Something in the world of floating have you stumped?
Show Highlights
Obviously float centers need a lot of salt. The average float tank requires roughly a thousand pounds of salt to maintain a specific gravity high enough to be functional. What about after you get your tanks filled and ready to go, how much do you need to have on hand just for maintaining that level? Fortunately, Graham and Ashkahn have a good rule of thumb for how they run Float On to use as a metric, as well as some good simple tips to keep in mind about storage in your float centers.
Listen to Just the Audio
Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)
Graham: So, today’s question is, “How much salt should you have on hand at any given time?”
Ashkahn: How much salt? I mean I got my general rule.
Graham: Was is going to be a lot? That’s what I was going to say.
Ashkahn: You don’t want to have a little bit of salt, that’s a big problem.
Graham: Trust us, this isn’t the line of work for that.
Ashkahn: I like always having at least one float tanks worth of salt on hand. You’re biggest float tank if you have different models. I never want to not be able to refill a single tank at any moment. That way you’re just prepared. Whatever happens you can totally drain and fill a tank. If you don’t all of a sudden, who knows you might have to shut that tank down for a few days. That’s a lot of lost revenue. That’s kind of my comfort zone. If we’re ever less than a full float tanks worth that we have in storage or in our lobby or whatever that’s the danger zone to me.
Graham: So really that’s when you have your biggest float tanks worth of salt, the order should be arriving on your doorstep that day to replenish your salt.
Ashkahn: Right. Littlest amount.
Graham: That’s your lowest amount that you possibly want. It’s just because something could go wrong. If your batch of salt gets contaminated by something in a float tank then you want to be able to immediately, day of, start that refilling process.
Ashkahn: Right.
Graham: Because that makes sense. Then you know other than that it’s I guess moving up from there, how much salt you keep on hand and how much you want to be reordering it.
Ashkahn: Right. I mean every company I know of, the price gets cheaper the more salt you order at once.
Graham: That’d be weird if it was …
Ashkahn: More expensive. “You want how much salt?”
Graham: “No, that’s really going to cost you this time.”
Ashkahn: It’s tempting. I mean when we order salt I’m constantly in my head, “I should just order 50,000 pounds and then we’ll get a warehouse and we’ll store it.” When we’ve crunched the numbers, it’s really hard to make the finances actually work out. If you’re paying for storage, if you’re paying for storage that’s just there to house salt so that you can order a bigger order to bring the price down it almost never actually saves you more money than the cost of the storage space.
Graham: Almost no matter what it is even if we’re talking about 75, 100 dollars a month or something to store that salt, it immediately eats into that profit margin.
Ashkahn: It just doesn’t seem to work out. Here’s the best idea we’ve had. Feel free to steal this one. The best idea we had to solve this problem was just to replace all the furniture in our house with salt bags. Just make a couch out of salt bags and a salt bag TV stand. The problem was that we realized we’d slowly start losing our furniture over the course of us using the salt.
Graham: I also do think that same idea is applicable in float tank a lobby as well. Just have your whole lobby furniture made out of salt.
Ashkahn: Just constructed out of salt bags. So, that was pretty tempting but we never …
Graham: I thought you were just going to say invent anti-gravity and this whole salt thing really solves the problem.
Ashkahn: That’s the real solution.
Graham: So that said, how much salt do we order at a time when we order salt?
Ashkahn: Well, so we keep salt in our lobby.
Graham: The furniture thing again.
Ashkahn: Furniture. Kind of, yeah. Then we also have a storage shed out near our office. Which just kind of comes with our office, we’re not paying any extra rent for it so it’s not part of the math equation of salt cost. Basically we order as much as we can to fill those spaces. For us ends up being about 10,000 pounds of salt. That fills up our shed and then there’s a nice little stack in our lobby.
Graham: I think the biggest order we did was for around 15,000.
Ashkahn: Yeah, once.
Graham: That was just … Once again, it spill over into this area where we had to pay for a little bit of storage. It kind of made it not worth storing any more.
Ashkahn: We were filling tanks up right around then. That’s mostly what we do. We’re often ordering it. At least that lasts us about six months. We’ll order that.
Graham: Once a year we’ll be doing our tank refills, it’s the regularity that we’re doing that. Just to give you guys an idea.
Ashkahn: We’ll do a tank refill and we’ll order salt right before that because we use a lot of salt in that process.
Graham: And, we have six float tanks. We’re opened 24 hours a day. We run around 1,300 floats a month. We run a lot of floats that are using up that salt as well. When you do the averages it ends up being about 1.1 pounds of salt per person, is what we end up losing per float.
Ashkahn: But, I mean really going to the question of how much do you have on hand; if we didn’t have that storage unit, we wouldn’t be ordering that much salt.
Graham: Very true. On the other hand, some of the other centers that we’ve visited, if you just have a ton of back storage or you have all this space that you can use that you’re not making use of, then order even more. Again, it only gets cheaper the more you have. It’s not like your Epsom salt is going to hit its expiration date.
Ashkahn: It’s not going to go bad.
Graham: Yeah.
Ashkahn: You can make some nice furniture out of it.
Graham: All right. So, there you have it. As much as you can and never less than enough to fill your largest float tank.
Ashkahn: Okay.
Graham: So, thanks for tuning in. As always, if you want another question like this or even easier than this answered, feel free to go to floattanksolutions.com/podcast and send it in there.
Recent Podcast Episodes
Monthly Budget for Float Centers – DSP 305
Graham and Ashkahn break down the real truth about how closely they watch their budget for Float On on a monthly basis.
The truth is… not much. As it turns out, monthly expenses for float centers don’t have huge variations unlike businesses that rely on retail, for example. Graham and Ashkahn explain they developed a sense for what’s within reason.
How to Sign on Float Ambassadors – DSP 304
Float Ambassadors have been with the industry since the beginning, but gained popularity sometime in the last few years. What are ambassadors and how to float centers find them? When they do find them, how do they get them to represent floating?
Graham and Ashkahn share their experiences with the practice of finding float mavens out in the world and the impact they’ve had on Float On.
How do you Talk about Psychedelics? – DSP 303
It’s no secret that the inventor of the float tank, John Lilly, was also an early psychonaut and used the tank for mental exploration in conjunction with LSD. Not everyone in the float community appreciates this shared history and some actively try to distance themselves from it given the taboo nature of psychedelics.
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.
What About 75 Minute Floats? – DSP 302
Most float centers divide on floats offered between 60 or 90 minute floats, but some split the difference right down the middle and offer 75 minutes. Graham and Ashkahn share their thoughts on this tactic, what they see as the pros, cons, and things to consider when implementing it.
Free Floats for Teachers – DSP 301
Graham and Ashkahn give their perspective on the pros and cons of giving free floats away for teachers. Giving out free floats is the Float On way and giving them to a specific group of people who could really use them sounds like a good idea.
The guys break it down and address some of the concerns any float center may have about running a program like this.
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.
