Comparing the OMF innerspring vs. standard encased coils

Proper support is vital to healthy sleep, and support comes from the core of your mattress — typically either an innerspring or foam core.

At the Original Mattress Factory, we understand how important support is, so our innerspring mattresses use high-quality interlaced innersprings that can all offer adult-level support for every night use. Our Orthopedic line features our highest-quality innerspring: a six-turn, 12.75-gauge, knotted offset coil with a 6-gauge border rod for edge-to-edge support. This innerspring offers our best support and durability. The coils are interlaced, meaning they are all connected and work together to conform to your body while still being supportive.

Most mainstream mattress brands now use a standard encased coil — individual coils that are wrapped in fabric. This style of innerspring was designed more than 100 years ago by a Canadian inventor who wanted to design a softer mattress for his wife, who was ill. Many mainstream mattress brands will aim to build a mattress for the lowest cost possible. The thin-wire encased coil is a softer coil, this allows mattress manufacturers to reduce costs by eliminating some of the upholstery layers in the mattress.

At the Original Mattress Factory, we strive to build the highest-quality mattress because we believe you deserve the best. So we’re putting our Orthopedic innerspring unit up against the standard encased coil commonly found in mainstream mattress brands. We ran the two innerspring units through a series of tests to determine which unit provides the best support, conformance, and motion transfer.

Want to see how the spring units performed for yourself? Watch the video:

Support: The kettlebell test

Active support is the primary job of the innerspring. The innerspring pushes back on your body to hold your spine in proper alignment.

To test the support of the whole innerspring units, we placed each innerspring unit on a sheet of glass and dropped a 15-pound kettlebell from 4 feet on each unit. If the innerspring can support the kettlebell, it won’t damage the glass.

So, how’d they do?    

The encased coil unit was not able to support the weight of the kettlebell and the glass shattered, failing the test.

The OMF interlaced innerspring allows each coil to work together and supported the weight, so the glass stayed intact. The OMF innerspring passes the support test.

Conformance: The guitar test

While proper support is important to healthy sleep, it’s also important that the innerspring unit conforms to the curves of your body like your hips, shoulders, and lower back it order to provide adequate comfort. While a table would provide a lot of support, it wouldn’t be very comfortable due to its lack of conformance.

To test out the conformance capabilities of each spring unit, we pressed the side of a guitar into the innerspring units, simulating the curves of your body.

Both innerspring units conformed well to the curves of the guitar, and therefore pass the test.

Motion transfer: The wine test

When you’re sleeping, you don’t want to be woken by your partner as they move, toss, and turn during the night. While a certain amount of motion transfer is normal, many mainstream mattress brands claim that the encased coil minimizes motion transfer because the coils flex independently of one another. But do those claims hold up? Let’s test it out.

We placed a glass of wine on the bare innersprings and dropped our 15-pound kettlebell from 2.5 feet onto each unit. As you can see, the wine didn’t spill for either mattress.

But no one sleeps on bare springs! So, let’s test them out again, but this time on finished mattresses. We repeated the test on our Orthopedic Ultra Plush and the Simmons Beautyrest PressureSmart Lux.

This time the wine spills on both mattresses.

Without upholstery, the motion doesn’t transfer and the wine glass stays standing. But once we add the upholstery layers, those layers carry some movement and knock over the glasses.

Both the OMF interlaced innerspring and the standard encased coil performed identically in the motion transfer challenge.

The results

In summary, our innerspring performed every bit as well as the encased coil unit when it comes to conformance and motion transfer — and where it really stands out is its superior support!

And when it comes to overall value, you can’t beat the Original Mattress Factory. Not only is the product higher quality, it’s also hand-built and sold directly to consumers — eliminating the middleman and saving you money. That means you can get a higher-quality mattress at a better price.

Ready to start your mattress buying journey? Come to The Original Mattress Factory first. No one knows more than our team about what makes a great mattress great. Whether you buy from us or not, you’ll be better prepared to make a smart mattress buying decision. Find a store near you