to be. Your options are 2” (firm), 3” (medium) and 4” (soft). Relying on my hours of research the consensus for side sleepers seemed to be the Purple 3. So medium it was! When I mentioned earlier that you never get to actually see the Smart Comfort Grid I told a little bit of a fib. We learned that as a “Thank You” for ordering a Purple Mattress they would be sending us two 12” x 18” seat cushions made of the Smart Comfort Grid. Kind of a 1” version of the one in our mattress. Our Purple Smart Comfort Grid seat cushions now reside in the seats of our uber-uncomfortable theater seats that came with our RV. After clicking the box for queen size and selecting the 3” Smart Comfort Grid our total came out to $2,199. Well, actually $2,380.43 after the State of Texas, the County of Calhoun and City of Port Lavaca all tacked on their taxes. Hey, at least delivery was free! Smiles all around! Yes, we could have paid more for a mattress and we definitely could have paid less, but we did not feel bad splurging if Purple Mattress delivered on the comfort they promised.
The process from there should have been easy. Schedule a delivery date with the company that handles deliveries for Purple and start sleeping, right? WRONG! It actually took us more than a couple of angry phone calls to Purple, the company that schedules the deliveries and the delivery company based in Houston, to get our mattress delivered. After all of that, on a Tuesday night, at 9:41 pm (delivery window was promised between 1 - 5 pm) our vacuum-packed Purple bundle of joy arrived. Spectacular sleeping can now commence.
A couple of days later, I got the saw out and reduced our king-sized bed platform to a new queen-sized version. Boy did that 12 inches seem like a lot of space. Betsy and I can’t stop dancing our way around the bedroom! Well, so far so good. After a couple of nights of adjustment, we seem to have settled into our new Purple 3 Mattress like a champ. We’ll keep an eye on that 100 day mark just in case the thrill wears off. But we’re keeping a positive outlook towards many years of Purple Sleeping Dreams.
If you are interested after reading this review and in the market for a new mattress, there is an opportunity to get a $75 Amazon gift card with your purchase of a Purple Mattress by clicking on any of the Purple Mattress links in this post or the photo below. In return, Purple promises to be just as nice to us, your new Purple friends, with the same generous $75 gift card. That will allow both you and us to comfortably do some online shopping, guilt-free from our new twinning Purple mattresses. But seriously, if you have any questions about our experience with Purple, don’t hesitate to pop a question in the comments below. As always, sleep well our friends!
