Accessories to keep in a float room – DSP 15

What goes into a float room?

From the furniture and fixtures to the floors and float tanks themselves, it turns out a lot. Whatever the items, they need to withstand a constant barrage of salt and water.

In this episode, Ashkahn and Graham go over the myriad float materials and objects commonly found in a float room, why they’re useful, and why minimalism works well when it comes to float room design.

FTS Blog: Fundamental Float Room Construction Tips

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Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)

Graham: Our next question is coming in from one of our loyal readers out there. Listeners. What do you call them again? Who are you guys? The question is, “What is the ideal float room setup? What goes inside of it?

Ashkahn: What goes inside? Like objects? What objects are in the float room?

Graham: That’s all they asked. So, I think yeah. I think what objects … Obviously trying to describe the full construction over the course of … This episode is going to be totally insane.

Ashkahn: I’m going to start with laying the foundation down.

Graham: We’re going to take artistic liberty with your question and assume that you meant the objects that are going inside a float tank room.

Ashkahn: Number one: As little as possible. Everything that’s in there is something that’s going to get salty and needs to be cleaned continuously.

Graham: I was going to say number one: A float tank.

Ashkahn: Oh, I see. If you could simplify down to not even having a float tank, I would go for that.

Graham: Yeah, it’s true though, right? Even for the size of it. It’s not necessarily that if you could make these giant float tank rooms, that you should even do that. There’s definitely an optimal, maximum size, and a lot of that has to do with cleaning, and just getting salt off of everything that is in your room.

Ashkahn: Yeah. Also, nothing in the room should be anything but like non-porous, waterproof sort of materials. You want to expect everything single thing that’s inside of that room to get wet and covered in salt. You need to be okay with that.

Graham: Yeah, so I guess the basics. Non-porous, non-slip for the floor. Hopefully hides salt well.

If you see a lot of float stands there that have sterile white walls, or seem a little more boring in that sense, the reason is because white hides salt. Like crazy. So, having white walls is a very attractive thing for a float tank center.

Ashkahn: So, you usually need like a bench to sit on. That’s a very typical thing that goes into a float room.

Graham: Especially for just taking off your shoes, your clothes, things like that. Something to sit on is ideal.

Ashkahn: Something for people’s jackets and stuff like that, like having a coat unless you have something like that out of your lobby.

Graham: Yeah. Cubbies, hooks. Or sometimes I’ve seen a whole dressing room setup, where separate going into a float tank room, people have a place to store their objects.

Ashkahn: And you’ll put your stuff into a little locker, then you’ll grab a rope, and put on a robe and walk from there to your float room.

Graham: But assuming that you’re doing everything just within a single room, then cubbies, hooks, something ideally that will put their belongings far enough away from the shower that it’s not just getting soaked when they’re showering.

Which I guess also goes into that category of other things to not put in the room like a shower curtain. It’s a great thing to not have in your float center room.

Ashkahn: Oh shower doors, or basically like anything that is going to be a big thing you need to clean all the time, or has nooks and crannies for mold to develop in, or anything like that is almost never worth it.

Graham: Which means you’re probably going to have an open shower, which is why I say that putting their belongings away from the main shower area, or somewhere where it won’t get splashed, or wet is kind of essential.

Ashkahn: What about the items that the customer will actually use?

Graham: It differs a little bit from float center to float center. You’ll see a lot of really familiar things pop up. So at Float On, we basically have a little basket of single-serve items. The reason those are important it’ll be single-serve earplugs for example, single-serve Vaseline packets, individually wrapped Q-Tips, make up packets that are also individually wrapped, and the reason that we have all of those kind of separately sealed, even though it creates some more waste is just for hygiene.

There’s no telling if you had even just Q-Tips sitting just in a tiny jar. Someone’s fingers touched one of the other Q-Tips, another customer put that in their ear, and there’s some risk of contamination, you just want to avoid that with everything possible for the most part and everywhere that we can find it. All of the things that we’re putting in these baskets that are kind of accessories to the float experience are single-serving.

Ashkahn: Pretty much my must list that I think every float center should have is a set of earplugs, and ideally waterproof ear plugs. Not just kind of the foam ones that you can put in if you were going to a rock concert or something. Those really easily kind of slip out of your ear. But actually waterproof earplugs is nice in case people have tubes in their ears, or some sort of ear condition, or something where they’re a bit more sensitive, or if they just find the water getting in their ears to be uncomfortable, then providing those earplugs to me is definitely something that every float center should have.

Graham: We use MACs silicone earplugs, which are really standard in the industry. We also really like the orange ones because if someone loses an earplug in the tank, or it falls out and goes on the ground, kind of gets squished into a corner somewhere, you can actually see the orange ones even though something is there as opposed to trying to spot a clear earplug floating in clear water is not the easiest thing in the world.

Ashkahn: Like Graham mentioned, packets of petroleum jelly that we put into each room for small cuts. The little bottles that we have of half-distilled white vinegar and half water, I don’t see these around much as I see the other things that we’re listing, but I think they’re really nice. This is just so after your float, you can just squirt the solution into your ears, and it’ll help just dissolve any salt that kind of made its way in there, and it’ll prevent you from getting the old kind of salty ear the next day.

Graham: Yeah, that comes from an old surfers trick. We’re just kind of taking the salt out of your ears. I’ve also seen alcohol used for that too rather than vinegar. Distilled alcohol, which honestly to me has just has a much more pungent smell, even in vinegar was the main downside. I’ve tried using that. Getting out of a float and putting some of the alcohol solution in my ears, which did clear them out really well, but yeah it just smelled so strongly. Even the vinegar does too. It definitely smell a little bit of fish and chips. When you use the vinegar solution to get out of a float.

Ashkahn: I usually recommend people doing it in the shower afterwards. That kind of prevents smelling like you just splashed vinegar all over your face.

Graham: Okay, so what didn’t we cover?

Ashkahn: So, a neck pillow and sandals is definitely something that you’re going to want in there. The neck pillow is, some people again are coming in because maybe they were in a car injury, or something like that. Their whole body is a little bit more sensitive, and they might need that extra support in there. So, having a neck pillow is, I think, very important for float centers.

Graham: There’s different options out there. For a long time, we used pool noodles for neck pillows. The Float Ease is something manufactured by another float tank center, by one of the Float House boys up there. They make the halo neck pillow.

It’s very popular mainly because, and if you do have whatever neck pillow you have, making sure that it can keep those ears below the water is really important just for soundproofing. If your neck pillow is pushing your ears above the water, all of a sudden you have all of the sound contamination that’s coming in, and just that water/air barrier does so much for the actual soundproofing for a float tank. You don’t want to get rid of it.

Ashkahn: We have a robe and sandals in our room as well. That’s because we have a bathroom that’s out in the hallway. So, if someone needs to go to the bathroom at some point in their float, hopping out and being able to put a robe and sandals on rather than putting their clothes back is already …

Graham: Just wandering down the hall naked.

Ashkahn: Which has happened, even with the robe and sandals in the room, that happens. But if there are some float centers out there that have a toilet in each float room, in those cases maybe the robe is not entirely necessary.

Graham: What else? What else do we put in the float rooms?

Ashkahn: A towel. There’s a towel in there.

Graham: A towel, yeah. I forgot the towel. We have some things available on request for people too, but let’s see. So, we have a bench, we have a place to put the clothes.

Ashkahn: We’ve a few other niceties that I don’t know if these are entirely unnecessary or necessary, these are just things that we like to do like the Q-Tips we mentioned, we have a box of Kleenex hung on the wall.

Specifically we took a Kleenex mounting thing for the wall and flipped it upside down. Yeah, you have to take the Kleenex out from the bottom of it, and that way people’s salty hands when they’re reaching above it wouldn’t drip salt on top of it.

Graham: It might be the most brilliant thing we’ve ever done as an organization.

Ashkahn: We have a dispenser for lotion on the wall in case people want some lotion afterwards.

Graham: I totally recommend it. I’m not a huge lotion person myself, but after a float, I definitely just feel like treating myself.

Ashkahn: Trash cans. There’s a small trash can in our rooms.

Graham: Yeah. Closed lid for trash can too. It tends to be really nice. Even though we empty it out every time, it’s still just nice not to have that open plastic there, or the risk of a scent coming out, or something like that. Also, white to hide salt.

Ashkahn: Yeah, everything needs to be whiter. Marbly white colored. And I think that’s pretty much everything that goes in our rooms.

Graham: Wall heater?

Ashkahn: A wall heater, yeah.

Graham: That’s for if you have a really expensive HVAC, you can sometimes control the thermostat in the rooms independently. But for most rooms, you’ll need something that you’ll just be able to tweak it up or down a few degrees separately from the room right next door to it. We find that just wall-mounted wall heaters, ceramic wall heaters, so they don’t make any noise are a great way to accomplish that.

Ashkahn: In addition to our centralized HVAC system.

Graham: Yeah, which still runs.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: But I guess that’s more construction for user interaction. That’s about it. There is a shower in there in addition to the float tank.

And not much else. I think that’s pretty much the bread of it. Again, anything that you can remove from the room is really a big win. So, it should be much more about distilling things. We thought about putting water bottles in the rooms before, which we’ve seen in other places.

We have nice kind of hot tub plastic cups, and people can get their own water.

Ashkahn: So, specifically cups not made out of glass, so if someone drops it in that area where they’re barefoot, we don’t have to deal with broken glass.

Graham: They can grab water outside and bring it in. For us, that was just available enough that it ended up working out and wanted to be a little more sustainable.

Ashkahn: I’ve seen float centers that go as far as putting a little piece of chocolate into the room for everybody. So, there’s really like all sorts of things you can do to kinda go above and beyond there.

Graham: Is there anything that people absolutely should not put in their float tank rooms?

Like there are clearly things they shouldn’t put in there. I think the shower curtains is one that we stumble into. Shower doors. Both of those were just such a hindrance that we walked full face into.

Ashkahn: Almost something else until we start getting into it. Crazy construction world.

Graham: Yeah. So there you have it. That’s what we keep in our rooms. Some other options that people do, and hopefully this has been at least minorly useful to you, as all of our episodes aim to be.

Ashkahn: That’s all we’re shooting for here.

Graham: Minorly useful, which is my nickname in baseball, in college.

Ashkahn: All right we’ll see you guys later.

Graham: Peace.

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