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A glimpse into one of the rooms at our mattress testing facility.
CNET’s team of nine mattress experts has been testing and reviewing mattresses for years. To date, the team has tested over 300 beds. Each bed that passes through our Reno, Nevada, testing facility undergoes extensive hands-on testing to rate performance and quality.
Our team takes a holistic approach to mattress testing, meaning our whole team is involved in assessing key performance indicators. This allows us to represent all types of people.
Read more: Yes, We Lie on Beds for a Living. Here’s How We Test Mattresses
Firmness
The Mattress Smasher 9000 getting ready to smash a bed and provide us with an objective firmness score.
Firmness is among the most critical factors we rate regarding top-rated plush mattresses. Our team rates perceived firmness based on their collective experience with the bed. This involves lying on the bed in different positions and rating how it feels.
In addition to what we experience when we test it, we use our proprietary Mattress Smasher 9000 to deliver objective firmness scores based on the force from a 160-pound person. We always test the beds before the MS9K has the chance to smash it to ensure our experience is complemented by the data, not replaced by it.
Motion isolation
Testing the motion isolation with a glass of water on the edge and rolling around the bed.
Motion isolation is how well the bed dampens movement across the surface. It’s a huge factor for people who sleep with a partner who moves around a lot or have pets who jump on and off the bed. Soft memory foam mattresses tend to score high in motion isolation.
To test motion isolation, we have two primary tests. First, I lie on the bed with my eyes closed while a team member moves around on the bed next to me. I then rate how much movement I feel. The second test we perform is the water glass test. By setting a glass of water on the edge of the bed and rolling toward and away from it, we can measure how much the water sloshes in the glass.
Edge support
Edge support is what we describe as how strong the bed’s perimeter is. This factor is huge if you tend to sleep on the edge of the bed or have mobility issues that make it difficult to get in and out of bed. To test edge support, we sit and lie on the edge of the bed and measure how much it compresses under our weight.
Soft memory foam mattresses tend to lack in the edge support department because they so easily compress under our weight. Hybrids tend to perform well in this category.
Temperature
Unfortunately, not every bed that says it has cooling technology will actually cool you. There’s no level of cooling to meet before a brand can market its bed as cooling. That’s where our extensive industry knowledge comes in. In addition to ranking how cool a bed feels when we test it, we can determine which elements of a cooling mattress might move the needle for hot sleepers.
Our testing rooms are temperature-controlled, and we test the beds without sheets to get the purest reading on how cool a bed is.
