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.
Recent Podcast Episodes
How do you Know What to Delegate and When? – DSP 164
The eternal small business challenge. You can’t be everywhere at once, but how do you decide what to delegate and to whom? Unfortunately, there’s not an easy solution, but there are some philosophies behind how you run your business and operate that may be helpful to review.
If you’re reaching this wall and you’re not sure what to do, think about how your work is laid out and what is required of you. Some things are naturally going to be more repetitive and have more built in redundancy. That’s a good place to start looking for delegating responsibility, but it doesn’t have to end there. It all just takes time.
Graham and Ashkahn get into the Float On way and how it’s come about that they’re the owners, but don’t run the shop and are no longer making the major decisions in running it as a business. Worth a listen even if you’ve never even seen a float center before.
Float Room Construction Costs Specifics – DSP 163
In this episode, Graham and Ashkahn succinctly breakdown the cost of float room construction. The average float room cost per the industry survey is $75,000 per room. How much of that is float tank cost and how much is construction? There are some variables to consider based on geography and types of tanks, but the guys lay out the average and clarify some of the numbers we’ve released previously.
How to Delicately Handle Difficult Customers – DSP 162
Sometimes there’s just that one customer. The “Problem Child” customer that you don’t like having to deal with. The one who totally know is definitely (probably) making things up to try and get a free float. And they’re such a nuisance! What can you do about that? Obviously you don’t want them getting vengeful if you tell them to kick rocks and spread lies about you.
How do you handle that situation? Well, Graham and Ashkahn lay out some nice ground rules for how they handle people and it comes down to setting clear boundaries that at least appear rigid on the outset. Then, if those boundaries are crossed, the reactions you have are totally expected.
What’s the Difference Between a Residential and Commercial Float Tank? – DSP 161
Ashkahn and Graham break down the differences between float tanks designed for home use in comparison to ones intended for a commercial setting. Depending on how it’s intended to be used can drastically affect the construction of the tank. Most home use tanks, for example, aren’t made of fiberglass, because those large, rigid structures are difficult to move by yourself or just with one other person. Likewise, the filtration demands for a home use tank are a lot different.
Listen in and check out all the differences and which tanks are more intended for use at home as opposed to commercial use.
Do Floaters really Go into a “Theta State”? – DSP 160
Sometimes it’s difficult to differentiate the claims of scientific benefit of floating from those that are just anecdotal. The idea that floating causing greater theta brainwave activity is one of those things that sounds right, but what does the data say? And how can everyone else find out?
Fortunately, Graham and Ashkahn have done the legwork and even talked to the researchers who do this kind of stuff. They break down exactly how true the Theta claim is and what, if any, real research corroborates it.
Latest Blog Posts
Prepayment for Floats
Do you make people pay when they schedule an appointment?
We at Float On always strive to be as easy to deal with and non-intimidating as possible, so from the very beginning we have allowed people to book floats over the phone without payment. READ MORE…
The Difference Between Night and Day
We've all heard the expression, “It’s like the difference between night and day.” The term is used to draw extreme contrast. How much different is our experience of nighttime and daytime? How does it affect how we live? How we work? How we interact with our...
A Peek at the Float On Renovation
Well, we did it again. We've been closed for 2 weeks of construction already, and we still have another week to go. We're installing two new flooring and shower systems to test out, a new lobby wall for soundproofing, and we're replacing one of our Ocean Float Rooms...
The Best Time to Start a Float Center (response)
I usually don't share the responses I get from our posts, but they always spawn great conversations. After this last one, I got hit with more emails than usual, and I wanted to share one of them with you which is representative of many of the others. I've been...
