We have a rock we sleep on called a queen size mattress. Anyone use an air mattress in it's place? What kind and does it stay inflated? Does it get cold?
We had a mattress custom made for ours, a little pricey but that was mostly due to the options we specified. They are called trailer queens and are short so they give some walk around room. All trailers that come with a separate bedroom seem to come with the most uncomfortable mattresses ever produced. It seems that there should be an option to pay an extra $50 dollars to not have a mattress come with the trailer so you would be forced to get one that is comfortable. Ours let you feel every spring. The company that made ours said they regularly replace them in trailers and often toss ones still in the plastic wrap, the customer comes from delivery to the shop and has the mattress replaced.
memory foam over the stock rv mattress underneath . HD down comforter with extra stitching to keep the down in place on top . as comfortable a bed as i can find . and we do have a ( very ) expensive mattress at home to compare with . also a down comforter on top . no substitute for a good night's sleep for us aarp guys .
I sleep on a rock currently because it is an odd sized mattress. I have friends who have been sleeping in a full size air mattress from Wal mart for over two years. It has a 3" memory foam topper plus a queen size heated mattress pad on top of the foam. They like their bed. Says it's the closest to what their waterbed felt like. They also said that they had to keep adding air to the mattress until it stopped stretching. It took about a month to get the air bed fully stretched. Their kids slept on similar air mattresses for 10 years. I think they replaced the air mattress once for each kid. They did have to patch a few times due to the cat. As for "lasting forever", a regular mattress should be replaced every 5 to 7 years. These people used to take a baffled waterbed mattress tent camping. They would fill it with air using a foot pump. Then lay a sleeping bag on top between them and the mattress. The top of the mattress would be about a foot off the ground. The first time I saw it I laughed. But on a camping trip with them a few months later, we were subjected to a downpour and my tent was literally floating along with my foam pad and sleeping bag (I finished the night out sleeping in the back of my station wagon). My friends (and their dog) slept high and dry even though the floor of their tent flooded too. I stopped laughing at them over their waterbed mattress. I also started looking more closely at the "crazy" things they did. I have discovered they may have some "crazy" ideas but most of what they do works, works for a low cost and works very well. So much so that I have been incorporating many of their ways into my own. So some may want to take a second look at air mattress. Not those skinny things but the ones that are about the same thickness of a "real' mattress. I know my friend have theirs sitting on a plywood deck with an old comforter between the plywood and mattress to prevent the wood from abrading the mattress.
I used an air mattress in my pop up and it wasn't very comfortable. When I bought our new to us 09 tt first thing I did was buy a pillow topper. Best investment I've ever done. It's so nice we brought or home after winterizing and put it on our home bed. It's so comfortable.
We replaced all the mattresses in our TT with mattresses from Mattress Insider. They are a very comfortable mattress and memory foam at that. For the bunkhouse pads, we ordered the custom size mattresses, the kids love them and are better than the gym mats that were originally supplied.
We did air mattresses in our tent camping days. No more! If your mattress is not comfortable, take the time (and expense) to get something that is comfortable. Most mattresses that come with campers are junk anyway. We purchased a Serta Queen several years ago, and it's now in it's second trailer! Very comfortable! Never "air" again!
They've come a long way with mattress toppers, and I'm very happy with my memory foam topper along with synthetic down mattress cover. It's a great combination, and feels terrific. I would not go with an air mattress as your main sleeping source. They leak, they're cold, and they aren't meant to last forever. There's a reason they come with a patch kit.
The one thing I found with the air mattress is it changes pressure with day into night use.
I would pressure it up nice and firm just before going to bed and later on at night when things cool down around it loses it's pressure and we would sink into the air mattress.
I went back to the original bed mattress and added three inch magic foam on top of that. This worked out great for us.
However then we found out the properties of the magic memory foam toppers has a drawback to live with as well. It seems when the temp goes down around freezing the memory foam items get hard as a rock until the temp goes back up... Was very strange the first time we found our memory pillows hard as a rock...