Choosing a mattress for life off-grid, you have to consider damp and temperature. Assuming you are living somwhere that can get cold and wet, you do not realy want a regular sprung mattress. Insects can get in, plus it will retain the damp. Foam is the answer – the question is regular Hight Density foam or the more comfortable memory foam that conforms to your body shape while you sleep. Question is, will the memory foam become warm up enough to change shape? Your own body heat will soften it, but if it is below say 30 degrees F, then when you move you will encounter a hard patch.
if you are in a sleeping bag not enough heat will get to the mattress to soften it up because the sleeping bag is not letting enough heat reach the mattress.
“We added a memory-foam pad with a poly-fill topper on top of our original mattress in our Class C motorhome,” says one afficionado. “We use a queen size TraverSak (like a sleeping bag with removable sheet inside).
“The extra padding made the bed extremely comfortable and your body will conform to the memory-foam pad. We can be comfortable sleeping with lower temperatures overnight in the motor-home. I now longer need socks sleeping when temperature drops below 32F outside.”
Memory foam gets hard as a rock when the temp gets down to below 30 degrees. The memory foam on the bed allows us to settle down inside them when sleeping and when it gets below 30 degrees it forms a hard depression where we was laying.
It does jump back to life however as soon as you start getting heat going…
Maybe there is different types of memory foam…
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MNtundraRet
Bloomington, MN
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My wife complains the memory foam is too hot. Even in the winter. It is interesting to read folks differing responses.
Oasis Bo
Years ago when we had our fiver and lived in Alberta we put a memory foam mattress in it. The temperature dropped to -35 celcius and we hooked on to the trailer and were headed south. We got to Great Falls Montana and stopped for the night and got in the trailer and started the furnace. It didn’t take long for the trailer to warm up.
Later we went to go to bed and discovered the mattress was froze solid and cold. We piled extra blankets on top and spent a cool night on that brick. It did soften up after 5 or 6 hrs.
The next year we pre heated the trailer for a day before we left and all was good. We still laugh about it.
We now have a memory foam in our MH.
I used a 3″ thick memory foam pad for camping in my the back of my Caravan in 25 degree weather last winter in northern AZ. During the night the damn stuff turned into brick. Never again!
it works better in a motor-home which is heated somewhat while traveling. Not so good for unheated trailer.
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I used to sell Sleep Number beds and I still swear by mine…but wouldn’t ever use the ones that incorporated memory foam into the mattress topper. Memory foam uses closed-cell technology–which means when it’s hot it’ll be hot and stinky…and there’s no washing it! yuck!
This is the voice of experience, with memory foam, in the summer it gets hot, it holds your heat, you will sweat, in the winter it gets hard as a rock, it may soften up enough for you to sink into the hole but when you roll over, the rest of the mattress is hard as a rock and cold as ice. We have a good 4 inch thick topper that I loved when I lived in the city and had a “normal” heated and cooled house, but living a more rough life off-grid, that topper was relegated to the shed…