Opening and closing tasks for a float center – DSP 33

What to do when you open and when you close can seem almost arbitrary at times. How do you organize who does what and when? Aside from trial and error, Graham and Ashkahn explain how things work at Float On, which, despite running 24 hours, does have opening and closing shifts each day.

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

Graham: “What are the standard opening and closing tasks that you do as a float center?“

Okay well, I mean, so we’re a 24 hour float center so the distinction between opening and closing is a bit of a blurred line.

Ashkahn: But it’s still … we pretty much have a kinda like, after the last float, there’s like a two hour gap that we do most of our cleaning in and it still pretty much breaks down into kind of  “closing” and “opening”.

Graham: And we do have days like Monday, where we have our work day that’s actually … we close and there’s someone who opens the next day. We know what it’s like to open a shop.

Ashkahn: Yeah, we know that. So, closing is a lot of cleaning really. You not gonna leave the salt water on the ground until the next morning when it’s all crystallized and the longer it will sit there and destroy things and all that sort of stuff so you’re cleaning that stuff after the last float.

Graham: I would say, just as a brief interjection, that closing is by far the crazier part of the float center. As compared to opening.

Ashkahn: Yeah, yeah.

Graham: Way more time consuming, just like you were saying.

Ashkahn: It’s more like back breaking “work”. So, it’s pretty much that, you’re just doing a really thorough clean. So, what usually happens over the course of the day is that you have your transitions between people and you’re cleaning the rooms, but you’re going pretty fast, you’re wiping things off to sanitize them and you’re getting the big salt spots off of things, but you might be missing nooks and crannies and the corners of the handlebar, the grab bars, or underneath your bench or something like that. So, you’re closing task at night is your chance to go back and get all of those nooks and crannies, so you’re really doing a nice thorough clean of everything in the room, the floor, the walls, we wipe down the entire outside of our float tanks every night, we wipe down the benches, we wipe down the trash cans, all the stuff that’s in the room we’re giving once over.

There’s a few things in addition to that, that we only have to do once day like refilling our soap and shampoo and conditioner dispensers on the wall.

Graham: Yeah, unless one of them falls off the wall.

Ashkahn: Unless one of them falls.

Graham: That one’s for you other float tank center owners out there, you know what I’m talking about.

Ashkahn: That’s just like the normal size dispensers they’re going to last you a day, they’re going to be able to hold a day’s worth of product.

Graham: Yeah, no more than a day.

Ashkahn: So, there’s kind of a little thing like that and then depending on your type of treatment for the actual float tank in terms of hydrogen peroxide, chlorine, bromine, whatever you’re using, you might be doing some sort of dosing at the end of the night.

For example, with us with UV and hydrogen peroxide we’re at the, part of our closing task is measuring our levels and dosing to get them back up to the amount we need for the next day, so that’s part of our task.

I should say too that we try to run the pumps for the entire time that we’re doing this too, because in between each person you’ve been doing whatever you’re doing in your area, three turnovers, four turnovers, by now you have whatever half and hour, an hour, and hour and a half however long depending on how many tanks you have it’s going to take to close your center down for the night and you can really just be running the pumps that entire time. Get once nice little extra diligent round of filtration going at the end of the day every day, which will be really nice for your water to get a chance to get everything mixed up and moving through the filtration system.

So, we have those things running while we’re cleaning and I would say this really takes, all this cleaning put together, will take maybe one person 20 minutes per room, something around that whereas I would put one person doing a transition during the middle of the day about five minutes to clean a room.

The other thing that we’re doing is during the transitions when we’re spraying things down with some sort of hard surface sanitizer these products that you’re cleaning with, whatever you’re using whether it’s bleach or 409 spray or whatever product you’re using out there.

Graham: General elbow grease, yeah.

Ashkahn: Yeah, G-E-G.

Graham: Okay.

Ashkahn: Whatever product you’re using they usually have some sort of amount of time they’re supposed to sit on the surface to kill things, so you might read the back of a bottle or look at their information on their website and it might say something like, spray this and let it sit for a minute to kill this list of things, like E.Coli, and pseudomonas, and whatever and then if you let it sit for five minutes it will start to kill these viruses, and if you let it sit for 10 minutes then it will start to kill these fungi and stuff like that and so what we’ll do is during our transitions we’re usually meeting the lower end of that, we’d be letting it sit for the one minute time to kill things and then we’ll use that same spray at that end of the day during the closing time, but we’ll let it sit for that more robust period, that full 10 minutes, to hit that actual hard surface disinfection of the more intense microorganisms that you’re trying to deal with, so we’re getting an extra robust level of cleaning happening at the end of the night by just letting the same product sit for longer before we wipe it off.

Graham: Yeah, and then I guess there’s also just all the general closing things too that happen, right? Like checking voicemails, doing a last email check, doing the general tidying around the lobby, making sure that everything is set and straightened on the tables.

Ashkahn: Yeah, and really ideally you want to try to do as much of that sort of stuff while the last person is floating as possible.

Graham: Yeah, even like sweeping and mopping for the bulk of the space while the people are in the float tanks, they’re the last customers are in there for sure.

Ashkahn: Because that’s just going to save you time, the more you can get of your lobby cleaning done while people are floating the more efficient you’re running everything. So, and they’ll always be a little bit of straightening up and stuff to do after the last people get out, but hopefully you’ve taken care of the bulk of it.

Anything else for closing before we jump to opening? There’s some float tank centers will have bubble wrap or a cover, a kind of pool cover material that they’ll put on their float tanks overnight to prevent too much evaporation or condensation from forming on the ceiling of the float tank.

Graham: Some float centers will also run their pumps overnight without people in the center.

Ashkahn: Yes, true.

Graham: Which I find totally terrifying.

Ashkahn: I mean the concept is nice, getting all that filtration time.

Graham: Getting the filtration in sounds great.

Ashkahn: Is great, but-

Graham: Having something go wrong at all with the pump when you’re not in the building, it’s suddenly just like blasting 50 gallons a minute of salt water out and no one’s around to deal to with it sounds just horrifying.

Ashkahn: It does sound really scary.

Graham: So we don’t, again we’re mainly open 24 hours, but any time when our shop is closed we’ll have to go in to run the pumps every 12 hours or so, so it doesn’t crystallize, but someone’s in the shop when that’s happening. We don’t ever even allow our shop staff to leave if the pumps are running and they’re about to take off for the night, they have to make sure that everything is turned off.

Ashkahn: Yeah, they turn them off before they leave. Yeah, a terrifying sort of thought.

Graham: No, I think that’s about it and the other side of this, which we’ll get in to for opening, is just that the more stuff that you get done during the closing the easier it’s going to be for the opening person, which ends up being really important when something unexpected goes wrong in the morning and now you have floaters who might be waiting around for their appointments, right? If someone comes in and a pump’s not working, it’s really nice to have all of the float tanks dosed with whatever disinfectant that you’re using, to have everything else totally clean and ready to go so that you can deal with that emergency and not fall too far behind for the day.

At some point we were actually trying to split things more between opening and closing to make it a little more fair on our staff and it just became very clear, very fast that the burden goes mainly on the closer to make it easier on the opener.

Ashkahn: Yeah. So, in terms of opening a lot of what you’re doing, I mean you’re kind of double checking to make sure everything’s right, towels in place, robe there-

Graham: Yeah, and then ratting out on the closer if things aren’t right.

Ashkahn: Yeah, yeah, sneaking notes about what they did wrong. Temperatures, you’re checking temperatures is a very common thing that you want to make sure to do in the morning. Check to make sure everything’s in the right ranges and stuff like that and that can just lead from normal operations, like maybe it’s cold outside and your heater wasn’t quite keeping up like it normally does, to more extreme things like maybe your actual heater sensor your thermometer or thermostat on your float tank is malfunctioning and the tanks been getting really hot and it’s too hot to put someone in to, so that’s definitely one of the important things to check.

A lot of what you’re doing is checking stuff in the morning. So, you’re also checking all of your various chemistry levels.

Graham: Which is nice because if you just dosed them the night before, or like tested and then dosed the night before, then in the morning you can kind of confirm that the dosing did what it was supposed to.

Ashkahn: Right, and we probably won’t get in to the details of all the different chemistry stuff, just because it can differ a lot from place to place and what you’re doing and what your regulations are.

Graham: Someone else will have to answer that question.

Ashkahn: What your air filtration system is and everything, but almost certainly you’re doing some sort of taking samples from the float tank and measuring a few things and logging them every morning and that is not the fastest thing in the world, that can be time consuming.

Graham: Yup.

Ashkahn: What we do is we take a little vial and we take a sample from each float tank and then we sit down and we have a few tests that we run on it and that whole process takes maybe like 20 minutes, something like just to do that testing.

You want to kick the pumps on again in the morning just to get everything nice and mixed up and get the temperature in the water to be more consistent as it gets all mixed up together and all that sort of stuff. So, you’re running the pumps if you do have those pool covers or that bubble wrap you’re taking that stuff off, you’re spot checking for any salt that might have showed up that the night person missed because it was still wet when they were there or something like that.

I guess you’re probably, there’s probably going to be some voicemails and emails to answer, you’ll have to unlock the door and let the customers in.

Graham: Yeah, and again it’s sort of a damage control position too. The reason that the morning is all about doing these checks and analyzing how everything is performing is because that’s the time you want to catch it, not after people have already floating for the day, right? So, ideally you leave enough room for the morning people to come in and there’s actually a point where they’ve finished all their morning tasks and they’re just doing basic answering email or pushing things forward and aren’t running like crazy just because that buffer’s very useful when again things don’t come out right or you do need to readjust the chemical levels in your float tanks or you do need to figure out a way to lower down the temperature and throw some cold water in there until you bring it down.

Ashkahn: Yeah, you find out something’s not working, and yeah.

Graham: Yup … Yeah, I think without going in to like exact list of what the tasks are, that’s definitely the big one’s and kind of the philosophy behind it.

Ashkahn: Perfect, well if you guys have other questions for us out there hope over to floattanksolutions.com/podcast.

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