Cause and Solutions for a Crystallized Pump – DSP 137

This is a terrifying experience the first time it happens in a float center. A pump will seize, it’s full of salt and there just seems like there’s nothing you can do about it. Fortunately, this is one of those things that happens to pretty much everyone and it’s not too difficult to take care of.

Graham and Ashkahn dive into what causes a pump to seize as well as how to fix it. It’s all here. Right now. Check it.

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

Graham: And today’s question is, “what’s the best way to get your water flowing again if salt is crystallized in the pump or pipes?”

Ashkahn: Boom. Got the old salt crystallization. It happens. It happens to the best of us.

Graham: I know. I feel like you should get merit badges for all the disasters that happen in a float center after you go through them for the first time.

Ashkahn: That’s definitely, like, that’s a Boy Scouts badge right there is your first salt crystallization.

Graham: Yeah. Ripped liner, salt crystallized in my pump.

Ashkahn: So, this happens … Let’s talk about how it happens, and it can happen a few different ways. It basically has to do with the …

Graham: Sabotage.

Ashkahn: Yeah. Sabotage is when there’s someone sneaking in extra little cups of salt while you’re not looking. That’s how it’s happened to us most of the times.

Graham: We assume.

Ashkahn: So, it’s basically, it has to do with the saturation point of your solution. Basically, there’s only so much Epsom salt that can be dissolved into the water in your float tank, and how much …

Graham: Before it becomes more like salt crystals that happen to have some water mixed in.

Ashkahn: Right.

Graham: You know, the balance shifts at some point.

Ashkahn: Yeah. And this is just anything, right? There’s only so much solid you can mix into liquid in general, and that varies based off of the solids and the liquids, and also, most importantly here, the temperature. So, what can happen is that the warmer the temperature is, the more you can dissolve a solid into a liquid, and that’s because the warmer a temperature is of a liquid, the more space there is in the molecules, and the process of dissolution is actually those solids kind of fitting between those molecules. So, the more space there is in there, the more you can dissolve things into it. And with float tanks, we’re really close to the saturation point. At float tank temperatures, that are like 93, 94 degrees, the saturation point in specific gravity is about 1.31, 1.32, like, somewhere …

Graham: Yeah, right around there.

Ashkahn: Somewhere right in around there, and most people are keeping their float tanks, like, 1.26, 27, 28, 29, somewhere in that range.

Graham: Yeah, 1.25 and above.

Ashkahn: So, for us, once we hit 1.3, that’s kind of our, “Uh oh, danger zone.”

Graham: Like, super-oh-oh, danger zone, too.

Ashkahn: Yeah. Like,  “add water, add water now!”

Graham: Yeah. We try not to go above 1.29 generally. Like, 1.3 is the emergency response.

Ashkahn: So, there’s a couple ways you can cross that line and start getting the salt crystallizing. One is to have more salt in there, right, and that can happen because … It might not be that you’ve added any more salt, but if you haven’t been keeping an eye on your tanks, and you’re not balancing them on a regular basis, well, the water will just evaporate because of how hot it is, and eventually it’ll just become saltier and saltier as the water’s evaporating, and it’ll just cross that threshold. That’s usually not how it happens to people because that requires a certain amount of negligence. Like, it would have to be weeks of you really not paying attention for the levels to crawl up to that point.

Graham: Well, and it depends a little bit on how close it’s being kept to begin with, I guess. I’d say it often happens as, or I’ve definitely heard from centers, it happening as a result of keeping high salt content.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: I mean, this is exactly what happened with Float On, now that I’m saying it out loud, this is how we seized up our pumps.

Ashkahn: One time when we seized it, it was because we were experimenting. We were like, “How high can we go?” And we found out. We found out how high we could go.

Graham: Yeah. Yeah.

Ashkahn: But every other time its been the other thing, and the other thing is that, it’s not that the salt content got higher, and higher, and higher, it’s that the temperature dropped. And so as the temperature drops, that saturation point goes lower, and lower. And at room temperature, the saturation point … I think its like 1.21, 1.22 something like that.

Graham: Around there. Yeah. Yeah.

Ashkahn: I don’t know exactly, but its something. Its lower than your float tank is, is the important thing. It is below what you would ever keep your float tank at.

Graham: It’s ’cause by design, we’re just kicking our float tanks up to saturation for whatever our temperature is.

Ashkahn: Right.

Graham: Like, if we were allowed to keep the float tanks warmer, then we would just throw in that much more salt.

Ashkahn: Yeah, exactly.

Graham: So anytime your float tanks are losing temperature, you’re in danger of seizing up your pumps, and ending up with the old salt crystal block there instead of a working piece of mechanical machinery.

Ashkahn: So this can happen if your heater’s break in your float tank, right? And then just the water’s cooling down. And there’s ways to deal with that as well. We have some aquarium probe heaters, something you could just plug into a wall and put it directly into the float tank, and that could maintain the temperature. If we do have a heater break, or if we lose power to like one room, but the rest of our building still works, and we can run a cord from another outlet, then we have a way of maintaining the temperature in our float tanks so we don’t have to worry too much about the temperature drop.

Graham: Yeah, so this is if we realize ahead of time that somethings a problem-

Ashkahn: Right.

Graham: And the temperatures going to be dropping and things like that and especially in places that have even colder climates than Float On. I’ve heard of this happening a lot where … Or I guess places that close over night-

Ashkahn: Yeah, yeah.

Graham: As opposed to us. We get to cover a lot of emergencies just because we actually have people there-

Ashkahn: All the time.

Graham: All across the night. Yeah. But often times people leave at the end of the day, and then when they come in, in the morning, there’s no heat in the entire building, or the electricity went off, and yeah, like there’s crystals all covering the bottom slash inside of their float tank, and their pump is often one solid piece of salt chunk.

Ashkahn: So, again, that can happen and it does happen, but its still not the actual most frequent way that this is happening to people. And the way that this is most commonly happening to people in their float tanks, is … Take it away, Graham.

Graham: The most common way to seize up your pump is by having all of the heaters functioning normally, everything else is going fine, and you’re just not cycling the water in your pump. So, although the water in the float tank is staying at temperature, everything is staying fine, no crystallization, that doesn’t mean that any of the water throughout your pump system is actually staying at temperature. So if you’re not cycling that on a regular basis, probably about two times a day, then it means that you’re at risk of that just crystallizing. So getting the salt water crystallizing in your pipes, getting it crystallizing inside your pump, and that’s probably the most common thing that happens.

Ashkahn: Yeah, and there are a lot of float tanks that just come with built in protections for this now. Like float tanks will have logic built into their controllers that says, “If the pump hasn’t been run in six hours, cycle it for 15 minutes.” Just to get the liquid in the pipes and the pump and everything cycled through, get warm stuff in there and there’s just kind of a mechanism there to not allow this to happen to you. There’s ways to work around it too. This most commonly happens when Thanksgiving rolls around or some sort of holiday, where all of a sudden, It’s a whole day and you’re not at your float center where you’re used to being there every day. That’s when someone comes back in after that nice sleepy Thanksgiving morning and they turn their pump on, and they just hear this high pitched noise and no water’s moving and you start to panic and it’s because there’s literally a giant salt crystal around the impeller in your pump and it can’t spin.

There are other solutions too, even if your float tank doesn’t have a control like that built into it. There’s all sorts of smart outlets and stuff like that, that you can work with an electrician and have something like that installed with your float tank, that can have controls in it, that can run things at three in the morning, there are things you can just run from your phone directly. There’s simple solutions like that, or you know, honestly, you can just come in on Thanksgiving and run your pump system-

Graham: Or, you can pay your staff to come in.

Ashkahn: Or you can pay your staff to come in on Thanksgiving, which is honestly the solution we use at Float On. We’re closed so few days of the year, for long enough for this to be an issue for us, that … And someone’s usually just like, “Oh yeah, I’m already going by, like that way.”-

Graham: “Yeah, I’m addicted to the coffee at the store down the street, I’m gonna be by Float On anyway.”

Ashkahn: That is literally what one of our employees said this last year. So it’s not really that big a deal. Really the big deal is when you forgot and then you come in, in the morning, and you got a floater coming in, in twenty minutes and you turn that pump on and you hear, “Weeee”, which actually gets us to the question finally that was asked. What do you do in this situation?

Graham: Panic, sell your business. Get out of there. Yeah.

Ashkahn: Burn it down. Take the insurance money.

Graham: So what you do, is actually a lot simpler than I think a lot of people think it is … Which is basically, heat up the water that’s in there and the salt, often by just pouring as much hot water as you can through it. Or, if you can actually even disconnect the pump, getting parts of it soaking … Essentially chipping away enough to get in there and get hot water on the salt crystals and then they’ll really start to dissolve faster than you probably think they will.

Ashkahn: Yeah, I mean the nice thing is, this doesn’t cost any money. When you-

Graham: No.

Ashkahn: If this happens to you, you don’t have to spend any money. You may have to cancel a float or two, because it’ll still take you, I don’t know, a few hours at least, to really … Ideally, you’re gonna start pulling pieces apart. Right? Unscrewing the unions, where you have unions in your filtration system. Take as many components apart as you can and just really run super hot water through all those things. The pump will be the hardest, because you won’t really be able to see, but if you pour enough water, you’ll start to see bigger chunks of salt coming out at some point.

Graham: Yep.

Ashkahn: That’s basically it. You don’t want to do it dry, because it’s gonna be really hard to try to break up a salt crystal with a knife or something, but the hot water will just slowly weaken it, and melt it, and dissolve it.

Graham: Yep and be sure to keep that on the wet end, as well. You know? You don’t want to be getting the hot water onto your motor end of the pump.

Ashkahn: Right. Yeah. You’re not just spraying the pump down, you want to pour it into the pipe.

Graham: And often, we’re talking about actual hot water kettle kind of hot, too. Not just hot water from the shower head-

Ashkahn: Ideally-

Graham: Style hot like the-

Ashkahn: Yeah, the hotter the better. I mean, so the salt cools the water down. It’s an endothermic reaction, so it’s gonna strip the water of heat as it’s trying to dissolve stuff. So the warmer the water you have, the easier this will be for you.

Graham: And it will just start to happen. As you do it too, first it will feel like you’re just actually pouring water over a brick and nothing is going right. You know? But it does. Just like salt starts to permeate things, hot water starts to permeate salt. It’ll kind of start mushifying and breaking loose. Like Ashkahn said, “The good news is you don’t actually need a professional to solve this problem, you just need some hot water and patience.”

Ashkahn: Yeah, and just don’t … As long as you realize it and don’t just keep running your pump, not understanding what’s happening and running your pump-

Graham: It’s a good lesson there. If your water is ever not moving in the tank when your pump is on, immediately turn it off and try to figure out what’s going on, because there’s something that’s getting in the way and it’s probably disastrous to your equipment if it keeps trying to run and isn’t able to actually push flow through.

Ashkahn: Then put it all back together. You know? Done. Yeah. And you should be good to go.

Graham: It’s just that easy. Cool. Well, if you have any other questions for us, definitely shoot them our way. Go to floattanksolutions.com/podcast.

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