Something in the world of floating have you stumped?
Show Highlights
What the heck are double stud walls and why would I need them?
Graham and Ashkahn talk about this and how a high level of soundproofing and construction design can make the difference between a perfectly quiet float, and one where you can hear the person chanting and doing yoga in the room next to you and trucks rumbling by outside.
When it comes to float centers, what’s inside the walls is what makes the experiences outside them so special.
Show Resources
Listen to Just the Audio
Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)
Graham: Today’s question, from one of our listeners is, What the heck are double-stud walls and why should I use them?
Ashkahn: Oh, okay. I was hoping we’d get away with that, talking about why they’re used at all, but they had to sneak that in there, huh?
Graham: Yeah, because the “what” is really the easy part of the question.
Ashkahn: Yeah, it’s two sets of studs in a wall.
Graham: I don’t know actually how to describe it much better than that, except you have actually two sets of base studs or the base plates, two top plates, and you have two rows of studs that make up your wall with an air gap in between them, which can usually be anything from an inch up to a foot or so.
Ashkahn: It’s basically like two walls, like you just have a wall right next to another wall, is what a double-stud wall is.
Graham: As opposed to a single set of studs with the walling material on both sides of that, which would be a single-stud wall.
Ashkahn: Why you use them almost feels like the better part to start with, because they sound really weird without knowing why you’d ever build something like that.
Graham: That takes twice as many materials, twice as much labor.
Ashkahn: Like, “I already have a wall. Why would I build another wall?”
Graham: The reason that you want them is that they help a lot with soundproofing. One of the core parts of soundproofing your float center, and any room that you want to soundproof really, is to have some kind of air gap built into the wall. You can accomplish that through a couple different means.
You can also have a clip and channel system, where you actually attach these clips to a single-stud wall and have some channels you run through there and then put your drywall material onto those channels, and that creates an air gap as well. I won’t go into that too much. You can look it up if you want to see diagrams. It should make a lot more sense than listening to my voice over the air.
For the double-stud wall, it’s actually much more understandable. Those two studs are not connected, and so once you have the sound waves hitting one side of the wall, the material on one side, they’re not just transmitted directly through the studs to the other side of the wall and then out. They hit that wall material and then they have to go through this air gap before they hit the material on the other side and then come out. It turns out that just that transition between solid, air, and back to solid again, is what accomplishes a huge amount of your soundproofing in your rooms.
Ashkahn: The more of an air gap you have in between there, the better it tends to do with soundproofing, so as the sound travels and hits that wall, it gets into that air space in between and it’s basically resonating through that air space. What happens is when you set those two walls further apart from each other, you’re making that air space larger, and as a result you’re making the frequency that it resonates at, which is the most likely or the easiest frequency of sound that can travel through that medium.
You’re making that go lower and lower. The lower you can get it, the better it tends to be for human ears. Our human ears have more trouble detecting it when it’s in those lower ranges than the higher ranges around the human voice and stuff like that. Having that larger sound gap tends to be better soundproofing.
Graham: Similarly with that, because that frequency is specific, we’ve also heard, although we haven’t played around with it much ourselves, that actually skewing the walls a little bit so they’re offset on an angle by a few inches so they’re not totally straight will further increase the cost of your construction, first of all, because not only are you building two sets of studs, now you have to do some crazy scribing on the ceilings because your walls aren’t actually parallel to each other.
Theoretically, that will actually even cut down on that resonant frequency that’s bouncing around in there, because you don’t have one flat plane in front of another, and cut down on the reverberation bouncing back and forth between them as well. That’s something else that can help with that effect. Another question that the listener didn’t ask but which I’d like to ask for them is if double studs are awesome, why not use triple studs or even a quadruple-stud setup?
It turns out in the case of having three sets of studs or sometimes more commonly two studs but you’ve covered both sides of one stud with wall material and both sides of the other stud with wall materials, now you have four times as many or twice as many sheets of walling up there.
There’s names for those. The amount of walls that you have up is called the leaves, is the actual sheets that you have. If, in a double-stud setup, only the outside of either of your studs is covered, that’s two leaves that you have there. If you were to cover, then, the inside as well, that makes it four leaves. Or if you had three sets of studs and only one side of each of them, that would be a triple-leaf system.
Ashkahn: These are actually generally regarded as worse soundproofing than what you could do with the same material were you to just have two leaves, so if you’re using the same amount of lumber and the same amount of drywall and all of that, it’s actually best to just have a solid chunk on the outsides and a big air gap in the middle.
That goes back to that resonant frequency of the air. As soon as you’re cutting that giant air gap into two small air gaps, because now you have a leaf in the middle or a wall in the middle, now you’re making two smaller bodies of air that can, again, resonate at those higher frequencies rather than the lower ones.
For the same cost, for the same amount of materials, and for the same space that it takes up, you generally are best off with as much material on the outsides as possible and as big of an air gap in the inside as possible.
Graham: Yep. To the point where you can use the exact same amount of material and just by switching two of the leaves to the inside of the wall as opposed to all of them being on the outside, you can cut the soundproofing in a quarter, so you’re now being a quarter as effective in your soundproofing just by rearranging the material instead of having that single big air gap.
Ashkahn: The last part of all this is that you want to reduce the amount of resonance once the sound is inside those walls as much as possible, too. That’s where this soundproofing insulation comes from.
While it seems like soundproofing insulation is something that’s going to stop sound from going through, it’s actually much more there to dampen sound on the inside of walls so when sound gets in, instead of bouncing back and forth wildly between your two sets of drywall, there’s sound like rockwool type of material specifically sound-absorbent insulation in there that is meant to dampen it and catch it so that you don’t create this kind of drum-like resonant body inside of your walls. Or as I like to say, guitar-like resonant frequency inside the walls.
Graham: That’s why people use double-stud walls.
Ashkahn: Yeah, good. Solid.
Graham: You think?
Ashkahn: Double solid.
Graham: Thanks for tuning in. We’ll see you tomorrow.
Recent Podcast Episodes
How Often Does Float On Party? – DSP 225
Ashkahn and Graham have developed a bit of a reputation over the years within the industry as party animals. Anyone who has met them can confirm this to be true. But how often to the throw parties at Float On? What are good occasions for float center parties and how do you throw one?
The guys share their party philosophy and offer some nice tips and tricks for throwing a sensory deprivation shindig.
Is there a “Best” Float Position? – DSP 224
Ashkahn and Graham thoroughly debunk the myth of a “best” float position. The Float On boys explicate their philosophy that there is no right way to float and instead talk about all the different positions they enjoy floating in. They learn more about each other than they expected to in the process.
What to Look for When Hiring a Float Center Employee – DSP 223
What makes a good float center employee? What does Float On look for when trying to find someone to take care of their salt monster tanks and their blissed out customers at the same time?
Ashkahn and Graham break down the qualities they look for when hiring, and what makes the people at Float On so special.
How Do you Incentivize Return Floaters without Memberships or Packages? – DSP 222
How many times has a float center owner had a first time floater come out of the tank and said something along the lines of “that was amazing! I need to do this every week!” and then they never see that person again? How do you get them to come back without committing to a membership or a high ticket package of floats?
Ashkahn and Graham share their thoughts on this exact problems and some of the creative solutions they’ve implemented at Float On to combat it. The key, for them, has been keeping it simple and making it accessible.
How to Schedule Your Float Center During the Slow Season – DSP 221
For most float centers, the summer months drastically change how busy it gets. It seems that zenning out to nothingness is moderately less appealing when there’s a lot of outdoor activities to enjoy.
Graham and Ashkahn share their thoughts on a reduced schedule. Float On runs 24 hours almost every day throughout the year. so reducing their schedule is typically against their philosophies. They explain some of the reasons people might consider it, what are some good ways to go about it, as well as explain some practices to consider avoiding when cutting hours.
Latest Blog Posts
Float Quarterly – January 2016
It’s been our pleasure to be actively involved in the float industry for over five years now. In 2016, we’re already on track to have more new centers opening, more press covering floating, and more resources for people just entering our salty world than ever before.
With so much action, we’ve decided to send out brief, quarterly updates on our industry to keep people posted on the all the latest happenings. Welcome to our first installment!
Training to Become a Certified Pool/Spa Operator
Each year at the Float Conference, we put on a Certified Pool/Spa Operator (CPO) training course. At first, that might strike you as an odd thing to have as part of a float tank conference. This post will explain what CPO training is and why we think it can be a really useful certification to have on your belt.
Increase Sales by Offering Retail in Your Float Center
On their own, float tanks have a limit to their profits. Retailing has the potential to bring extra money into your shop, but it also requires a lot of work and attention on your part to really be successful at it. At Float On, our retail contributes 6.5% towards our overall sales and 3% of total profit. While this might not seem like a large contribution, depending on your sales, it could end up paying the wages of a whole extra employee.
The Health Department and Float Tanks… How to get Approved!
If you’re working on starting a float center, chances are you’re nervously anticipating having to call the health department. We’ve all heard horror stories of people being asked to follow pool rules that don’t make sense for them, or having to do costly changes to their pump systems.
float tanks not regulatedBelow is our best advice for working with your health department to get your float center approved, but before we dive into that, it’s important to get a bit of an understanding as to how the health department works.
