Is Your Bed Sweating?

So, I had been warned, through blog reading and by other live-aboard cruisers that come winter time, condensation would become a real problem.

But for some reason I didn't worry about it, it wouldn't happen to us. We have all heard the stories of moldy matresses, soggy seat cushions and weeping walls, but I figured those people just didn't take the time to do things right, they weren't as vigilant as I would be. Didn't they know that with two space heaters, a wood stove, an air purifier and dehumidifier and fans and strategically opened hatches to keep it all circulating, there would be no way condensation could hinder us? Sorry it is just an impossibility. 

Uh hum, well not quite as impossible as I had hoped. 

I had done pretty good though, all those things keep condensation from getting on the walls and into the tricky corners, and from five people two pets breathing and cooking three meals a day in this small space, that is an accomplishment, however... I had nothing implemented for the matresses and just hoped all the other safeguards would prevent that being a problem. It didn't.

While Mark was installing the water tank under the v berth, he needed to lift up our mattress only to find lots of lovely black mold all over the bottom of it and it was soaking wet. Literally dripping, I was shocked and horrified, we shoved the thing up through the hatch and onto the dock to dry, thankfully there was no mold growing on the bed itself or any of the walls around it so we just had to figure out what to do about the mattress.

Out comes Google, what do other sailors do? You know, those other sailors I thought knew less than me? Yes I am humbled. 

So the solutions ranged from incredibly complicated, like building sub flooring and drilling holes and running drain tubes, to incredibly expensive, like buying hypervent, a specially made product for sailboats for just this reason. Its a meshy mat you lay down under matresses and cushions that allows air flow underneath them.

Hypervent is on our to buy list, but we don't have the funds for that right now so we needed something creative and we found it. 

Another cruiser used the hard, pink, foam insulation that you use in houses, placed it under his matress. We were skeptical at first, this is too cheap, too easy, would it actually be effective? It is, works like a charm.

We placed a complete layer of the pink panther hard insulation under our bed and it has been dry as a bone ever since. How it works, unlike hypervent and drilling holes in the bed, it doesn't let air circulate underneath, but it creates a barrier between the cold of the bed and the heat of the matress so, basically insulates it, perfect, so simple.

Since our mattress was moldy on the bottom we couldn't use it as it was. Thankfully our mattress is just a memory foam mattress from walmart that we cut to fit the v berth. It's just a cheap one, which had four inches of regular foam glued onto the bottom of the memory foam top, thankfully the mold was only on the bottom of the regular foam, which we pried away from the top memory foam and are now just using that. The first time sleeping on the insulation, it creaked and squeaked every time we moved but that only lasted one night, once it seemed to have gotten compressed down, it doesn't make any more noise.