How to Deal with Float Room Humidity – DSP 261

Graham and Jake are at the helm again while Ashkahn puts the finishing touches on the Float Conference.

Today, the guys are talking all about humidity and how to deal with it when constructing your float rooms. They talk about all the little nuances that you (or your contractor) might not think about when it comes to humidity and how soundproofing and regular airflow may not always go hand in hand.

Just one day left until the Float Conference registration opens up! Get your tickets, find schedules, and plan your Friday activities at FloatConference.com!

A more complete explanation of the Heat Index and how humidity affects apparent temperature

Hygrometers for sale (measures humidity)

Detailed plans for Graham and Jake’s ideal float room construction

Listen to Just the Audio

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

Graham: Alright, welcome everybody, I actually just recorded that intro with sound clips from Ashkahn, so I didn’t need him in the studio which is good, ’cause he is not here. So I Graham.

Jake: And I’m Jake.

Graham: And Ashkahn is off planning the float conference for August 18th and 19th and in the meantime we’re going to tackle some construction questions. And today’s is, “what is the best way to deal with humidity in float rooms?”

Jake: Well, that’s a tough one actually because we’re kind of at odds with ourselves. We want to build a soundproof box but then we put a float tank in there, which just gives off a lot of humidity, we let people shower –

Graham: Yeah showers –

Jake: In this room, just gives off ton of humidity. So in an ideal world, of course, zero penetrations, no door even.

Graham: Yeah, yeah yeah. Cask of Amontillado style just brick the floater into the room when they go in there, just solid –

Jake: That’s high quality service. That’s good service. I would float in that place. Anyways, though, what it comes down to is we have to put some kind of penetrations in the room. Be that for HVAC, are we doing a central, forced air system? Or, are we putting in exhaust fans? Or both actually, is what we have have at Float On.

So, we are pulling, you know, couple hundred CFMs, that’s how exhaust fans are rated, cubic feet per minute. We’re running a couple hundred CFM fan in those rooms and ours are pretty much running 24 hours a day. I’ve seen a few float centers incorporate moisture sensors where the fan is only turning off and on when the showers are actually running, but those tend to be running all the time just because the humidity that you’re getting from the tank. And the humidity that you’re getting form the tank is kind of dependent on what type of tank you have. If you have an enclosed cabin style tank, you’re going to get less humidity through the whole room than you do for –

Graham: An open pool –

Jake: Yeah, an open pool.

Graham: Like our two big open pools definitely generate just the craziest amount of humidity.

Jake: I mean, we’re not going to keep that room at 95 degrees, 96 degrees. That’s unbearable so we’re gonna get the greenhouse effect all the time, no matter what that water is always evaporating right into your space and you gotta get it out of your space, or else it’s going to destroy your space. You’re going to end up with mold and mildew, you’re gonna end up damaging those very, very expensive soundproofing materials.

Graham: And so just to hop in and kind of reiterate what an annoyance this is for a float tank center. You don’t see a lot of sound studios out there that just have a shower in the sound studio, so when the drummer gets really sweaty they can just hop in and shower off, you know and then you have to deal with, sound studios and a lot of there materials made for soundproofing are made for that and not really designed with waterproofing and the need to vent this huge amount of moisture.

Jake: Often, very porous materials as well, it’s a problem for humidity.

Graham: Nor do you see like the need to really soundproof a big public pool area, right? So, a lot of the waterproofing materials aren’t made for soundproofing, conversely. And it’s just this area where float tanks are a little bit special and unique and where extra care has to be taken because you are essentially just puncturing giant holes in your soundproofing so you can get rid of the massive amount of humidity we generate.

Jake: We’re at this weird crossroads of recording studio and steam room.

Graham: Yeah, so I’m just thinking of dozens and dozens of hours of trying to think through this and figure out the best ways to deal with it ourselves. So yeah, it’s not an easy thing to deal with, the humidity because, specifically, of the soundproofing and this mashup. Anyway, go on, I didn’t mean to –

Jake: No, no, no, yeah. There are some options, you know, that you can do to kind of cut down that noise. One of them being maybe an inline blower motor instead of actually having the fan motor mounted in the ceiling within the room. Or, even keeping that blower motor clean, over time as dust starts to build up on it, it starts to develop almost this white noise sounds that you don’t realize until the fan is actually off. Or, if it’s installed poorly, if a contractor installs this fan and she ends up putting it too close to the edges and all of a sudden it’s reverberating the ducts within your room, that’s gonna resonate through, that’s gonna make some noise for sure. So again, it’s always coming down to the installer and how well they’re doing with your space or yourself, how well you’re doing with your space.

What are else we looking at for humidity control?

Graham: I mean, air exchange is a big one and I guess the typical way that you’ll accomplish, well, so getting the humid air out –

Jake: Right.

Graham: Is one thing. Pumping fresh air in is another part of it.

Jake: Yeah.

Graham: And then the other one is things like air conditioners, you know when you have the coolant in the air that’ll actually naturally dehumidify as it gets sucked through the system. And you do need to make sure that you probably have an air conditioning system that has humidity and humidity control built into it.

Jake: And something to keep in mind from the beginning, where is that condensate pump going to be located? You’re going to be pulling a lot of moisture out of those float rooms. We have central air at Float On, our pump is running all the time. Always pulling humidity out and that needs to be drained somewhere so just keeping that in mind from step one as well.

Graham: Yep, and we just drain ours into our sink, right?

Jake: Yeah, it goes into our utility sink because of the afterthought, you know what I mean?

Graham: Yeah, yeah because we hadn’t planned from the beginning –

Jake: Yeah, the contractor never said anything and they’re like, “Oh, yeah and you’re gonna need this pump” and I’m like, well where is that gonna drain to? And they’re like “Uh” and I’m like okay, we have a communication problem here.

Graham: As far as like the far side of HVAC contractors not understanding exactly how much humidity is getting pulled out of the air, I think sometimes of the sheets of ice that were forming inside of our central blower area. And just the humidity that was being pulled out and then getting pulled into the main system was then freezing in the sheets of ice which were falling down from the system and crashing. It just sounded like something horribly wrong going on inside there. And yeah, so we had to put in more controls for that. If you’re not planning on the humidity, the sheer volume of humidity that we generate day after day then it can wear on both your soundproofing and your ducting.

Jake: Yeah, and your duct work, like making sure that they understand how much humidity there is going to be because those ducts need to be slanted appropriately. You don’t want any water pooling in any of your duct work, that’s were things like mold and mildew start to grow within there. So making sure you have good drainage plans, another –

Graham: And that can work at odds too with flex ducting which is also what you want for soundproofing, as far as soundproofing solutions.

Jake: Everything’s a trade-off.

Graham: Yeah, so and then there’s another soundproofing one, at least on the little areas where you’re crossing over your walls, do a little decoupling. You know, even if you’re using rigid ducting for the rest of it, have just a little piece of flex ducting that goes over your walls, or what we do is once we go kind of up into our ceiling, anything that’s up in there is flex ducting. And then anything that’s actually surface mounted down in our lobby or hallways or anything is all rigid. And that’s pretty common as well, but that is if you just have rigid duct going through, again you can just imagine sounds waves hitting that rigid duct and traveling throughout your entire space and amplifying and so it kind of makes sense just intuitively that flex duct is a little better at that.

Jake: I think it’s also worth jumping back to the need for fresh air in your space. So, if you have central forced air that’s pulling in fresh air all the time. You know, they say there should be a certain gap under your door to pull fresh air into the room. Well, that’s, again, at odds with what we’re trying to do, we’re putting door bottoms on –

Graham: Yeah, we want to brick people into the rooms.

Jake: Yeah, like –

Graham: Gap under the door, what are you talking about?

Jake: So you can see some challenges. We’ve seen a few people that had mini-pump systems, heat pump systems. Our mini-splits, and they are required to bring in fresh air because that’s only handling the air actually within the rooms and so the air then becomes stale and then that’s uncomfortable for your clients.

Graham: Yeah and so the, just to describe it really briefly, a heat pump system for those of you who aren’t familiar you don’t actually really have these rigid duct systems going throughout your space to heat and cool it, you have tiny coolant pipes. And just through thermodynamics and how heat is exchanged between coolant and compressed and expanded, you’re able to reverse the flow in the heat pump and either use that same coolant to heat or cool an area.

Jake: Very efficient systems, but they lack that fresh air.

Graham: But yeah, because they only have coolant lines going through, it’s not supplying fresh air. So although initially you’re like, “Oh great, I don’t have to puncture holes in things!” You still do have to go back and puncture holes to get the fresh air in there so, every system has this requirement for, essentially making sure you’re not just suffocating or oxygen depriving your customers while they’re in their float room.

Jake: Yeah, and you want them to be comfortable, you know. When we’re thinking about this humidity we’re not just –

Graham: Right, comfort and not killing.

Jake: Not killing, so definitely that. I mean, I’m not sure which one comes first, but for what it’s worth, both of them are on that list. We want it to be comfortable for our clients in those rooms as well, when the humidity climbs up that relative humidity it becomes very uncomfortable for your clients, it’s hard to breathe. When you have 50, 40% relative humidity is where we kind of try to keep it, but of course it spike when you’re opening doors and everything. You know, 83 degrees feels like 83 degrees. When you start climbing up that spectrum and all of a sudden you’re at 90% relative humidity, 83 degrees can feel like you’re in the 90s –

Graham: It’s like 2000 degrees.

Jake: It’s insane, like it’s completely uncomfortable and you’re flop sweating as you’re trying to like tie your shoes or something like that. So comfort for your clients as well I think is a big factor and controlling the humidity within your space.

Graham: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. If you haven’t looked at it, look at relative humidity and perceived temperature.

Jake: Oh, its crazy.

Graham: And take a look at the scale, it kind of blew my mind when I started researching this stuff like –

Jake: But it makes sense, like you feel these things, you know, like “Oh, that’s strange” you always hear like, oh it’s the humidity ’cause like Minnesota, man.

Graham: Yeah I’d take a dry heat over a humid heat, but it’s scientific we –

Jake: I prefer no heat, that’s why I live in the Pacific Northwest.

Graham: And it has to do with our cooling mechanism as human beings, too. It’s just we sweat to cool ourselves off, so the higher the humidity the less our sweat is actually doing. And when you’re at 100 humidity, in fact our built in cooling mechanism is doing almost nothing, so it’s really easy to overheat.

Jake: Dangerous.

Graham: Yeah. So again, kind of nerdy little humidity –

Jake: Don’t kill your clients, right?

Graham: Yeah, don’t kill you’re clients, keep them comfortable in some sort of order. And, yeah is that about it for ventilation?

Jake: Yeah, I think so, yeah, as far as like pulling the humidity out of the rooms, you’re going to get spikes in the rest of your place, too, but –

Graham: Yep, so some things to consider again, and no matter what system you go with, just bear in mind that this is a balance that has to be considered. How are you going to soundproof it? This is a discussion you should be having with your HVAC person and it’s probably going to involve, again, fans a little removed, things like using flex duct instead of solid duct, you might hear things like HVAC boots, kind of big heavy things you attach to the duct to stop them from vibrating for the rigid ducting. All of these should be discussions that you’re having, you might talk about dead vents, which we won’t go into now, that might be a topic for a different episode.

Jake: And talking about this stuff in the beginning, when you’re actually writing up bids because you don’t want to be doing this after the fact. That’s where change orders come in, that’s where a bid all of a sudden starts to climb in price very, very quickly.

Graham: Yeah, and make sure that your contractor know too exactly how much humidity you’re dealing with. You’ll be doing 2 showers every hour, hour and a half, two hours, something like that, probably –

Jake: 2 showers right after each other when you’re changing clients.

Graham: Yup, so you know, maybe a shower every hour or more on average and that you’re tank is going to be putting off humidity for every room, make sure they really comprehend the sheer volume of humidity that your center will be generating and that they’re planning their system accordingly.

Jake: And if you’re curious to know how your center is performing, like once this is started, or if you have one that’s up and running now. Hygrometers, you can mount those in your rooms, and they’ll tell you the humidity.

Graham: You should say hygrometers.

Jake: Hygrometer.

Graham: With a “g” not a “d”.

Jake: With a “g”, that’s right, hygrometers. And then they’ll let you know what you’re relative humidity is within that space, so we rock that at Float On.

Graham: Yeah, and you can see it spike during floats inside the float tank, you can see it vent out when we kind of kick on our main system a little bit heavier in between floats to really vent everything out. And yeah, it’s interesting data to look at.

Jake: It’s fun to nerd out.

Graham: Yeah.

Jake: It’s cool stuff to look at.

Graham: It’s fun to nerd out, for sure and if you have questions of your own, head on over to FloatTankSolutions.com/podcast.

Jake: Thank you.

Graham: Thanks everybody.

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