I heard somewhere that if you throw a regular box-spring mattress into someone’s pool and let it stay there overnight, it will soak up with water and sink to the bottom. Then, supposedly, the mattress is so water-logged and heavy that it requires a winch or a crane to pull it out of the pool. Would this really happen?
Has anyone ever heard of this being done?
Not sure it you would need a crane. I would imagine, you could drain the pool, pump out ALL the water, and then go back every couple of hours and pump out what comes back out of the mattress (maybe standing on it to help squeeze some more out). After that, I’d imagine you’d have to either dismantle part of the part of the pool to slide it out or get a couple of big stong people that have the ability to lift the mattress over the side. Fully loaded with water, sure maybe a crane (or even a good forklift), once you get the majority of the water out I think it’ll be REALLY heavy and awkward to move, but I don’t think you’d need a crane. But I’ll bet someone else will come up with actual numbers soon.
Well… here’s my reasoning:
Yes, a mttress filled with water would be really heavy. A queen sized mattress should be about 1.0 cubic meter in volume. 1.0 cubic meters of water is 1000kg, or one metric ton (2200lbs). From that perspective, it’s very heavy, indeed.
However, while it was in the water, it is moveable. I know this because I have moved (by myself) totally submerge canoes. Unweild and awkward, but moveable. The bouency force of the water in the pool offsets the water in the mattress. Drag not-withstanding, the water-soaked mattress should feel lighter in the pool than out of the pool. However, once the mattress is out of the water, there is no bouency holding up, the weight returns.
I would move the mattress to the shallow end and raise it up slowly using the steps. I would also probably punch a hole in both ends just to make sure the water can flow out easily.
I doubt a crane is necessary, unless you need the mattress out now.
hmmm… didn’t read my own stuff.
Try submergeD and unweidY.
(And, even as an oceanographer, I can never spell bouenc… bouanc… that word.)
I am hesitant to call this a prank. a prank to me is something that causes a modest amount of confusion and ,perhaps, embarrassment. This action is ruining a possession that could cost anywhere from a couple hundred to a couple thousand dollars.
Meh. It would be annoying, but you could drag the box spring into the shallow end of the pool and then slice it up with hand tools. Hopefully the pool filter could deal with sawdust.
There’s something about pools that just seem to invite pranks. Like using a hose to siphon all the water out of the pool.
What about what I do with all heavy objects. (of these dimensions) Once the mattress is in the shallow end, would it still be too heavy to flip end over end up the stairs? Once outside the pool, you can just dry it out, by jumping on it every so often.
If you want to retrieve the mattress in one piece, then it seems to me that the best way is to lift it at last part way out of the water by getting various buoyant things underneath it (such as swimming pool floats), then let it dry out. This might take some days to do, but eventually the weight of the mattress will go down again.
On NPR news, they interviewed a hurricane survivor in New Orleans who had noticed her Stearns & Foster box-spring and mattress set floating on the waist-deep water in her house when the levee broke. She climbed on, and that’s where she spent most of the next 5 days. She mentioned the brand name, saying maybe they’d want her endorsement.
So, not all bedding will sink.
as AskNot’s post implies, I think a box spring and a mattress are two different things. An inner spring mattress is probably what you mean. I wouldn’t think a queen box spring (I think that’s as big as they get, most kings use two twin box springs) would get that heavy. A queen inner spring matress on the other hand . . .
I have an inground pool and know how heavy a bicycle is to get it out from the 10 foot end. (damn punk teenagers*) It’s hard to get any leverage when you struggling to stay under water and not float up. A waterlogged mattress would need a lot of effort to move if it was dead weight at the bottom of the pool.
I’m not sure how I would move it but draining 37,000 gallons of water would really piss me off.
*me and my friends a loooong time ago.
Even if the mattress gets completely waterlogged, it should be at least as easy to lift it to the surface as it is to lift a dry mattress in air. Then you just have the problem of getting from the surface of the water to out of the water. Other posters have mentioned ways to do this.
In fact, when I read your post, I thought you were saying “bouncy”. (Which is an apt description of a mattress, particularly one with springs in it.)
It took me a while to realize you were trying to spell “buoyancy”.
I’ve heard of people surviving flash floods by floating on mattresses. One survivor of the Johnstown Flood in 1889 road out the wave on an old mattress.
A lot would depend on what’s in the mattress. Cotton batting: soaks up water fast, weighs a ton, drys very slowly. Polyester batting: soaks up water, won’t hold it. Foam rubber: floats until water soaks into all the pores, which it won’t if the foam is sealed. Wood (used in box spring frames): floats until it soaks through, which can take a long time. (This could acccount for the floating box springs in New Orleans.) Springs: sink, but gain no weight.
An all-cotton futon might be a real pain to fish out of a pool, unless you slashed it apart and hauled the cotton up in chunks.
A heavy object like a matress should be fairly easy (relatively) to get out of a pool. My first thought would be to punch a hole or two in the corners or find another simple way to tie a rope around it. If your yard will accomodate it, tie the other end to your car and pull it out. 5 minutes, done. If the car/rope angles won’t work, grab a crowbar (the real 4-ft ones, not the short curved “wrecking bars”) and try any of a number of levering techniques to wrench it out using the rope.
If that won’t work, then you could simply get 2 or 3 people to pull it out. You don’t have to deadlift 1,000lbs straight up, you just have to slide it over a 6" smooth ledge. I can pull a 200lb slate-topped table across a dry floor no problem… hoisting it over my head would be another story. 3 Guys dragging a wet slippery mattress shouldn’t be a problem. Put a little dishsoap on the pool edge to make it a 2-minute job.
Simpler yet is to have one guy in the pool pushing it up from the bottom as the others pull. Just move it to a spot aboout 4-5 feet deep, crouch down under, and push it up a few inches with your head/hands while it’s pulled horizontally by those on dry land. Again, shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes.
I’d also have someone spotting the fence for onlookers - they’ll likely be the culprits, especially if they’re snickering… I mean, isn’t the whole point of such a prank to SEE the victims struggling to fix it?
Dude, you have obviously never moved a mattress. Most of the suggestions you make wouldn’t work with a DRY mattress, let alone a wet one. They’re a lot like dead bodies: all dead weight, very little resistance, no handles. And dish soap? You know how much dish soap you’d have to run along the mattress/pool-edge interface to have any effect? probably a volume greater than the wet mattress. The mattress would wipe it away as you move it; you’d have to keep reapplying it. You’d end up with a gargantuan goopy mess.
A lot of modern mattresses (the cheap ones) are hollow, with springs. I wouldn’t think they’d be too terribly heavy, because they’d empty out. An old fashioned mattress–more like a futon, all cotton batting–is probably the mattress envisioned in the hypothetical prank. That would be almost impossible to move without something like a crane, unless you cut it up.
It’s a brilliant prank. THere’s an awful damn lot of gravity in a waterlogged cotton mattress, and not a whole lot of cooperation.
You have the pressure of the water on top of it pushing down and the weight of the water saturating it. So no, it will not be as easy as air, since the mattress is neither bouyant and is under the pressure of a column of water AND the same column of air that it would have on the ground.
<eeeennnnhhhh, incorrect> Sorry Big Red, the water pressure is all around it, not just coming down in one direction. That’s the thing about pressure: it acts on all sides. If pressure were unidirectional as you claim, you could make things lighter by standing over them, and it would be impossible for you to lift anything underwater (because of the column pushing down on it).
Also, the bouyency (thanks, tracer) is there. Something more dense than water may not be positively bouyent, but there still remains a bouyency force, which counteracts the force of gravity. Ever see a stone thrown into water? It sinks slower than it falls, mostly for this reason.