Something in the world of floating have you stumped?
Show Highlights
Listen up future float center owners! Every one of you has probably wondered “What exactly does a transition look like in a float center from one float to the next?”
In this episode, Graham and Ashkahn explain exactly how they do transitions at Float On and why they do it the way they do.
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Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)
Ashkahn: Welcome to the podcast today. We have a fun question here. It is, “What are the things that need to take place during a transition?”
So, there’s five things that need to happen in a transition. Number one is running your filtration system. Plenty of stuff that we won’t go into at this point but that’s just one thing that has to happen. You gotta run your filtration system.
Number two is a visual check of the float tank. I think this is important every single time you do a transition. You gotta just look at the float tank. Look in the water. Make sure everything’s fine. Most of the time, the most common thing you’re gonna find is a neck pillow, right? Someone was in there. They had a neck pillow. They didn’t take it out when they left and you gotta get it out of there. Second most common thing I find is a rogue earplug. So, an earplug that came out of someone’s ear at some point in the float. We specifically get bright orange ear plugs so that they’re easy to spot during these visual inspections of the tanks during our transitions. The third most common thing is maybe like a hairball or something, you gotta kinda skim out of there, perhaps.
Graham: I was gonna say a crystal that someone left behind.
Ashkahn: A crystal that’s around? I think that’s like the fourth most common thing.
And then, you always want to check for worst case scenario sort of stuff, which is also probably something that we shouldn’t get into in the scope of this here. Always checking in case something catastrophic did go down and you need to deal with that.
Graham: AFRs. Look that up if you don’t know what that is.
Ashkahn: That’s step one and two. Run your filtration system. Two, visual inspection of the float tank.
Graham: Actually, if possible, do those in the reverse order, too. Like, ideally if you can, you’re doing the visual inspection of the float tank before you actually run your filtration system, so if there anything in there, it’s not getting sucked in.
Ashkahn: Yeah, ideally. I think lot of float centers in practice have trouble doing that just because they’re running their filtration systems maybe before people are coming out of the rooms. So, that’s definitely ideal, and sometimes not entirely possible for all float centers.
Graham: I’ll say feasible.
Ashkahn: Feasible.
Okay, the third thing is basically getting salt off of all the major salty spots, right? Anything anybody touches at any point inside the room is gonna have salt on it. Grab bars, light buttons, handles to your shower doors, your float tank, the lip of the float tank, the front part of the float tank under where people get out.
Graham: Every single thing in the room.
Ashkahn: Everything! Just everything is gonna have salt on it, and you gotta get that salt off. This step is where a lotta construction stuff comes in. There’s a lotta tricks you can do with how you build your room that makes this specific step as easy as possible, the biggest one being putting your showers as absolutely close to the doors of your float tanks as possible. Things like floor drains everywhere, proper slopes, color. The color you choose for things is really important for this. That kind of brushed nickel handlebar might be really nice and modern-looking, but you’re gonna want the white one, because that one’s gonna hide salt a lot better. So, as you’re wiping things off, if you miss a little nook and cranny somewhere, it’s okay. It’ll be really hard to spot. In general, the area that they’re touching is gonna be cleaned off, so colors, and kind of white, off white, colors with speckled bits of white mixed in to their patterns.
Graham: Mineral salt crystal designs on your walls.
Ashkahn: I did have someone suggest to me once, “Why not just build the room out of salt and that way, as people get it salty, it’ll just make the room stronger?”
Graham: I know. It sounds amazing. I don’t know the logistics of that, but it sounds amazing.
Ashkahn: So getting salt off of everything is another good step.
Graham: This is also where our pitch-black floors that had a gap of like three feet between our float tank and our shower with giant doors on our showers was really not a good idea.
Ashkahn: That was what we started as. We learned real fast. That was a big mistake.
So, getting salt off everything. The other step is sanitizing everything. You wanna go in and make sure that someone is not gonna spread disease to somebody else through being barefoot in the same place or having a skin rash and touching a handlebar or something like that. You can get whatever sanitizer you prefer. Most of the off the shelf items out there ranging from bleach to more industrial versions of Simple Green to various things like that are gonna have the capacity to sanitize between people and really, the important thing that I didn’t know before getting into the whole float tank world with all these different cleaning products you using is they all have kill times associated with them. If you just spray it on and wipe it off immediately and you don’t let it sit on the surface for the amount of time it’s supposed to sit there, you’re really not cleaning in the same way that you think you’re cleaning.
Basically, you can read the back of the bottle or sometimes it’s on the website for these different products. The EPA actually registers these products for different usages. You can actually go look up and they’ll say, After 30 seconds, it kills this list of things, and if you leave it on for a minute instead of 30 seconds, it’ll also kill this list of things, and if you leave it on for 10 minutes, then you start killing norovirus and certain fungi and stuff like that.
Look at that and make sure you’re doing it right. Often, the range you’re looking for is probably around a minute in terms of when you’re leaving it on there, so that’s something you gotta build into your transitions, too. You gotta spray down, and know that you’re leaving it there for a minute. Maybe you go do some other stuff before coming back and actually wiping it off.
Graham: You might be surprised once you actually look up those kill times how long some things take. Some things might have a 5 minute, or we’ve even seen things with a 10 minute kill time on certain items. A lot of times, if you’re not choosing the right kind of sanitizer for that, it can really cause issues.
Ashkahn: Yeah, some products, like the most basic version of Simple Green, I think, will never achieve certain kill rates even if you left it on for hours, as kind of even more industrial versions of Simple Green will in a minute. The Pro D5 is a slightly weaker version.
Graham: We call them Complicated Green.
Ashkahn: Yeah! Actually properly sanitizing things. You’re basically just trying to hit anything that someone is contacting, right? So the ground, the handlebars, the light button, stuff like that. Places that one person’s gonna touch that the next person’s also gonna touch.
And the last thing is replacing everything in the room that’s been used, like the towels, the robes, the earplugs, all of the stuff that we talked about before. You need to get all that stuff out and put new stuff in. We actually have a good method for trying to do that as fast as possible.
Graham: We do pretty much a full basket swap with all of the little things that go into a room, and grab the extras like the sandals and the neck pillow when we’re leaving, but essentially, we do a full room swap. Anything that was in the room for one person, we just switch it out, get it outta there, bring in the new, fresh batch, and that’s regardless of whether these things have been used or not, just because even if you’re trying to reuse the things that haven’t been used by the previous floater, the time to sort through those and figure out what’s been used and what hasn’t is not during this crazy transition crunch time, right?
The time to sort it out is when everyone’s in float tanks and you have a fair amount of time in between floats to actually take a look at the earplugs and figure out whether someone’s used them or not. Slowly over time, we’ve just found that the more that we can encourage that, the more we can make that an easy process, fully swapping out everything in the room, the quicker transitions go, and the more confident that we are that everything is actually being disinfected between every person, and we’re not ending up with something like earplugs where one of them was used and the other one wasn’t, and the person folded it and put it back in the little earplug container and placed it perfectly back in the basket, which has happened.
Or, people re-fold their towels exactly like they found them in the room despite the fact that the towels are now used and salty.
Ashkahn: Everybody’s gonna use a towel. I don’t think anyone made it out without using a towel before. Someone, I mean, you gotta use a towel at some point in the process.
Graham: So the point is, switching everything out. Don’t check it on the fly. That’s really the way that you want to make sure that everything in your room is being exchanged.
Ashkahn: It really is just that quality control you get from that. It’s really, really hard to train yourself to remember to check the sandals every single time if they only get used one out of every six floats or something like that. When they’re not happening that frequently, it’s a very, very difficult habit to build, and ultimately too difficult. We couldn’t get people to do it and people were ending up with salty stuff and things like that.
So, just swapping them out 100% of the time solves that problem and it’s faster and it’s better for sanitation. It means you can clean things properly. If you have sandals that people are using from one person to the next, you can let them sit with that sanitizer for 10 minutes and get to that full fungicidal kill time, and then wash it off and let it dry before putting it back into the room. It really kind of is a win across a lot of different variables.
Graham: How many things was that? Was that five?
Ashkahn: That was five. That was five. Visual check of the float tank, running your filtration system, wiping salt off of things, sanitizing things, and replacing things that were used in the room. Those are the things that you need to do. And then, I guess, giving people a walk-through if they’re new is five and a half. Not everybody needs that.
Graham: Alright. There you go. Transitions explained. Chicka-chicka-bow.
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Given that it’s so close to home, the float centers in Seattle are a lot more familiar to us. Our visits here were more like a high school reunion than they were like the first day of school. During some of our visits, we were picking up conversations right where we left them.
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