Something in the world of floating have you stumped?
Show Highlights
Graham and Ashkahn have been around the proverbial float block. They’ve visited centers all over the world, consulted with them, and trained them on how to make their centers as good as possible. It’s tempting to ask them, specifically, what are some of the most common mistakes they’ve seen in this time.
Fortunately, someone did. The duo hash out exactly what they think of when it comes to both “common” and “expensive” construction mistakes for float centers, especially where those two points intersect on the float center Venn diagram of unhappiness.
Show Resources
FTS Product – Float Center Construction Packet – How to Build a Float Center
FTS Blog – Float On’s Halloween Spooktacular (horror stories about float center construction)
Listen to Just the Audio
Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)
Graham: Yo, yo, yo, yo.
Ashkahn: Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. This is Ashkahn.
Graham: And I’m Graham.
Ashkahn: And we have a question from somebody that we are going to answer today on this podcast.
Graham: That is a really good description of what we do here.
Ashkahn: Yeah.
Graham: And that question is …
Ashkahn: Yeah, that was your cue.
Graham: Yeah, it wasn’t the best cue that I’ve taken. “What are the most common/expensive construction mistakes you’ve seen float centers make?”
Ashkahn: Yeah, there are some big ones that you can make.
Graham: Yeah, and we’ve talked about some of them here too, just kind of scattered across different episodes, so-
Ashkahn: Here’s a-
Graham: You should go back and listen to every episode and see if you can spot them.
Ashkahn: Yeah.
Graham: It’s kind of like a Where’s Waldo, Where’s Waldo kind of thing.
Ashkahn: All right, let’s do this thing.
Graham: Okay.
Ashkahn: Number one, the-
Graham: Carpet. Putting carpet in your float room.
Ashkahn: That’s not very common.
Graham: But it is expensive.
Ashkahn: It’s not even as expensive as other things-
Graham: It’s true.
Ashkahn: You just rip the carpet up. Number one, improperly sloped floors.
Graham: Super common.
Ashkahn: Super common and very difficult to fix/expensive.
Graham: Yeah, because you have to tear out your flooring, re-slope things.
Ashkahn: Yeah, I mean, it’s just crazy, and it’s just hard. It’s just hard. You have all these floor drains in your room and they all need to have slopes going down to them, and it’s a very small room, and you know, you don’t have this crazy elite concrete guy because you have a relatively small project compared to other concrete projects in the world.
Graham: I’d say that’s actually what makes it the most, one of the most common. A lot of people try to slope their floors. We’ve seen so many centers that they’ve made an attempt to slope their floors and what’s happens is half of the slope works and half just dumps the water out their door, or does something equally as awful, you know?
Ashkahn: Or just like a pool, as soon as you get like a little bit of puddling somewhere, it means you have to clean that spot up every single time, forever. Like, every single transition, you need to have to be like, “Okay, gotta go get this puddle spot.” That’s why it’s so annoying. Like, little tiny mistakes that lead to something where the water doesn’t go down the drain well is like, continuous ongoing work for you and your staff for the rest of the time that you have that there.
Graham: Which is expensive in staffing cost and then also expensive to fix for something relatively little. You’re like, “Wow, I wish this room drained better,” and it’s like $40,000 to go in and like actually correct it for all of your rooms, you know?
Ashkahn: Yeah.
Graham: It’s insane. So yeah, that’s a really good one. I would say-
Ashkahn: Yeah, number two.
Graham: Yeah number two, was ceramic tile and cementitious grout, I would say is hugely expensive, right?
Ashkahn: Yeah.
Graham: Because you need to use certain types of tile and grout for it not to be destroyed by salt water. That’s going to be, usually porcelain tile and epoxy grout. That’s not obvious necessarily if you’ve not worked in this kind of corrosive setting before. Even in wet environments they’ll use non-porcelain tile because having the non epoxy grout, because having water soak in and then be able to evaporate is actually part of how a lot of tile rooms work and function. But in this case, they can’t be porous because salt water will wreak havoc on them.
Using them not only means that you have to go back and redo all of your tile and all of your grout when it starts decaying, and cracking, and stuff like that, but you’re likely to have water damage on all of the soundproofing and the expensive work that you did behind that tile.
Ashkahn: Yeah.
Graham: So likely tearing out all of yours soundproofing or at least a layer of it.
Ashkahn: Big trouble. Big trouble.
Graham: You might have mold back there in which case you need to do mold remediation as well. Yeah, so improperly sealing your walls and waterproofing in general, but I’d say within that is like a main category, is just using the wrong kind of tile.
Ashkahn: Yeah, and grout.
Graham: Yeah. Number three.
Ashkahn: Number three. Number three. Not having enough space to get your float tanks in and out of the room they’re supposed to go into.
Graham: Oh, good one. Yeah.
Ashkahn: Super common. So many stories out there of people building beautiful, nice, soundproofed, waterproofed walls, and then realizing their float tank’s too big. It doesn’t turn quite right because the hallway’s too narrow, or you’re just not quite making it up or down a staircase, or it’s not getting through the doorway, or for whatever reason, you now have to cut out a chunk of beautiful, thick, soundproof, expensive, waterproof wall, to be able to get a float tank in.
And any time you’d ever want to get that float tank out of the room, which doesn’t happen that often but it does happen, now it’s build into the room. You have to cut that same wall out. Huge trouble, super common.
Graham: Yeah, it’s a good one. That is a good one. We see it happen so often.
Ashkahn: Number four?
Graham: Number four.
Ashkahn: Number four.
Graham: Four-alido. Quattro. I would say extending your soundproofing all the way to the ceiling, or sorry, to the ceiling but not to the roof.
Ashkahn: Right.
Graham: So not extending your soundproofing past your ceiling, all the way to the roof or the next story.
Ashkahn: Yeah.
Graham: Because you’ve just built these nice soundproof walls, you’ve surrounded your float tank with them, your ceiling is finished, or it was finished before you did this. The time to do ceiling work is when there’s nothing else around for it to fall on, for you to have to kind of wedge little pieces up into the joists and stuff like that. If you don’t extend your sound proofing up past where your ceiling is so you actually have this kind of full barrier going all the way up to the next level of your building, then it means sound is just going to go right past all of your soundproofing. It’s just going to kind of hop over your wall. Like it follows the path of least resistance so it’s going to go through your thin ceiling, over the top of your wall, and back through a thin ceiling, right into your float room. It’s kind of all of this money wasted on the soundproofing that you did build because you’re not achieving near what it’s capable of if you’d just raised it up a little higher.
Ashkahn: Raise the roof.
Graham: You gotta the raise the roof.
Ashkahn: At least raise the walls.
Graham: The other expensive part is it’s not cheap to go back and replace that. To go in you either have to decide yeah, how you’re going to tackle this. Are you going to cut a thin slice of ceiling out on either side and then wedge little pieces in which is what we did at Float On, and was a very long process, and tedious, and hands still kind of hurt from thinking about doing that. Or, are you going to, yeah, tear out a bigger portion of the wall so it’s easier to extend back up? But then you just wasted a ton of money and resources building and finishing this wall that you’re now tearing out in little bits so you can extend it higher. So yeah, getting that right from the beginning is-
Ashkahn: Big trouble.
Graham: Another big one. Number five?
Ashkahn: Number five.
Graham: Number five.
Ashkahn: Number five. Not having float tanks. How many people build these beautiful float centers and then they just don’t put any float tanks in there?
Graham: Get out of here.
Ashkahn: And it’s like, what are your customers going to float in? You know? It’s crazy. Super common.
Graham: All right, number six? Do you actually have a number five over there?
Ashkahn: No, that’s it. I think those are the only problems that I think can happen.
Graham: I’ll say another one for soundproofing that’s common but not entirely expensive to fix is, getting unnecessary vibration into your float tank. You either set up the float tank so that it’s touching the wall or it’s not touching a wall, but it’s one that’s built in like a cabin style, like an ocean float room or something. When you build it in, it’s just those wooden pieces that you’re using as the mounts for the kind of outside finishing are just right up against the wall, it’s drilled into a wall. The base is just touching the floor. These are all weak points where despite all of your soundproofing, vibration is one of the hardest things to block out which is why it’s so important to completely isolate your float tank from anything else.
You know, having a vibration isolation system down underneath it where you use vibration isolation pads with a little stand on top of it. Making sure that it’s not coming into rigid contact with the walls. Making sure that even for its pump system, that the pump system is up on vibration isolation pads and there’s just no way of sound to travel through the ground, or the walls, into the float tank without some kind of disjointed semi air gap going on there. That one’s not expensive to fix, but it is really common, and it’s expensive in the sense that you’ve invested a lot in soundproofing. You’re not making like 50% out of the use to it, just because you didn’t go that extra 10% and make sure that everything’s actually isolated from vibration.
Ashkahn: Yeah. So there you go, six top reasons that six common mistakes that-
Graham: Call it five and a half. Yeah.
Ashkahn: Yeah, your last one is kind of a half one. If you guys have other questions that we can answer in list form like this, then go over to floattanksolutions.com/podcast and type them in, and you may just hear it. You may just hear us talking about it.
Graham: All right, thanks everybody.
Ashkahn: Bye.
Recent Podcast Episodes
Float Centers in Hip Neighborhoods – DSP 199
Do float centers in the hip part of town do better than ones on the outskirts? Graham and Ashkahn are well versed on this in that Float On is in a fairly hip part of Portland.
The guys break down some of the benefits of being one of the “cool” businesses in town as well as some of the serious drawbacks. Naturally, things like foot traffic aren’t as important. Almost no one walks into a float center and hops in a tank off the street. So there are fringe benefits to it, like awareness, but if you decide on going to a different part of town, then you’re not automatically doing a disservice to your brand.
Can You Clean a Float Tank with Vinegar? – DSP 198
You have to change out your float tank water eventually. Is it a good idea to give your float tank a vinegar cleanse when you do? is that effective? Is it too much work for the results? Are there better solutions to keep your tank clean and fresh?
Graham and Ashkahn discuss while providing assurances like “either you’re not crazy or we’re all crazy”, so that’s nice.
Have you Experienced Challenging Floats? – DSP 197
Graham and Ashkahn share stories about their most challenging floats. Everything from extreme physical discomfort to literally staying in too long.
They also share stories of floats from friends and customers that they’ve accumulated over the years and discuss the value of experiencing these difficult moments in the tank and how you might approach them when one occurs at your center.
What’s the Best Representation of Float Tanks in TV or Movies? – DSP 196
It happens every once in a while, a tv show or a movie will feature a float tank and the entire industry gets a jolt as if to say “we made it to the big time!”
But not all float tank cameos are created equal, so which one does it the best? What is the best representation of floating in media? Graham and Ashkahn go through the list of everything from Altered States to Stranger Things to find out what it is.
Is it Bad for Float Centers to Always be Running Discounts? – DSP 195
Welcome to the last episode in Social Media Week with Derek, Ashkahn, and Graham. If you haven’t listened to the other episodes in the series, it is strongly recommended that you start at the beginning especially for this episode as it references some points brought up earlier in the week.
Derek and Graham share some more intricacies of the Float On business philosophy and share their opinions on constantly running ads for floats through Groupon or on Social Media. Admittedly, Float On doesn’t run discounts very often, and they share why that is. They also talk about how to run discounts effectively and have a tough conversation about what to do if you want to break that cycle of constant discounts for your floats.
Latest Blog Posts
Lessons for Float Centers from a Mainstream Marketing Conference
A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend Copyblogger’s Authority Rainmaker Conference in Denver, Colorado. As a self proclaimed marketing nerd, this was an opportunity to mingle with my people. I believe no matter how much experience you have in...
A Quick Note on Insulation…
Insulating the roof/joists of your float center... Basically, what you're trying to do here to create an envelope around your space. You're trying to create a barrier between a conditioned environment (your float room) and an unconditioned environment (open air). This...
Encouraging Creativity After Floating
Most float tanks centers have customers. So as to have a place to put these customers where they will be able to sit, or stand, as they please and not be in the way, most float tank centers also have lobbies. So as to have something - some surface upon which these...
Float Center Education Through Internships
Why Have an Intern Program? I (Marshall) started my career in floating as an intern, coming in to the shop each Monday to learn about floating, sanitation, and better understand the intricacies of construction projects. For every four hours I worked, I was expected to...
