Something in the world of floating have you stumped?
Show Highlights
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.
Listen to Just the Audio
Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)
Graham: All right. Hello everybody.
Ashkahn: Hey, everyone. This is Ashkahn.
Graham: Graham over here, and we got a question for you today.
Ashkahn: Nice, that’s good.
Graham: Just like every day, yeah.
Ashkahn: I’m impressed every time.
Graham: Which is, and I always say that. I should say we have an answer for you today, because really the questions are for us.
Ashkahn: We got both, we got both.
Graham: The question is, “we have a crazy idea of draining float tanks and then running 200 gallons of water mixed with vinegar for an amount of time. Do you think there would be some decent cleaning?”
Ashkahn: All right, so assumptions-
Graham: Decent. Let’s define decent.
Ashkahn: Let’s make some assumptions first. I’m assuming they’re talking about doing this at the point they’re draining their float tank, once-
Graham: Anyway, right? Not like they’re just draining it and they’re-
Ashkahn: They’re not doing this every night. Yeah. Dump the water, throw some tap water in there and get-
Graham: 200 gallons of vinegar.
Ashkahn: 200 gallons of vinegar. That’s not what they said, but assuming you’re like, “Okay, yeah. I’m draining my float tank,” on whatever kind of periodic schedule that I’ve decided, a year or whatever it is. At that point, should I be doing this crazy scheme? And-
Graham: Sort of.
Ashkahn: Yeah, sort of. I mean, so it’s not crazy.
Graham: Well, we came up with it, so it might be crazy as well. Not the vinegar part, but the … this is something that we’ve started doing to, when we drain our float tanks is to actually kind of run a full cleaning kind of cycle through them to deal with anything that might be collecting on the inside of the pipes. Biofilm, things like that. So certainly the desire to make sure that your entire system’s kinda of flushed out, as long as you’re doing a big drain and fill, is totally sane and reasonable.
Ashkahn: Yeah. I would probably say the main thing to think about is vinegar is probably not what you want to put in there.
Graham: Yeah.
Ashkahn: It’s just really not that strong of a cleaning agent. I mean, it can clean things. It’s good at killing things. It’s not as good as many, many other things you could probably use. As long as you’re just putting tap water in there and you’re putting some cleaning agent in, and you’re gonna dump all this afterwards, you might as well use something stronger than vinegar.
Graham: Super vinegar.
Ashkahn: Yeah, it’s like you let vinegar ferment a third time, and then it becomes super vinegar.
Graham: Super vinegar. Probably bleach is just the easiest thing to be able to toss in there, which is basically just chlorine.
Ashkahn: Yeah. Bleach is just kinda concentrated chlorine, and you can just put a decently high concentration.
Graham: 200 gallons of bleach.
Ashkahn: Then you’re not gonna expose anyone to being in this liquid, right? So you’re kind of hitting it probably with a different method than maybe you’re used to using with other things that you’re typically cleaning your float tanks with, whatever. Using peroxide or ozone, or relying on the UV or whatever it is. Even if you’re using chlorine. Getting to a really high, kind of super-chlorinated dose of it for a period of time can have kind of an extra sanitation boost.
Graham: Yeah, and it just seems to be the go-to for a lot of disinfecting, too, that you see from different health departments and recommendations. Bleach is just an easily available and easy to use disinfectant as long as you’re not worried about, again, people kind of getting in the water afterwards. Which you’re not. You’re just sort of doing a flush and fill. That’s what we decided, was pretty much this exact same protocol that you’re talking about, where you’re emptying your float tank, filling it back up, running cycles through with water. Only in our case, we’re using bleach rather than vinegar.
Ashkahn: And there are calculators online if you want to be a little bit more quantitative about what you’re doing. You can find online calculators that will tell you how much bleach you’re pouring in and what level of parts per million of chlorine that turns into. So you can actually kind of shoot for a certain number or do something other than just turning a bottle of bleach over and counting for three seconds.
Graham: The old glug and chug method, huh?
Ashkahn: I don’t know about chugging, but-
Graham: I meant chugging along, not like-
Ashkahn: I see, I see. Take a quick sip. Pour some in the float tank.
Graham: Half for the tank, half for me. Yeah, don’t do that.
Ashkahn: Yeah, this periodic sort of cleaning can be good. There’s kind of a conversation in the pool and spa world more recently than ever about these things called biofilms, and that’s where certain microorganisms can build up these protective shell layers outside of them that protects them from the exposure of different sanitizers that would usually be able to kill them. One of the methods of being able to deal with stuff like that is having these kind of periodic, long-term punches of super-sanitation that you do to your system. The best kind of analogy I heard was relating it to keeping your teeth clean. You want to brush your teeth every night, but also it’s good to go to the dentist once every six months and have them do kind of like a more intense cleaning of your teeth that you’re not gonna be able to do with your toothbrush. That same kind of logic, I think, makes sense in the world of sanitation. If you have these kind of longer cycles of more intense cleaning, it’s, I think, another step or another effective way of keeping things at bay.
Graham: There’s pretty much no harm to it, either. You know, as long as you’re not adding in enough bleach that you’re worried about staining your tubs or something like that-
Ashkahn: Your filter’s not filled with ammonia, or something?
Graham: There’s not really any concern to your float tank for doing it. Other than a little extra time spent in when you’re draining it out. Doing this intermediate step before immediately refilling with salt water. That’s really the only cost of adding in what I think is a really nice precaution to other things growing in there or anything that might be hanging out in your pipes.
Ashkahn: So, you’re not crazy. I guess that’s-
Graham: Or we’re all crazy. One of the two, yeah.
Ashkahn: Yeah. We’re in it together, if that’s the case.
Graham: And if you have any more questions you want to send over to us, go to floattanksolutions.com/podcast.
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Opening up a float center is a lot like climbing a mountain. Even if you can see the peak, it’s a lot further away than you think, and when you finally get there, the journey and the destination usually end up being different than previously assumed.
In this post we’ll lay out a general process and timeline of what you may encounter on your path, from initial idea to actually operating a center.
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So you’re thinking about using volunteers in your float center?
Before we clarify what a “volunteer” actually means, we’ll first explore why a float center might be considering them in the first place. While it can be a way to provide floats to people who are otherwise unable to pay, the impulse to bring in volunteers can also stem from a desire to get some sort of free labor (later in this post we’ll dive into why you can’t actually do this, but it’s important to recognize that the instinct is understandable, especially when you have someone lined up and willing to work for free).
In addition to a desired boost in overall productivity, it’s also a way to invite more people into your center to experience what you do. Some customers actually want to help out and see what happens behind the scenes at a center.
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One of the beautiful things about the float tank is that it serves to rejuvenate the whole person. — the body, mind, heart.
Broadly speaking, it’s a tool for homeostasis, an ideal environment that supports balance, health, and growth. This piece will look specifically at floating and athletics. For anyone who defines themselves as an athlete, or as a general pursuant of athletic endeavors, the float tank can be a powerful asset.
In this post, I’ll discuss individual athletes who float and how to look at this from a marketing perspective. I’ll also discuss past and present research, and share some thoughts on how the relationship between the athletic and floating communities might continue to unfold.
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I think it’s time we addressed the giant metaphorical elephant in the salty metaphorical room — there are lots of exaggerated and untrue claims about the benefits of floating being spread around the industry.
Some are anecdotal, some are only half true, and some are just patently false. Floating has historically had a strong oral tradition tied to it — the practice has survived through word-of-mouth, one passionate floater teaching another everything they know. The unfortunate thing about this is that the information disseminated can’t be reliably tested or shared with others on a broader scale. You can’t use “my buddy Chris” as a source for a health benefit of float tanks in a newspaper article, much less for a research paper.
Now that we’re becoming a bit more mainstream, we thought it would be nice to add some clarity to what we should and shouldn’t be telling people about these difficult-to-understand, saliferous containers.
