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
Are Tankless Water Heaters the Best? – DSP 270
Graham and Jake take on talking about Tankless or “On Demand” water heaters today. They break down a lot of the benefits of them compared to storage water heaters like the fact that they provide a nearly limitless source of hot water, require less energy consumption, etc. They’re not perfect though, and any float center considering one should look closely on how best to implement them. Jake shares some of the pitfalls of them as well as how to maximize their usefulness.
Should Float Centers use Light or Heavy Gauge Studs? – DSP 269
Still no Ashkahn today. He’s taking a couple of post-conference days to himself.
Jake and Graham are on the scene though to answer construction questions, though. Even the straight forward ones, like today. Jake informs us which to choose when doing construction, light or heavy gauge studs when constructing a float center, while getting a little sidetracked when comparing wooden and metal studs.
Construction to Make Your Life Easier – DSP 268
Graham and Jake cover a wide range of construction tips to make running a float center easier. Everything from making sure you have extra storage to installing mop closets with sinks in them for dealing with heavy duty chemicals.
The advice is pretty much a shotgun approach of tips, tricks, and hard lessons learned throughout the years.
Draining Float Tanks into Septic Systems – DSP 267
Graham and Jake tackle the difficulties of draining float tanks and how that process can differ based on different municipalities, different water treatment systems, or whether you’re using a septic system or not.
Water treatment typically involves whole contained ecosystems and highly concentrated epsom salt water can impact that pretty drastically. The guys provide good tips for each type of system and what to be prepared for if you’re operating in a rural area with a septic system.
The Difference Between STC and Decibels – DSP 266
Post-Conference Ashkahn is still out of the recording studio, but fortunately Jake is keeping Graham company in there.
Graham and Jake break down the differences between decibels and STC ratings, two very important to understand when figuring out soundproofing. There’s a lot to digest in this episode, but fortunately the guys keep it easy to understand by providing a broad level overview of the different concepts.
Latest Blog Posts
The Float Tour Blog – Issue #28
Home sweet home! After so many months on the road, it was strange being back here in Portland. We were exhausted, excited, and a little travel weary. The first night back, I slept in my own bed for the first time in three months and the world just melted away.
Having travelled across the United States, I’m reminded of how insular Portland is. We are aggressively fixated on keeping things local. Local beer, ketchup, bikes, pet food, pillows, phone cases… it’s part of our charm. We want to reward people for living here and being a part of the community. It’s so pervasive that, after living here for so long, I kind of forgot that Secret Aardvark hot-sauce isn’t available everywhere, and that most cities don’t even recycle, let alone compost.
The Float Tour Blog – Issue #27
Our northern neighbor – a sister city, of sorts – Seattle is the largest metropolitan area in the Pacific Northwest. It’s the land of Microsoft and Kurt Cobain, and the culture here embraces both simultaneously. It’s tech business professional in the front and rock n’ roll grunge in the back. This blend creates a perfect storm of high energy business life and high energy nightlife, making relaxation a valuable commodity. Floating helps fill the void left by nightmarish traffic and overcrowded restaurants.
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.
The Float Tour Blog Issue #26
Vancouver is the largest metropolitan area in Canada, and third largest on the West Coast. It’s a major hub for international trade, with one of the largest ports in the world, giving it a large migrant population, mainly from Asia, the Middle East, and Australia. It’s also been a long-time home to the Canadian film industry, and has even been nicknamed “North Hollywood.” Dozens of film and television productions from major studios film here every year.
Vancouver is very much an international city. It has large boroughs dedicated to varying cultures, including one of the largest Chinatowns in the world. The society here is more receptive to new ideas, always looking for the next big thing; it’s not surprising that floating has blown up in Vancouver as much as it has.
In the last 3 years, 10 float centers have opened up, most of them being larger 4–6 tank centers. The really interesting thing is how they all opened within the same short amount of time about 1 ½ to 2 years ago, within months of each other.
The Float Tour Blog – Issue #25
We finally made it back to the West Coast! We went through the Canadian Rockies and were overwhelmed by the beauty of it all. We drove through hours and hours of winding mountain roads, fertile valleys, and tiny towns so picturesque they looked like movie sets. It was so captivating, in fact, I suspect Graham and Ashkahn may have secretly replaced themselves with robotic doppelgängers to hike throughout Banff.
This post will focus on the smaller communities in B.C. that are bringing floating to new people every day. We also get to visit Canadian manufacturer Pro Float. They’re relatively new to the scene, just opening up earlier this year – another exciting sign of the growth in the industry.
