Tips for offering sessions open air float tanks – DSP 34

Make no mistake, open air float tanks are a next level challenge for float centers. Graham and Ashkahn explain exactly what to look out for if you’re thinking of using one of these bad boys in your center.

FTS Product – Float Tank Comparison Guide (Free)

Listen to Just the Audio

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

Graham: Today’s question is “I was wondering if you had any tips specifically for open-air float tanks.”

Ashkahn: Oh yeah. I got some tips.

Graham: Yeah? What are your tips?

Ashkahn: All right, here are some tips. Open-air float tanks, these are like float tanks that are built into the room much more-

Graham: Oh I thought they meant like out in a field. Like really open air, you know? There’s no center around.

Ashkahn: Like you just pour some salt into a small pond you find somewhere.

Graham: Well number one, it’s gonna be hard to heat that pond. So yeah, so open right? The walls of the float tank are the walls of the room.

Ashkahn: Yeah. So in my mind there’s two big things that become harder with open-air float tanks, which is sound and temperature/humidity really.

Graham: Yeah, and with that whole salt crystallization thing, which we’ll talk about in a second.

Ashkahn: Right. Yeah, yeah.

Graham: So yeah, but I guess my tip is don’t go into it expecting an easy time. It is not easy to make as good a float in an open air float tank as it is in something that’s self-contained.

Ashkahn: No. You’re basically losing a layer of isolation. Right? A float tank is like a device that’s in a room that’s in a building. And an open float tank removes … You lose one of those layers.

Graham: Or yeah, you can even lose the building too. You lose two layers there if you really go open.

Ashkahn: That’s true. Back in that pond. I mean maybe we should talk about the fact that they’re kind of … It’s not that open air float tanks are a terrible idea, and you should never do them.

Graham: No they’re great. They’re-

Ashkahn: The floats are nice. You do feel really open. Although the temperature stuff and the humidity stuff that we’ll talk about is difficult. If you do it right, you can get a lot more ventilation and fresh air and stuff like that in the float environment, which is nice and a lot harder to do in an enclosed tank.

Graham: So they’re cool. I think there’s a certain wow factor to open float tanks.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: And like we’ve mentioned in-

Ashkahn: Easier to take pictures.

Graham: … in another episode too, the claustrophobia apparently. Just one-third of all people in the world are claustrophobic, so this obviously is a nice way to immediately address that. If you do have an open float tank, you can show off to people if they get a little nervous about feeling confined.

Ashkahn: Yeah. So sound. Let’s talk about sound, which is basically, it’s exactly what you think. It’s just you’ve lost a layer of soundproofing. That basically puts a bigger burden on the soundproofing of your room to really do a good job.

We’ve done this. We have two open rooms in our float center, and we have four normal enclosed tanks. We had to do a lot more soundproofing in those open rooms that we did the other ones. Everything from the walls to the ceiling to the door was a big one. All of a sudden the sound getting through the door is of way more importance to stop because you’re like right there inside the door.

All that stuff was not just kind of difficult to construct but expensive. Soundproofing costs a lot of money.

Graham: Yep, and pretty extreme too. The other rooms, the ceilings are completely fine just naturally and in our open pools, we had to actually put in full suspended drywall ceilings, which is not a simple thing. You’re basically hanging a whole second ceiling from a bunch of clips and wires and having it hover there as an added layer of protection. So we had to do some pretty extreme things to make sure that there was actually … I mean when we first installed them, they weren’t quiet.

Ashkahn: No, we had to axe them.

Graham: They were like this is how we know from experience that it kind of sucks doing open float rooms.

Ashkahn: We did like the same level of soundproofing we’d done to our other rooms at first, and it didn’t work. What was fine for our existing rooms, all of a sudden was not enough for our new rooms.

Graham: So we immediately had to take them down and do another month worth of construction to actually try to do some soundproofing fixes and then bring them up. Then do more small tweaks.

Ashkahn: Yeah. So more severe walls. We had to do the suspended ceiling. For the door … In our normal rooms, for our doors, we have a nice little kind of rubber soundproofing bar system that goes on the bottom of the door just to-

Graham: Yes, sweep and saddle.

Ashkahn: Sweep and saddle, just to close that bottom gap. And on these rooms, the open rooms, we had to have that system for the entire perimeter of the door. It wasn’t enough just putting it on the bottom.

Graham: Yeah, so full gasket system going around there to … It feels a little bit like an airlock.

Ashkahn: Yeah. So all that was more difficult. And they’re still probably our least soundproof rooms despite all that extra soundproofing.

Graham: Yeah, for sure. I mean we get … Yeah. Not sound complaints, I guess, but more people coming out saying they think they heard small clunks or things coming through there.

Ashkahn: And it’s a lot harder to have them isolated from the building in terms of actual physical connection points and dealing with vibrational noise. When you have a unit like that built in, there’s a lot more spots where you really have to make sure you’re doing things right. As opposed to a float tank, which you can mostly sit up on its pedestal of vibration isolation pads.

Graham: Yeah, or it takes a lot more room. Right?

Ashkahn: Or it takes a lot more room.

Graham: You can have an open float tank with space all around it not touching any walls. But yeah, then there’s a lot of space that you have to build around an open tank to achieve that as well.

Let’s talk about what? Humidity?

Ashkahn: Yeah. There’s a segue here, which is that-

Graham: Great. Because mine was pretty rough.

Ashkahn: Check this out. No, check this out. Check this out. The other thing that’s difficult about noise is that even your HVAC system, which might be fine in your other rooms with the vents pulling and pushing air during people’s floats. All of a sudden, those HVAC vents are in the room, in the float tank basically when someone’s floating.

So we’ve had trouble being able to even run our HVAC continuously because of our open rooms, specifically because of our open rooms. It’s just that little bit of noise that the vents create and the HVAC creates while it’s doing its purge cycle. That’s not enough noise to bother the rooms that have enclosed float tanks in them, but it is enough to be heard in the open float rooms.

Graham: And I see your segue, which is the other reason that you can’t really run an HVAC the same way that you would in a normal float tank room is that it moves around the air. Which is fine when you’re inside a float tank, but when you’re in an open pool, all of a sudden that air kind of moving around will actually … Like you can feel it first of all, which isn’t great.

But you’re way more likely to get cooled even if the temperature inside the room is really high. Just that little bit of draft is actually kind of cold especially when you have some water on you. And it starts crystallizing salt on your stomach and getting scratchy.

Ashkahn: Yeah, that’s really like the humidity thing. I put it in two camps. Right? There’s the temperature itself, which is … You basically need to have the entire room as hot as you would want the inside of a float tank to be, which presents a few problems.

One is if you have an HVAC system that you can only control one temperature for all your float rooms like if you don’t have individual temperature control over the rooms. Then what are you doing? Are you setting all of your rooms as hot as they need to be for the open rooms? Or are you setting them kind of cool enough to be okay for the other rooms. So there’s some butting heads of comfort in different rooms that are happening.

And it’s just a lot more space to heat. Right? All of a sudden, there’s a lot more air in that space that needs to be heated up and kept to temperature.

Graham: And there’s this weird byproduct of that too, which is now because your entire room is so hot including the dressing room. All of a sudden showering post float and getting dressed is like really uncomfortable.

Ashkahn: Yeah it sucks. It’s all hot and moist as you’re putting your clothes back on.

Graham: Ideally, we’d almost have this automated system that kicked down the temperature and sucked out all the hot air when they’re getting out of the float or something really fancy and crazy like that. But these are the types-

Ashkahn: Or you just have some sort of barrier between your dressing room and your float tank room. Some places do it like that too.

Graham: Sure, I guess, which we have seen. We have seen open rooms that are closed off behind doors, which I guess makes sense for that. We certainly have, if not complaints, then certainly some hot customers coming out of the rooms and putting on their shoes out in the lobby. Or just getting as dressed as humanly decent. Then coming out to do the rest of their dressing out where it’s not so hot.

Ashkahn: The nice thing is, along these same lines of ventilation and stuff, you really can get a lot more air exchange and fresh air and stuff like that into an open room, which I think is nice. Ventilation is not, I would say, one of the strongest points of a lot of float tanks. It’s a difficult thing to do well. These are small kind of enclosed spaces. So having an open room and having a chance to have a nice ventilation is a nice float experience.

But it brings up the other point that you were talking about before. If you take too much humidity out of the air, what ends up happening is that all the salt water that’s on the front of your body that’s exposed to the air, the water will just start to evaporate a little bit more easily and dry up. And all the salt will be left behind. You’ll get this layer of salt crystallizing on the front of your body.

Graham: And I think it’s like it is humidity, but I also think even just a little airflow will do that. Even with humid air, just a tiny air current or being able to feel that all also kind of has that crystallization effect.

Ashkahn: And it’s just uncomfortable basically.

Graham: Yeah. You wouldn’t think that it would make such a big difference. You’re like, okay, well it’s salty water anyway. But yeah it’s like if you go to rest your hand on your belly.

Ashkahn: If you go to like move or … Yeah.

Graham: It’s almost like gets itchy really fast because it scratches a little bit.

Ashkahn: It’s tiny little pokies.

Graham: Yeah. It’s not … Anyway.

Ashkahn: But you can fix that problem.

Graham: It’s fine. You can do it.

Ashkahn: Yeah. You just need to have enough humidity and stuff like that. You need to drop back down your extreme ventilation and get it to a point where it’s not creating that.

Graham: And basically all of these things are addressable. You can make your entire room a float tank and make it soundproof and make it temperature controlled and make it so that the humidity is proper, and you don’t have this crystallization. But as far as tips go, just make sure that you’re planning for all of that.

It’s not as easy as setting up a regular closed float tank or float cabin. It’s a lot more tinkering. So if you are doing this, plan on spending more money on it. Plan on spending a few more weeks and kind of a soft launch of that room specifically to do tinkering and make sure that you’re getting it all up to snuff.

Oh I guess I do have one other tip.

Ashkahn: All right.

Graham: My other tip is for pricing. So when we were first thinking about starting up with these kind of larger open pools, initially we were thinking about actually raising the price on them and having them a little more expensive than floats in our other rooms.

And ultimately, we didn’t do that. We ended up doing so much tinkering, and there were kind of things that were slightly wrong with them. And it took us maybe a year to kind of deal with all that soundproofing and water crystallization.

But now that we have been charging the same price, I think I’d advise people to do that as well. To me even having this kind of bigger room and having it more open, I don’t like having a difference between the float experiences or kind of making people think that one is monetarily more valuable than the other one.

Again, even if it seems like it’s a more expensive room and costs you more money to do. And it’s more of a pain to get up to level, like it is kind of this VIP room in a sense. But I’d encourage you to price it at the same as your other tanks. I like putting that into people’s heads that this experience of a float is going to be the same no matter if you’re in this pod or in this big room. It’s just different tastes of the same experience I guess.

Ashkahn: Good tip.

Graham: Thanks buddy.

Latest Blog Posts