Saturday, March 05, 2011

One Third of Your Life

If you sleep an average of 8 hours a day a quick calculation yields the fraction 1/3 when compared to the number of hours in a day, 24.

So I am now 63 years old, soon to turn 64, and let's say I have around 21 years left. Another quick calculation yields 7 years, the number of years out of the next 21 that I will be asleep.

So since there are on average 365.25 days in a year then another multiplication problem yields: 24*365.25*7 which comes out to be 61,372 hours that I will spend asleep for the rest of my life.

Given this huge number and given that the mattress that I normally sleep on is around 30 years old and it feels horrible to sleep on, then I thought a nice new mattress was a great idea.

The problem is, what mattress should I get? Consumer Reports is no help. The actually say that this is such a subjective matter that they refuse to rate mattresses. They do share their readers ratings of mattress stores and "The Original Mattress Factory" came out top. And the readers also rate their satisfaction of mattresses and something called the Tempur-Pedic mattress comes out top.

I have heard of this mattress and so about eight months ago I set out to see if it made sense to get this brand. Sadly, these things are not discounted, that I could find out, so I finally went ahead and purchased the 'one-step-up' version of this mattress (From a store called the Healthy Back Store, because it is right next door to the Starbucks where I get my morning coffee).

So given the cost of this mattress, and the accompanying box-spring, which is actually just a box, with no springs in it, I will for the rest of my life, assuming the mattress last for the next 21 years and I live that long --- be spending just under $0.03 per hour for what is rated by readers of Consumer Reports the best mattress.

This comes out to be about one quater a night.

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