Something in the world of floating have you stumped?
Show Highlights
When you’re in the business of slinging nothingness, it takes a lot of work to create the ideal float environment.
The hardest factor to get right in the float tank is usually water temperature — preferences are bound to vary across your floaters due to a natural variance in each individual’s skin temperature. Perfection is super subjective from person to person, and it’s hard to adjust for that.
While you can’t always deliver a float in which the air and water temperature are perfect, you can adjust based on individual customer feedback while avoiding extreme temperature variation by closely monitoring your tank’s temperatures.
In today’s episode of the Daily Solutions Podcast, join Graham and Ashkahn on their search for the holy grail of floating — the perfect temperature.
Show Resources
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Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)
Graham: Okay, welcome. We have a good question today, which is, “How do you set the temperature in your float tank, so that it’s comfortable for all of your floaters?”
Ashkahn: This is probably the most frustrating thing about running a float tank center, as far as I’m concerned, is getting the temperature right. It’s not like light and sound, right? With light, there is complete darkness, and it just is dark. There is a maximum darkness you can achieve. With sound, there is a maximum quiet you can achieve.
Graham: That’s true too. Sound is also a very challenging one to get, too.
Ashkahn: It’s challenging.
Graham: I don’t think any float center gets to absolute quiet.
Ashkahn: Sure, but at least the goal is the same. You’re trying to hit an endpoint that’s ubiquitous for everybody.
With temperature, it’s not like that. If you have the perfect temperature for one person, it’s not going to be the perfect temperature for the next person and that’s the part to me that’s really frustrating about it. Unlike everything else we’re trying to control, where you can just move closer and closer to some sort of abstract perfection that’s out there somewhere. With temperature, it just doesn’t work like that. There is not a human temperature that every single person is going to find perfect.
Graham: Even the accepted average human body temperature, or what we put into a lot of our float tank literature, ends up being 93.5 degrees. I know float centers that keep their float tanks more at 94 degrees, for example, or 94.2, or more in the 93.4 range. It kind of varies a little bit across the board and honestly, as far as I can tell, the temperature of 93.5 degrees just comes straight from John Lilly, and probably isn’t necessarily our external average body temperature, but is in my opinion more likely to be John Lilly’s experimental body temperature that was just what he was comfortable in.
Ashkahn: You know, there’s like a million variables too. There’s not only the temperature of the water, but there’s how are you measuring the temperature of the water? Is it the built-in thermometer in your float tank? Are you using a reference thermometer?
Where are you measuring it from? The whole body of water is probably not one single temperature so where you’re taking the measurement from differs, and then there’s air temperature. That to me is a huge part of it that makes it very difficult to just say one number.
You could have 93.5 degrees and no humidity in the air and it would feel exceptionally colder than 93.5 degrees with an extremely humid environment, like we find on float tanks. That level of humidity that’s changing, and the temperature of the air that’s changing, all that factors into what it feels like temperature-wise to be in a float tank.
There’s all those things going in and then someone just comes out and says, “I’m cold.” You’re like, “Okay, do I need to change the water temperature? Or the air temperature? Or the humidity level? Or where I’m measuring my temperature from with my thermometer?”
It’s just crazy.
It’s total madness.
Graham: Now that we’ve established that once again almost any question you ask us is going to be met with a huge, nebulous form of answer. Because we don’t actually really have concrete answers to a lot of these, let’s go in and break it down a little more diligently here, I guess.
Backing up, because what you said made a lot of sense to me, even just how you’re measuring the temperature has a huge impact on it. Let’s start there.
We have in our tanks built-in thermometers that give us readings, usually on the controller or sometimes out in the lobby, for our float tanks. There’s a lot of options out there. Specifically we use ThermoWorks, is the brand that we use for our thermometer. It’s a good lesson that any technology that you bring into your float center, even things that are made for a wet environments, kind of have a life that’s maybe not long for this world.
We actually check the temperature with those reference thermometers three times a day, I think is what our generator does. That allows us to have this comparison point for making sure A, that our temperatures are actually accurate again, down to that .08 degrees, but also just that our readings coming out of the float tanks themselves aren’t going haywire and freaking out.
Ashkahn: Even that is still not enough, definitely the most frequent complaint we get, if we are to get complaints from customers is that they felt too cold or that they felt too hot.
As far as I’m concerned, we just don’t have the technology yet to have every person have a very comfortable float. In addition to the humidity and all the other stuff I said, just people run differently right?
People run warmer or colder than other people. People run different temperatures than themselves. If someone comes in, in the morning, or if they come in at night, or if they just worked out, or if they just ate food.
Graham: That’s so true.
Ashkahn: All these things change your perception. We’ve even found that people taking warmer or colder showers before they hop into the float tank will change their perception of how hot or warm, hot or cold it was in there. At the end of the day, it feels much more like we have a handful of heuristics to try to deal with this, rather than any technological or systematic approach.
Graham: Yeah, and even it gets down to being as subjective as what you ate for breakfast this morning or how active you were before coming in to float. I know that if I go for a jog and go into float, everything is just way too hot, and I have to have the door wide open, take a really cold shower before I get inside and it still feels just really warm and way too muggy when I get inside there. Versus normally I actually need to turn down the temperature on the tanks anyway a little bit. I don’t nearly get as overwhelmed with that.
I remember we had a bricklayer who was coming in to float with us and he’d just get off his crazy eight, nine hour days of laying bricks and would come in. He would have to have the temperature way turned up because his body was running so warm from all the physical exertion that if it was at the regular temperature, he felt like it was almost ice cold or something, just because his own core was so hot, which is interesting.
Ashkahn: Yeah, so what do we do in practice to deal with this?
Graham: I still like our idea of the stickers that we put on the wall that don’t actually do anything, so that when people push them, they think that they’re raising and lowering the temperatures themselves, but they’re actually just pushing stickers.
Ashkahn: Yeah, there’s definitely a lot of it that’s just control. Feeling cold in there and not being able to do anything about it, I think is just an uncomfortable experience. Even the perception of doing something to get your tank warmer. One thing we do is we put notes on people’s accounts. They’ll come in. They’ll say that they’re a little bit cold.
Graham: That’s the real answer, although the sticker I think is the future solution for it.
Ashkahn: I mean, even with putting notes on people’s accounts, all the people come back in and I’ll forget to do it. I won’t turn the tank up. I won’t see the not until after they float or something like that. They’ll come out after they’ll float and they’ll be like, “Thank you. That was perfect that time. Thanks so much for turning it up.” I’m just like, “Yeah, you know, no problem.”
That’s part of it right, trying to turn it up. When we’re talking about turning it up or turning it down, we’re talking about fractions of a degree here, so nothing crazy. Usually if someone says they want to turn it up the first time, I’ll turn it up like three tenths of a degree or something like that, maybe four tenths of a degree.
Graham: Yeah, and it’s really rare actually that we even get to the point where we need to raise it a full degree for people. That’s how slim that margin of error is. If you get it off by half a degree, or it’s just half a degree going the wrong direction for someone, all of a sudden it’s just way too warm for them, or it’s way too cold. Yeah, I guess just to summarize and drive the point home that we’ve been saying this whole time; there is not perfect setting for the float tanks.
No matter how good you get it, no matter how much you’re measuring with reference thermometers, ultimately it’s just going to come down to; it’s going to be one of the complaints that you get the most. Having a good system, like notes on people’s accounts and making sure that your staff are trained up to actually go in and really make those adjustments every single time, ends up being really important and can be the difference between having a regular customer who loves floating and having someone who thinks all float tanks everywhere are slightly too cold for them and there’s no way they’d go back in there.
Ashkahn: I feel like when it really comes down to it, there’s three main things that we do is;
One is keeping the notes on people’s account and adjusting it a little bit person to person.
The second one is listening to feedback. If we get a bunch of complaints about people being cold or a bunch about people being hot, that’s how we know to slightly adjust things.
The third is seasonality. I just think that your tanks need to be a little bit warmer in the winter and a little bit cooler in the summer for probably a combination of reasons, like just the fact that everything is warmer and colder and your building is kind of warmer and colder in those months, as well as I think people tend to run warmer or colder. As winter descends, I think our bodies adapt to it a little bit and as the summer comes out our bodies do too. It’s just like we’re in slightly different places in those seasons.
Graham: Is that just your feeling or is that based on science or something you read?
Ashkahn: I read something. I feel like I’ve read … All right, I’ll have to look this up more, but I was reading something on the internet not too long ago.
Graham: People listen to us like we know what we’re talking about.
Ashkahn: This is what I’m saying. There was something about the perception of heat and cold with the seasons. Our skins actually will adapt over the course of multiple days to different weather, which is why the same temperature in the beginning of winter feels much colder than it does at the end of winter for us. Your skin actually, over the course of a short period of time will adapt to warmer, cooler weather. This is something I briefly skimmed on the internet.
Graham: It sounds very ‘sciency,’ I believe you.
Ashkahn: That’s what I’m saying. Yeah, I believe me too. That’s pretty much, that’s good enough for me I think.
Graham: All right, thanks so much for listening to today’s episode. Now you know, there is no actual perfect temperature in the float tanks.
Recent Podcast Episodes
How Many Managers Does it Take to Run a Float Center? – DSP 200
Not every float center owner wants to be tethered to working their shop for the rest of their lives. In fact, even some that enjoy that work immensely can be doing their business a disservice by focusing on day-to-day operations as opposed to dedicating their time to marketing or expansion.
So how do float center owners get out of the shop? How many managers (Or Taco Supremes as they’re called at Float On) does it take to effectively replace the shop owner at a business. Ashkahn and Graham have successfully implemented a system at Float On that allows them to be much more hands off on the business than when they first opened and they share how got to that point and how their business structure has evolved.
Float Centers in Hip Neighborhoods – DSP 199
Do float centers in the hip part of town do better than ones on the outskirts? Graham and Ashkahn are well versed on this in that Float On is in a fairly hip part of Portland.
The guys break down some of the benefits of being one of the “cool” businesses in town as well as some of the serious drawbacks. Naturally, things like foot traffic aren’t as important. Almost no one walks into a float center and hops in a tank off the street. So there are fringe benefits to it, like awareness, but if you decide on going to a different part of town, then you’re not automatically doing a disservice to your brand.
Can You Clean a Float Tank with Vinegar? – DSP 198
You have to change out your float tank water eventually. Is it a good idea to give your float tank a vinegar cleanse when you do? is that effective? Is it too much work for the results? Are there better solutions to keep your tank clean and fresh?
Graham and Ashkahn discuss while providing assurances like “either you’re not crazy or we’re all crazy”, so that’s nice.
Have you Experienced Challenging Floats? – DSP 197
Graham and Ashkahn share stories about their most challenging floats. Everything from extreme physical discomfort to literally staying in too long.
They also share stories of floats from friends and customers that they’ve accumulated over the years and discuss the value of experiencing these difficult moments in the tank and how you might approach them when one occurs at your center.
What’s the Best Representation of Float Tanks in TV or Movies? – DSP 196
It happens every once in a while, a tv show or a movie will feature a float tank and the entire industry gets a jolt as if to say “we made it to the big time!”
But not all float tank cameos are created equal, so which one does it the best? What is the best representation of floating in media? Graham and Ashkahn go through the list of everything from Altered States to Stranger Things to find out what it is.
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