Medgadget Reviews the Sleep Number i10 Select Comfort Bed

It’s pretty much common knowledge, and indeed the science proves it, that a good night’s sleep has profound effects on your overall health. We’ve reviewed a lot of cool gadgets here at Medgadget that help you diagnose your sleep, but what’s the next step?

Select Comfort, a company you’ve probably seen on numerous ads and in your local shopping mall, has an innovative solution for all your restless nights – a mattress. Select Comfort‘s is no ordinary mattress; it’s a specially made, air-filled mattress that features adjustable firmness regulated by how much air is inside of it. Prefer a mattress so firm you can bounce spare change off of it? Press a button to change the firmness to your desired setting (known as your “sleep number”), and the mattress quietly fills with air.

So how does the Sleep Number i10 fare in comparison to our traditional mattress? Will our sleep number of 45 really give us the best sleep we’ve ever had? Read on to find out.

Delivery and Setup

Being that this wasn’t an ordinary device that was left on our doorstep and ready to use out-of-box, part of the experience (and a part that Select Comfort prides itself in) is the delivery and setup of the bed. We’ll need to be honest here and say that our experience was less than ideal. Select Comfort had few available delivery times when we scheduled our setup, and we had to request time off of work to handle delivery. Moreover, the first delivery was abruptly cancelled the evening before with practically no explanation. When contacted a day later, we received an explanation about miscommunication between various parties, were given an apology, and rescheduled delivery a week later (and another missed day of work), but weren’t offered anything for our trouble. While this doesn’t affect our opinion of the bed itself, we can’t help but consider this part of the process important for our review. After all, if you were going to receive a pacemaker, would you want to be laying on the operating table with your chest cut open, only to find out that your device is still being manufactured? Otherwise, the delivery and setup went smoothly, taking only about 20 minutes to haul the thing to our 2nd story bedroom and getting it turned on.

What You Get

We received a queen size i10 mattress, which is Select Comfort’s newest and most advanced bed that features a Duvet-stye pillowtop and dual-layers including memory-foam for increased comfort.  It comes with two remotes; one for each side of the bed. Select Comfort also offers additional accessories, such as a bed frame, sheets, and pillows, but we found that our existing hardware was completely compatible with the i10 bed (we would’ve never given up our silky smooth bedsheets anyway). All the other components, such as the air compressor, are included and set up by Sleep Number technicians. And if the bed itself wasn’t simple enough to use, Select Comfort also included an instructional DVD.

Use and Results

We found the Sleep Number i10 to perform as well as expected. The provided remotes are fairly simple and straightforward to use: press the up or down arrows until your desired sleep number is selected, and wait for the mattress to quietly kick on and change the firmness, which is also displayed on the remote. There’s also settings to store a specific number for occasions when someone else somehow ends up sleeping in your bed and changes your sleep number settings.

However, finding our optimal sleep number was more difficult than we thought. We went into a local Sleep Number store to get some advice, however the salesperson tended to avoid suggesting a number or range of numbers, simply advising us to try a sleep number and change it a few nights later. We started at 45, based on laying on pressure sensors at the Sleep Number store, but at the time of writing, we’ve yet to find the best setting. It’s not a fault of the Sleep Numbe bed; there are simply too many factors that contribute to a good night’s sleep, so we’ll need to sleep in the bed for a little longer before we can declare our personal sleep number.

A couple of other things that we noticed is a “new mattress” smell that, after a month of use, is still slightly present. Since air is constantly entering and exiting the i10 mattress, a greater amount of odor is to be expected than with a traditional mattress, but we had hoped it would’ve dissipated by now. Moreover, because you’re essentially sleeping on a cloth-covered balloon, we found ourselves starting to slip off the edge of the mattress as we rolled closer to it. It’s the same reason you tend to lose your balance when you move your body away from the center of a medicine ball. Not a huge inconvenience; think of it as a way to snuggle closer to your loved one!

Conclusion

The Sleep Number i10 bed does what it claims and does it well. The digital remotes are helpful in letting you easily make small changes to the mattress firmness. However, finding your sleep number isn’t as fast and easy as Sleep Number makes it out to be; there’s a lot of factors that can affect your sleep, so it could take a little while to find your optimal firmness. Is it worth $3500+ that the bed retails for? It’s hard to say. For us, we had few sleeping problems to begin with, but for those who are finding it difficult to get a good sleep, the Sleep Number i10 could be just the thing you need. After all, you overall health depends on it.

Product page: Sleep Number i10…