Something in the world of floating have you stumped?
Show Highlights
How do people float in float tanks? With salt, of course! Salt water is denser than regular water, so it can hold more weight.
But not all salt is made the same. Find out about what salt to use in your float tanks, how it’s made, and the different options out there for float tanks (plus which salts count as “delicious”) in this episode of the Daily Solutions Podcast.
Show Resources
FTS Blog – Getting To Know Your Epsom Salt
Listen to Just the Audio
Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)
Graham: Okay, so today’s question is, what’s the difference between sea salt and float salt. And what the heck is dead sea salt?
Ashkahn: Okay. Interesting. Well I’m gonna go ahead and separate these into the delicious and not delicious categories.
Graham: That’s pretty much how he separates everything in our lives.
Ashkahn: Yeah. That kind of the base one classification … that I go into here. So, if you try to eat float salt, it’s not delicious. That’s the first thing you should really know. Does not taste good. You’ll probably only do it once, and then realize that you never want that in your mouth ever again.
Graham: And dead sea salt too, is also-
Ashkahn: Yeah.
Graham: -in the not delicious category.
Ashkahn: Yeah, that’s not delicious. However … Are we talking about, what was the other thing?
Graham: Sea salt. Regular sea salt. Live sea salt.
Ashkahn: Yeah. Is very delicious. I-
Graham: Especially out of ocean water.
Ashkahn: Yeah, like sometimes I would just take scoops of ocean water and sprinkle it over my breakfast.
Graham: Over your cereal.
Ashkahn: Yeah. Yes. And so it’s because the basic chemical composition of these things is different. Right, they’re not actually … Salts are something that forms that’s a structure of molecules, that forms into this kind of crystal and lattice. But, the molecules that are going into them can be completely different right. You can have chlorine salts as well. In a sense.
Graham: Like, sodium chloride chlorine salts? Like table salt?
Ashkahn: Right, so that’s the first one right, table salt is sodium chloride.
And that again, delicious category. So the sea salt when … Is basically a completely different chemical than what is in the float tank, which is magnesium sulfate. So those are the most specific of these. The dead sea salt is, as far as I know, like a mix of things.
Graham: Right, yeah. So it’s mostly I think, sodium chloride.
And then with just a bunch of other minerals and things that have kind of accumulated and mixed in.
Ashkahn: So, it’s multiple, it’s different percentages of different things. Of different types of salt and I don’t really know much more about the actual breakdown of dead sea salt than that.
Graham: Yeah, nor do I, but for the sake of this conversation, I think that the main question really is about what makes our float tank salt … Why can’t someone just buy a bunch of salt from the store and pour it into a float tank.
Ashkahn: Well, you can. Actually you can buy a bunch of salt from the store and pour it into a float tank.
Graham: We’ve been doing it wrong this entire time?
Ashkahn: Yeah, yeah, and in fact it’d be cheaper. Like I’ve seen 50 pound bags of sodium chloride at Costco for like $10 or something.
And a little piece of float history, that’s actually how it started with float tanks. I mean there was many, many, years of just water, and then when they first-
Graham: So no salt?
Ashkahn: No salt. Zero salt, and when they first started introducing salt into it, in an attempt to make the water more buoyant, they started with sodium chloride. Table salt. And got it up to that kind of same level of saturation and basically just found that it’s … If you had any sort of small cut or abrasion or something like that, it would sting and it just would not stop stinging. And as much as it did help and make you float, it was really uncomfortable to actually be in.
Graham: So that’s essentially the main reason for not doing that. That’s why even if you could get it cheaper, you don’t just wanna go down to the store and use table salt, is because it’s way harsher on people. And those stings are from cuts that you have, which you can really still feel in a float tank very much. Don’t really go away with the table salt, nearly as much. So that’s why people don’t do that.
Ashkahn: The Epsom salt on the other hand, still stings like your not gonna get away from that. But it seems to only sting for a few minutes, maybe two, three, four minutes and then after that it kinda fades away and you’re good to go. So it’s much less intense and you can actually still float as long as you’re willing to. Either being a little bit uncomfortable for a few minutes, or put, if it’s a small enough little scrape or something, some of that petroleum jelly on it and make a little force field around it. And because there’s health benefits associated with the dead sea and floating in it and that sort of has its own lore going along with it …
Just to loop back around to the dead sea salts as well. I think there’s this, “why can’t I fill my float tank with dead sea salt,” is that exact same reason as table salt. Which is, it’s also mainly sodium chloride. It’s also gonna be way harsher on your skin. Just not as pleasant an experience. That said, I do know some float tank centers who sprinkle dead sea salt into their float tanks alongside it. So maybe 10% dead sea salts and the rest, 90% of the salt being magnesium sulfate.
Graham: Yeah, even 10% is much higher than I normally hear. I often hear of people put in like, even just a few cups in or-
Ashkahn: A scoop.
Graham: Yeah.
Ashkahn: Yeah, so, that’s also an option. We never played around with it. So I have no idea how that actually turns out functionally. But I kind of can imagine that it actually makes that much of a difference on the perception at least or the abrasion from having it in there.
Graham: Yeah, I would be surprised if you could feel a difference on cuts on your body or anything like that. I dunno if there are actual health benefits or not. I think we’re trying to figure out how much you absorb stuff like that through your skin. So that’s a bit of an unknown.
Ashkahn: Yeah, for any of these two. Eating salt, floating in salt, floating in dead sea salt.
Graham: Well eating salt … I think we know.
Ashkahn: It’s good for you. We know it gets in but, I mean, it’s still like I feel like every year there’s a different argument back about how beneficial or not salt is.
Graham: Yeah, that’s true.
Ashkahn: So, just like the medical world where, in a huge quandary about the benefits of certain things.
Graham: Yeah.
Ashkahn: All right, so hopefully that answered your question. And we’ll be here same time tomorrow so, tune back in. Thanks guys.
Graham: Later.
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Graham and Ashkahn share their thoughts on psychedelics and floating and how, as a business, they can be completely separated while still being important, as well as explaining why some people might reasonably decide to disassociate from them.
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Latest Blog Posts
The Basics of Float Tank Sanitation
Some of the most common questions you’ll get as a float center operator involve the cleanliness of the tanks. This post will be an introduction to some of the most commonplace sanitation methods used in float tanks. These are generally either chemicals that go in the water or devices that attach to your filtration system. We’ll be discussing chlorine, bromine, ozone, UV, and hydrogen peroxide, which accounts for the sanitation methods used on nearly every float tank on the market.
Testing and Maintaining Float Tank Water Quality
Editors Note: This is a revision of a past blog post, updated to reflect the most current sanitation methods and standards
In a perfect world, you could just pour water and salt into a float tank and it would stay pure and clean and fresh and salty forever. In the real world, conditions in the water are constantly changing, so keeping your water safe and clean takes a fair amount of vigilance.
This post covers how we maintain basic water quality in the float tank, except for sanitization methods, which will be covered in their own beastly sanitation blog post. Stay tuned for that coming out next week!
Floating, mental health, and wellness
This post will explore the intersection of floating with the concepts, beliefs, and experiences related to mental health and wellness, with a focus on anxiety and depression. I’ll explore my own story as it relates to floating before diving into the current intersections of floating and mental health, with a look at past, current, and potential opportunities for research and personal growth.
Massage, Acupuncture, and Float Tanks… A Chat with Sandra Calm
We’ve seen lots of float centers that aren’t just float centers.
Many have massage, some offer counseling, some have yoga classes next door. Lots of people start out either by incorporating float tanks into a larger business, or with float tanks only being one of many modalities at their center. Being specialists in floating, Float On has not mastered anything else.
So, to help gain insight into this growing aspect of the industry, we contacted our old friend, Sandra Calm. She started up The Float Shoppe here in Portland with her husband and podcast sensation, Dylan Calm, back in 2011. When they first opened, they had just two float tanks, and slowly added acupuncture, massage, counseling, along with two more tanks. Talk about expansion!
She was more than happy to take some time for the industry to help us understand just what it’s like to run a center with multiple services by answering some questions.
