Something in the world of floating have you stumped?
Show Highlights
Float Tanks are expensive. Purchasing tanks can easily end up being half of your opening costs when starting out, so it makes sense to want to purchase tanks that have a long lifespan.
Thinking about which float tank manufacturers might last the longest, though, is probably not the way to think about this issue. For one, it’s impossible to tell what manufacturer is going to be around the longest. What’s more, if anything does break, the vast majority of the time you don’t need to go to the manufacturer to get it fixed in the first place.
Ashkahn and Graham share their thoughts on proper float tank care and the steps any float center owner should take when considering a tank.
Show Resources
Listen to Just the Audio
Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)
Ashkahn: All right. Hey. Hey. Hey.
Graham: You need to break set a couple more times?
Ashkahn: Hey.
Graham: Hey, [inaudible 00:00:46].
Ashkahn: Still a little new to this. Sorry guys.
Ashkahn. This is Ashkahn.
Graham: Yep. I’m Graham right over here.
Ashkahn: Hey.
Graham: And today’s question is.
Ashkahn: Hold on, hold on. Special announcement first.
Graham: Oh yeah. Yeah, I forgot about that.
Ashkahn: There’s this thing called the Float Conference. Just a conference.
Graham: What?
Ashkahn: It’s about floating. We put it on and it’s happening pretty soon. It’s in August, August 18th and 19th.
Graham: Pretty excited.
Ashkahn: And you should get your tickets, because we have a cut-off date where the prices of the tickets get a lot more expensive; it’s the day that we got to start making concrete, some of our ordering numbers and stuff like that. So we set a date. It’s coming up. It’s July 19th.
If you’re coming to the Float Conference and you don’t have your tickets yet, get them before then, otherwise, the prices will go up.
Graham: And it’s the 16th for hotels as well, that people should get?
Ashkahn: Yeah. Yeah. If you’re looking for a hotel, you don’t have a hotel booked yet, we have some group discounts. There’s a place, the Hilton is just a block away from the conference and there’s a page on the conference website, FloatConference.com/hotels, where you can book and get a cheaper rate. Definitely do that. The deal ends on July 16th. It’s the last time you can book those.
Graham: All right.
And now, today’s question is, “despite you making fun of all my questions, I still think you are the hippest guys. Today’s question is,” you threw that in and I threw that in too. You really made me sound redundant there. Thanks a lot question asker.
“What tank manufacturers do you think will be around the longest for future parts availability?”
Ashkahn: Well that’s a stupid question. I mean-
Graham: Obviously the RESTroom.
Ashkahn: What a dumb question that you could ask me.
Graham: If you haven’t heard, go to restroomfloat.com right now. I know we don’t usually recommend float tanks, but I will just go out on a limb here and say, single best float tank on the market.
Ashkahn: There’s no real competitor, really. There’s nothing even like it, I think, is a fair statement.
Graham: Yeah. Yeah?
Ashkahn: What float tank manufacturer is going to be around the longest?
Graham: Specifically for access to parts. So if they buy a tank, and I guess that tank falls apart.
Ashkahn: Well, the more likely it is that your tank is falling apart on you, the less likely it is that that manufacturer will be around, you know?
Graham: That’s true. So maybe it just is a nice balancing effect where-
Ashkahn: Yeah. Yeah. If you never need parts-
Graham: no matter where along the spectrum it is, it’s the correct place to be, you know? Interesting. I like that twist.
Ashkahn: Yeah. I mean, it’s a good question. If I could predict the future, I wouldn’t be doing this podcast.
Graham: Yeah, we’d just be investing in the float tank manufacturer stocks.
Ashkahn: Yeah. So I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know what manufacturer’s going to be around the longest.
Graham: Yeah. No, we have no idea.
Ashkahn: It’s hard to say. I mean, when we opened our center, whenever it was, a thousand years ago.
Graham: A century ago or something, yeah.
Ashkahn: Eight, seven and a half years ago. When we opened all those many, many decades ago, most of the manufactures that you see in a lot of float centers right now, didn’t even exist.
Graham: Yeah.
Ashkahn: Weren’t even there yet. And so what manufacturers are to come even-
Graham: We don’t know.
Ashkahn: Who’s to say? I don’t know.
Graham: Certainly not us. That RESTroom floats thing though. That was pretty good.
Yeah, in fact, I don’t even know what kind of question you’re asking here.
Ashkahn: Well, okay. Let’s approach this from a different direction, other than foreseeing the future.
Graham: Another better question?
Ashkahn: This is a fine question. Thank you. This is a very upstanding question you sent in to us today.
Graham: Playing good cop isn’t going to get you anywhere with this, Ashkahn.
Ashkahn: They need to send us more questions.
Let’s take this back a bit, because what parts would you even need a manufacturer for, I think is another interesting question to ask? The more that you’re getting a tank that uses a pump from a pump company that’s been around for a while, or a UV system from a UV company, or PVC pipe is PVC pipe.
Graham: Tires from a tire company.
Ashkahn: So most the stuff in your filtration system, I think, is going to either be easy for you to fix or replace with or without the float tank manufacturer. No float tank manufacturers out there are really making their own, totally custom UV lights or pumps or filters or forging their own PVC pipe or however PVC’s made.
Graham: Growing it out of the ground or something like that.
Ashkahn: So all that stuff is parts that they’re getting from other places, so no matter who you’re going with, you’re most likely going to be able to source those parts from somewhere else.
It’ll probably be easier for you, if you’re buying a float tank, in the country that you live in. Float tanks from other countries typically use parts from other countries, and they’re a little bit harder to find and source. Not impossible. We’ve done it. We have some float tanks from England and we’ve certainly found the parts and ordered them from England, but it’s not quite as easy as just going to Home Depot and there’s the same type of threading and stuff like that, that’s on the rest of your system.
Graham: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Ashkahn: I would say, really the hardest part is probably the control box and the software, right?
Graham: Yeah, because if something happens to the finish of the fiberglass tub, you can get it refinished; you don’t actually need the manufacturer for that.
Ashkahn: Yeah. Heaters. They’re probably buying heaters from some company; they’re not making their own heaters.
Graham: Yeah. And you can find another heater company, theoretically, if you really had to.
Ashkahn: Yeah.
Graham: We know. If we got a used tank that didn’t have heaters in it-
Ashkahn: Right.
Graham: we could find heaters to replace that.
Ashkahn: We could fix that. Or last resort, put an in-line or circulation heater in.
Graham: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Ashkahn: That hurts the ability for long floats, but it’s functional.
Graham: So yeah, the control system-
Ashkahn: That’s the tricky part, right?
Graham: I mean, you’d almost have to probably figure out a way to just take the inputs and outputs and if the control system broke, you’d go back to, “Here’s where the speakers go. Here’s where the pump turns on,”-
Ashkahn: Yeah.
Graham: and it’s hard-wire it into the controls.
Ashkahn: Yeah. And most manufactures have their own custom control box and their own custom control system for it, especially as time goes on, more and more manufacturers are going that direction; they’re making software, they’re getting electrical engineers to put together these boxes.
Graham: Yeah. And it’s getting more and more fancy, I guess is the right word for it.
Ashkahn: Right. Yeah. No, that is the right word for it.
Graham: Which means, the ability to just do that yourself and recreate these fancy setups that people have is-
Ashkahn: How fancy are you, really?
Graham: Are you a fancy person? If you’re a fancy person, no problem.
Ashkahn: Yeah, you got this.
Graham: But otherwise-
Ashkahn: But if you’re a common slob like the rest of us-
Graham: This ain’t no slobcast.
Ashkahn: And anything’s possible. At a certain point, you could just ditch the entire control box, the entire control system.
Graham: You’d probably have to, to be honest. You’d probably just have to ditch it.
Ashkahn: Yeah. It depends how far out you are from buying this thing, or what’s wrong with it? There’s certainly certain situations I think you could probably hire someone to just make a tweak or something, but at a certain point, probably the easiest thing is going to, especially thinking about the future, so that you don’t have to hire another person a week later to fix some other random little thing and keep Frankensteining this control box.
Yeah, at some point you’ll probably just have to ditch it, hire some low voltage electrical engineer person or high voltage if the pump and stuff is going through there.
Graham: Yeah.
Ashkahn: And build a little control box. And we’ve done this. When we built our own float tanks, we had to deal with this; we had to build a little control box.
Graham: Yeah.
Ashkahn: And it can be as simple as just little timer knobs that you have in your lobby that feed into something that turns the entire system on and a way to play music. So there are simple solutions without all the-
Graham: Rigamarole?
Ashkahn: Rigamarole or automation.
Graham: Was that the word you were looking for?
Ashkahn: Yeah. If you’re not a rigamarole type of person, there’s totally ways to deal with it.
Graham: Yeah. And really, everything could get replaced.
Ashkahn: Yeah.
Graham: It’s just a question of difficulty. I was thinking about liners, too. If you’re doing a tank that has liners throughout it in the fiberglass tub.
Ashkahn: Sure. Yeah, because those are custom sized.
Graham: Yeah, but you can reverse engineer them, you can have someone come in, you can custom size liners and have your own made.
Ashkahn: Yeah. Yeah.
Graham: It’ll be more expensive.
Ashkahn: The real question is, at the point that you’ve replaced every piece of the float tank, is it even the same float tank?
Graham: That’s a good question.
Ashkahn: Yeah. I don’t think anyone’s thought of something like that before.
Graham: You know where you should send that, you should go to FloatTankSolutions.com/podcast and send that one in. I’d answer it.
Ashkahn: Okay. That was good.
I got one more little thing to say before we finish, which is that-
Graham: Oh yeah, that wasn’t even my sign off.
Ashkahn: I thought it was just a real smooth segue.
Graham: Oh, I’m not that smooth.
Yeah, no go on there. What were you going to say?
Ashkahn: There are people out there.
Graham: All right. Thanks everybody!
Ashkahn: We’ll see you tomorrow!
There’s many people out there using float tanks right now from manufactures that don’t exist anymore.
Graham: True. Like the RESTroom.
Ashkahn: Yeah. Sometimes from manufacturers that never existed. But you see a lot of Floatarium’s out there. Floatarium hasn’t been a company for decades.
Graham: Apollo Float Tanks.
Ashkahn: Apollo as well. They’re still technically making those.
Graham: I’m sorry. Sorry Apollo.
Ashkahn: Yeah. Easy, easy. That’s still being made in Australia.
Graham: Whoops. They stopped existing for a little bit, or the company got purchased by someone else?
Ashkahn: This gets into hazy float history that I’m not even a hundred percent certain on. But I think there used to be two dudes who worked together, made these tanks and then they split. And one of them-
Graham: Okay, well-
Ashkahn: Let me at least finish.
One of them went to somewhere in Asia and started making them and those became the PathFinders. And the other one went to Australia and continued making those as the Apollo, or maybe vice versa.
And then the guy up in Asia sold his molds and stuff to a dude in Russia who’s still making that branch of it up there currently. And then there’s a guy down in Australia still making that branch of it. I think both branches of it are still currently being manufactured.
Graham: So actually, this is, as far as questions about people going out of business, this one doubled its business. So in some cases, you might actually end up with two separate manufactures who both could have spare parts for you.
Ashkahn: So yeah, you’ve got nothing to worry about. You’re all good. Don’t worry about it.
Graham: And thank you very much for continuing to send in questions, despite me berating them all the time. That was a really fun one to answer, so even though we pretty much didn’t say anything of any real merit.
Ashkahn: Yeah.
So if you guys have some high-quality questions to send in to us in the future, go to FloatTankSolutions.com/podcast. You’ll find a little thing right there that you can type it in to.
Graham: Was that your sign off or was that mid episode?
Ashkahn: That was it. Signing off.
Graham: Cool.
Bye everyone.
Recent Podcast Episodes
Funding your center through Kickstarter – DSP 119
Crowdfunding has made so many projects possible that would otherwise not exist. It seems perfect for niche ideas, concepts that would otherwise never see the light of day, and passion projects that just need to happen. This sounds perfect for float centers, but there are some caveats.
Crowdfunding is time intensive and there’s not guarantee of success. Aside from that, there are some issues with it that complicate things for float centers that other crowdfunded projects likely won’t face. Graham and Ashkahn talk about the successes of float center crowdfunding and the not-so-successes as well.
Don’t Build Your Own Float Tank! – DSP 118
For anyone considering a DIY float tank, give this episode a listen first. This isn’t a discussion on the merits of doing things one way versus another or expressing an opinion on one side and playing devil’s advocate for the other. Graham and Ashkahn know painfully well from personal experience the pitfalls of falling into the hubris trap of thinking you can build your own float tanks. They built two large open tanks in Float On and even years later they still cause headaches.
What’s more, they’ve spoken with dozens of people who’ve also gone through this themselves and heard their horror stories after they didn’t listen to the advice of not doing it.
The perception that it can be a cost-cutting measure or a more reliable way to get an operating float tank in your center by going DIY is generally pretty flawed. There’s so much to it that you just can’t consider before the fact.
Should Your Float Center have a Blog? – DSP 117
This seems like a good idea on paper. It helps with SEO stuff for Google. It gives you an outlet to write about floating and share information about the industry. And it seems to fall in line with something that other businesses do, right?
So what are the downsides? How much time and effort does a blog really take? What sort of impact does it have for a float center? Graham and Ashkahn lay out the pros and cons as well as things you may not initially consider about the responsibility of having a blog.
Thoughts on Buying Yelp Ads – DSP 116
There are lots of businesses that experience the dogged persistence of Yelp sales people calling them. Float On has done both buying Yelp ad space and living without it and Graham and Ashkahn break down exactly what that experience was like.
They also go into exactly what Yelp ads mean and how it impacts your float center (or doesn’t, as the case may be) as well as how well Yelp stacks up in comparison to other ad sources.
When is it Time to Open a Second Float Center? – DSP 115
Okay, so… Float On only has one location (not counting Float On Hong Kong) and there’s certainly a reason for that. Graham and Ashkahn have toyed with the idea of opening up another center multiple times throughout the years but something else always came up. As they’ve met more people in the industry, they’ve seen some of the pitfalls and successes from people opening additional locations, franchises and whatever else. They share their thoughts on when they think it’d be best to open and why they say to wait a little bit.
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