How Best to Heat Your Float Tank – DSP 180

In this episode, Graham and Ashkahn break down the pros and cons (not Kahns) of different types of heating typically used in float tanks. Aside from going over the most common types of heating, they also provide tips and tricks for keeping your tanks warm that don’t have to do with water temperature and making sure you’re providing a comfortable experience for your customers.

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

Graham: Today’s question is, “Can you explain the pros/cons,” “cons”, not “kahns”, “of different types of heating systems in a tank?”

Ashkahn: Okay. Yes, I can.

Graham: Hit it.

Ashkahn: Here we go.

Graham: Buckle in, everyone.

Ashkahn: There’s different types of heating systems in tanks. Those mostly break down into two categories. Maybe three categories.

Graham: I was going to say, maybe three.

Ashkahn: There’s some sort of heating pad, heating coil, heating something that goes, probably, on the outside of your actual float tank tub, whether it’s on the bottom underneath the tub, around the sides, embedded into the fiberglass, actually inside the tub with a liner above it, whatever the situation is. There’s some sort of heating pad thing that’s connected to the float tank itself that is heating the liquid inside of it. That’s one type of heater. I usually just call them “under-tank heaters”. It’s not-

Graham: Even though they go around the sides. Stuff like that, whatever is-

Ashkahn: Yeah. Sometimes they go around the sides. It’s not the most accurate thing in the world, but, yeah, just for a name for us to use.

Graham: It’s just for convenience.

Ashkahn: Then there’s another type of heater that are called either “inline heaters” or “circulation heaters”.

Graham: Sometimes “black magic heaters”. No, that’s not true. They’re never called that.

Ashkahn: Never “black magic heaters”. But those are heaters that are built into the plumbing of your filtration system, so they have an actual heating coil, and the float solution will rush through the pipes. At some point, it’ll go through that section of heater and go right against this heating coil, and be heated up, and continue on its way through your pipes.

Graham: A lot of tanks also have a combination of those two.

Ashkahn: Right. What’s the third type?

Graham: I was going to say “hydronic”. What were you going to say?

Ashkahn: I was going to say something different than that. There’s also heaters for the rest of the float tank. Some float tanks have radiant heaters built in to the ceiling or the wall panels above the waterline, or something to treat the air, and heating that to get its way into the system. Those are just a lot more, “this tank has this thing going on,” “this tank has that thing going on.” Most tanks probably have none of these things. It’s a little bit more of a nebulous category.

Graham: Hydronic heating is actually kind of a form of under-tank heater as well. Rather than having an electric element that’s heating the water through some kind of source directly, you’re running water, or some kind of liquid, through a hose that’s wrapped around your tank, or sometimes on the inside bottom of your tank. You’re actually heating the water that’s going around. That’s kind of nice, because you’re not creating giant electromagnetic fields within the float tank, and if something goes wrong, you don’t have electricity in totally close contact with your water. It’s just there’s now water leaking into your water from your water hose.

It’s kind of cool. Again, almost like a subdivision of what I’d call under-tank heaters. Just that constant heating, but a cool way to accomplish it.

Ashkahn: Pretty rare.

Graham: Super rare.

Ashkahn: I actually don’t know of any float tanks off the top of my head.

Graham: I know a couple manufacturers who are trying to do it.

Ashkahn: Trying to do it.

Graham: I know some-

Ashkahn: Did it for a little bit, and then switched, too.

Graham: But I know at least a couple custom builds that have done it themselves.

Ashkahn: Yeah. I’ve seen it on custom builds.

Graham: But no manufacturers, yeah.

Ashkahn: Yeah. So definitely not something you’re very likely going to run across if you were to buy a float tank from a commercial manufacturer.

Graham: But if you drop that term to a manufacturer, they’ll be super stoked, and probably tell you about how that’s exactly what they wanted to do before they figured out how hard it was. Because it is very attractive in the float industry.

Ashkahn: Yeah, definitely.

Graham: If you want a nerdy conversation, it’s a good one to bring up.

Ashkahn: Okay. Let’s talk about the two biggest things, here, the inline or circulation heater versus the under-tank heater.

The single biggest difference that’s really exists between those two things is that the inline heaters can only heat the water while your float tank is running its pump. In between floaters, when you kick that pump on, that’s the only time water’s gushing through the pipes in your filtration system. Usually the button that runs your pump will also give power to the heating element of the inline heater.

Graham: That’s the con number one, we’ll say, is that it can’t heat the water when someone is floating. Unless you have a rare, rare float tank that has some kind of low-flow pump where it’s active when people are in there, which is almost none of them. For the most part, having an inline heater means you can only heat the tank in between clients, not at all when someone’s floating.

Ashkahn: There are some float tanks out there that only have inline heaters, and you can do a lot of insulation, and stuff like that, to maintain the temperature. It can still get hard. We’ve done really long floats at our float center. Seven and a half hours. Eight and a half hours. Twenty-four hours.

Graham: Just yesterday, another twenty-four hour one.

Ashkahn: Yeah. When you’re doing stuff like that, I think it’d be real hard to have a float tank that only had an inline heater be able to do these epically long floats.

Other than that, there’s a lot of advantages to inline heaters. They’re a lot more efficient, because if you think about it, you have a heating coil in direct contact with the water that it’s trying to heat, as opposed to these heating pads that have to heat through fiberglass-

Graham: Which is, itself, an insulatory material. You’re actually designing a system that has to heat through insulation.

Ashkahn: To try to get to the water.

Graham: Which is kind of crazy.

Ashkahn: Not only for your energy bill, but also, you can heat the float tank up way faster with an inline heater than you can with an under-tank heater.

Graham: I’d say, in my opinion, that’s the number one benefit. The ability to get that water up, especially if something went wrong, or just when you’re filling new tanks, or whatever. Your water’s really dense, so it doesn’t want to change temperature, even more so than regular water. Having something where you can just turn on that supercharge mode and actually kick it up a few degrees in a matter of minutes is way better than you’ll get from any under-tank heater.

Ashkahn: My guess for under-tank heaters is they can probably heat a degree Fahrenheit in maybe an hour.

Graham: I think that’s probably pretty average, yeah.

Ashkahn: When you’re around float tank temperatures, to get from 93 to 94 degrees Fahrenheit, that might take about an hour. It’s going to differ tank by tank, and all that stuff. Like you were saying, inline heater, that’s probably going to take a minute. We’re talking significantly faster, so when you’re filling your tanks up from scratch, or a customer wants it warmer, you have a lot more flexibility with those with those inline heaters.

Graham: Which, again, is very powerful. In my mind, that’s number one benefit for sure.

Ashkahn: Yeah. The other big advantage of inline heaters is, if something goes wrong, they’re way easier to fix.

Graham: Yeah. That’s a good one.

Ashkahn: They’re just out. They’re just a part of your plumbing and your filtration system. Something goes wrong, you just take that part of the system off, and you can put a whole new one there. You can fix whatever. They’re a lot easier to access. Your under-tank heaters are under your tank. Or even if they’re in the wall panels, or something like that, they’re generally not the easiest things in the world to access and replace.

Graham: No. But it is one thing that I do like about the under-tank heaters that wrap around the side, or that aren’t actually under your tank. Because, man, when a heater under your tank gives out, and that’s the only heater you have, it means you need to lift up your float tank somehow, which usually means a decent amount of de-caulking things, and deconstruction.

Ashkahn: It’s a huge process.

Graham: A day to days of not having that tank be operable at all, just while you’re replacing the heater.

Ashkahn: Yeah. If you just have little ball valves, or some sort of check valve on either side of an inline heater, you don’t even have to empty your float tank. It’s like twisting two things, and now you can remove the section. It’s just a lot easier to deal with when something goes wrong.

Graham: If you had a backup you could switch an inline heater probably just in the course of a float session and be down for just a little bit.

Ashkahn: Yeah. There’s the electrical part, depending on how it’s wired in with the rest of the system. That might be more or less difficult.

Graham: Yeah. If you actually have to wire everything to the wall, or something like that, yeah.

Ashkahn: They’re almost always wired into the control box, somehow.

Graham: So that when the entire thing kicks on.

Ashkahn: But even that. Just the scope of fixing that is so much easier than the scope of fixing an under-tank heater. Usually. There’s always an exception to these things with various float tank design out there.

This is the reason why some float tanks, especially nowadays, the newer ones, seem to just be coming with both. People just throw an inline and an under-tank heater on there, and then you get the benefits of both worlds, which is nice.

Graham: And backup for both, too. Inline heater goes down, you still have a backup under-tank, and vice versa, which is really nice.

Ashkahn: Yeah. There’s a few tanks that only come with inline heaters, and there’s a lot of tanks that only come with under-tank heaters. If you’re going to have one heating type, by far, the more common is something that’s heating the tub itself.

Graham: If you do decide that you want to retrofit your tank and get an inline heater, that is something that’s, with some adding in pipe length and making sure you’re doing it right, that’s a little customization mod that you can do on your float tank, too. Putting in an inline heater is not the craziest thing in the world.

Ashkahn: Yeah. As long as you also consider the electrical load, because they want to use up a lot of electricity.

Graham: Heaters are purposefully inefficient, so they really want to crank through it. Yeah, for sure.

Ashkahn: Then, just to touch on the other category, the conditioning of air for humidity and for heat, and stuff like that. Again, you see that stuff a lot less commonly, but to me it’s kind of one of the cooler things that I see happening more as the float industry grows, is manufacturers are starting to dig a little deeper into actually having devices that control air temperature, control humidity. Radiant heating in the ceiling panels. I know Samadhi’s been doing that for a long time. They’ve had something like that. That’s more of an infrared heat, so not creating humidity, but creating heat.

There’s all sorts of different things like that, and it’s important to consider, because when people say they’re cold, might have nothing to do with the water. Your water might’ve been a great temperature, and it might’ve been the air was not humid enough, or too humid, or not warm enough. All those things can lead to the perception of temperature being off. We tend to focus a lot on the water and not quite as much on the air, where I think the air is just as big of a part of someone feeling warm or cold in there.

Graham: Yeah. Absolutely. Even though it’s not directly temperature related, you might even put variable air flow in with that. All it takes is a little bit of a breeze, and all of a sudden it’s way cooler inside the float tank, versus things being relatively static. Sort of a tangential variable that affects perceived temperature in there.

Ashkahn: So, yeah, it’ll be cool to see that stuff continue to get more and more robust as manufacturers take on more of the challenge of really directly dealing with ventilation, and air temperature, and humidity.

Graham: Yeah. That’s it. Is that it for tank heaters?

Ashkahn: Yeah. I think that’s pretty good, yeah.

Graham: I think so.

Ashkahn: If you have other questions about things getting hot and heavy, go ahead and send them to us. FloatTankSolutions.com/Podcast.

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