Are Light or Dark Colored Float Rooms better? – DSP 319

Is it better to have a light colored room that hides salt, or a dark colored room that easily shows it?

Graham and Ashkahn dish out some strong opinions on this idea, especially the idea that dark colored rooms and tanks are good for maintaining employee accountability.

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

Graham: Okay, Welcome.

Ashkahn: Welcome.

Graham: Welcome everyone.

Ashkahn: This is Ashkahn.

Graham: I am Graham.

Ashkahn: Graham is back.

Graham: The Graham is back.

Ashkahn: That’s exciting.

Graham: Yeah.

Ashkahn: Welcome back.

Graham: Thank you. It’s good to be back.

Ashkahn: Good to have you back.

Graham: We gots questions. Well one for today, one question.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: Sent in by you our lovely audience.

Ashkahn: Graham, so I was reading the questions while you were gone.

Graham: How did that go?

Ashkahn: It went great. We got a lot of fan mails.

Graham: Light versus dark floor and wall coverings.

Ashkahn: I didn’t cut people off with my questions. That was one of the things that I did.

Graham: Well you weren’t talking to cut yourself off.

Ashkahn: Some people said better.

Graham: Light versus dark floor. Light versus-

Ashkahn: Dark force.

Graham: No. “Light versus dark floor and wall coverings. Originally I had thought that I would get light colored materials because they don’t show up the salt as much.”

Ashkahn: They don’t show it up as much?

Graham: Yeah. “However after visiting a number of centers with dark colors I’m wondering if the fact that you can see the salt clearly to clean and to check that your employees are doing a good job could perhaps be the best option. What do you guys think?”

Yeah, I mean, I do know people who are happy with dark float tanks and floors and walls. Let me just say that I do know that there are people who have dark colored rooms who think that it was a good idea.

Ashkahn: Really?

Graham: Yes.

Ashkahn: For this reason?

Graham: For the being able to see salt to clean it up reason specifically.

Ashkahn: Sea salt.

Graham: Not like sea salt like s-e-a, s-e-e salt.

Ashkahn: Well yeah but that’s also the reason why I don’t want-

Graham: I’ve talked to people specifically. I think they’re crazy. Our rooms are largely white or kind of a marbled whiter or a white brown with white marbled streaks going through the light brown.

Ashkahn: I wouldn’t even exactly say light versus dark because we have some pretty radical floors in some of our rooms. We have some that are vibrant dark blue.

Graham: Speckled with white?

Ashkahn: Yeah. But they have something in them that hides the salt. Really I feel like this question is should I design my rooms to hide salt or show salt?

Graham: Sure, or really they just wanted to know if they are crazy for having a dark colored room I think. They aesthetically want a dark colored room and they’re afraid.

Ashkahn: You could get colors that are in that darker range.

Graham: Like a speckled white black tile for the walls. It looks like kind of granite. It just has white specks.

Ashkahn: Right but that would still hide the salt and I think is not the point of the question they’re asking. Despite the exact light versus dark it’s much easier to hide salt with light colors than dark colors of course but I think it’s possible with darker colors.

Graham: Well lets just say pure white versus pure black. Our hypothetical situation is not going to hide salt.

Ashkahn: I don’t know. We design our whole rooms specifically to hide salt.

Graham: Here’s the deal. Even after you wipe down the entire room after you disinfect it, after you go back in and get the disinfectant off of there, there’s still the chance that there’s just little salt streaks or there’s a place where salt was hiding in a corner. Nothing that would be detrimental to a customer coming in but enough that they’d see it. Perhaps aesthetically they think that’s a problem or they go, “Oh they must not have cleaned this room,” when in fact you can go over a room five times and still have little areas that show salt.

Ashkahn: I think that’s the distinction here is that I view salt free and sanitary as two different things. We make sure the spots in the room that people are going to be interacting with are sanitary between each person but we also realize we’ve got to move fast. A transition is a time where time is really valuable and we’re trying to hit the most important things. For us it’s a benefit that salt can hide a little bit. If it’s just this little spot in a corner somewhere and we’ve hit the main spots that we think are going to provide sanitary safety for people we just know that we’re going to be missing little spots. That at the end of the day when we do a much more rigorous clean of the room after all our floats are done we’re going to go hit all those spots and get all those nooks and crannies and deal with all that remnant saltiness. To me that’s part of what we’re aiming to do is be able to miss tiny little nooks and crannies.

Graham: Without the room looking totally disastrous.

Ashkahn: We want our employees to be able to not have to hit that weird top left corner of something.

Graham: Where if you’re short maybe you’d need to get a step stool in order to get up there. Yeah. For sure. I think the distinction between what’s safe and what still has a little bit of salt left behind is a good distinction. There are ways with the current set up that we have with white walls. If you have pure white walls and white salt on them you can still see where the salt is. You just have to be in the know I guess for the tactics to use. Looking at it at a sharp angle and having a bright overhead light you can really see some of the shadows. You can see where there’s even really light salt residue. That’s one way to do it. Then there’s the touch test. I almost said taste test. Thought I said it wrong. Not the taste test. The touch test where you just kind of run your hand over a surface and you can really clearly, even just a fine layer of salt, feel where that is. If you do have time to be diligent and get every spot you can get it really good with white walls still. It’s not like you’re employees are going to be missing the salt that’s on the walls as much as just hopefully the clients are not seeing it.

Ashkahn: You get much much better at seeing salt and knowing where it is when you’re working there. Also I mean-

Graham: What is it?

Ashkahn: You go, you go.

Graham: Okay well I was going to just say if you have anymore questions go to Daily Solutions.

Ashkahn: No, no, it was something important.

Graham: All right well just talk about other stuff for a little bit.

Ashkahn: That sounds good.

Graham: We’ll say again that I have talked to people who had dark float tank rooms and they liked it. They liked that they could more quickly check in on their staff and see how they’re doing or make their staff more accountable.

Ashkahn: I remember now. I remember.

Graham: That’s the argument that I’ve heard on that side. Well let’s finish mine now. You can’t just jump back in now that I’ve started another topic. Do you want to respond to what I just said?

Ashkahn: I wasn’t listening. What did you say?

Graham: Nevermind just go ahead.

Ashkahn: Okay. Here’s the thing is that the salt when you wipe it off sometimes the room will look completely clean and five or ten minutes later will look salty again. It will look visually totally clean to you. Then if you had a spot that was really salty and you wiped it and the water evaporates away it leaves a little bit of not even bumpy specks of salt as much as a light coating or something.

Graham: Residue if you will.

Ashkahn: Yeah, the residue. It’s so visible on something that’s black or those dark colors in a way that its just not visible on those lighter colors.

Graham: It’s like disappearing reappearing ink.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: It’s who framed Roger Rabbit. You get the idea. You know what disappearing reappearing ink would be.

Ashkahn: We used to have black floors, jet black.

Graham: We had a black float tank.

Ashkahn: We had a black float tank.

Graham: We’re not just talking out of our asses here you know. This is coming from real world painful experience of knowing how hard it is to make it so that residue. You have to use single direction wipes going and cleaning off the tank twice through because if you start going backwards then the salt residue will show. You just have to have all of these crazy tactics in order to make sure that that residue won’t pop up after you leave someone to go into the room.

Ashkahn: We had good employees. I didn’t feel in that process like our employees were not doing a good job or just being lazy or anything like that. It was genuinely people were working their butts off to clean those rooms between people and it was just very difficult to do it so perfectly and often do it multiple times or something like that to not have that kind of residue appear or miss a little spot in the corner once things dried up a little bit.

Graham: What I was saying when you couldn’t remember what you were saying-

Ashkahn: Yeah, yeah.

Graham: -to tie back into it with employees is the people who I’ve talked to say, and it’s two people, it’s two people I know who are really stoked on having their dark or black float rooms. They say what they liked is it’s almost an accountability measure for their staff members to make sure they’re going to this deep level of cleaning. If they get trained in the way to properly make sure you won’t leave these streaks and maybe a residue or something like that then they can both go into a dark colored room right after a staff member’s finished and see really quickly if they did a good job and the staff member themselves can check and make sure they do a good job and kind of know it’s the level where it’s just “Okay, you can’t show salt.”

Ashkahn: And your customers.

Graham: Also likewise hopefully won’t see it. It might take a little longer to get there but the idea is that you’re creating this environment of salt accountability where because you have to be so diligent to just make sure the rooms themselves are also hopefully as clean as they can be.

Ashkahn: We need to put something in the salt that glows under UV light or something. Then we can go into the room with special goggles. Like a black light and it’ll just all show up. That’s really my best suggestion.

Graham: If you invent it definitely send it in. Getting back to the very very original thing. You can have a dark room and hide salt is another part of this. It really did sound like aesthetically they wanted a dark room but they’re afraid of all this salt. Getting some kind of swirly white going through a dark color getting spot.

Ashkahn: Speckles.

Graham: Yeah speckled white.

Ashkahn: Yeah, patterns.

Graham: Stuff like that, actually really any pattern helps out a lot but especially if you have speckled or swirly white kind of going through. Those are the things that hide it really well.

Ashkahn: This is what public transportation does too right? This is why all these bus seats look all crazy with these insane designs and patterns and train seats and stuff like that is because they put those patterns on there so you can’t visibly see stains-

Graham: See stains as well.

Ashkahn: -and what’s going on. It’s good enough for the government.

Graham: You have any other questions? Head on down to floattanksolutions.com/podcast.

Ashkahn: Yeah, that’s the spot.

Graham: Alright bye everyone.

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