Something in the world of floating have you stumped?
Show Highlights
As it turns out, there’s no certification program to running a float center. You buy these big expensive machines that require constant, technical maintenance and you’re on your own for how to accomplish that. There aren’t float tank repair persons that you can call (yet) and just have them show up and do it for you, so making sure you’re knowledgeable and prepared for this maintenance is a really good idea.
Graham and Ashkahn lay out the Float On best practices for how to plan for maintenance so that it’s the least disruptive for your center if something goes wrong.
Listen to Just the Audio
Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)
Graham: Today’s question for you is, “We want to do some tank maintenance, but we’re worried we’re going to mess everything up.”
Yeah, that’ll do you.
“Should we take things apart just to do it, or should we go with the old adage of, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it?”
Ashkahn: Alright, that’s very general. I wish I knew a little bit more specifics about what they were talking about, but you know. You can’t let fear hold you back! I mean, that’s my general answer.
Graham: Yeah, and there’s just some maintenance that needs to be done, you know?
Ashkahn: So you can’t-
Graham: You can’t wait for things to break either.
Ashkahn: Yeah, the solution shouldn’t be “just don’t touch anything and avert your eyes and pretend like everything’s fine.” So yeah, you should probably do the maintenance you think is important that you should be doing.
Graham: Yeah, and the fact that it’s called “maintenance” and not like, just abstract upgrades, or you know, “I have this sick idea to pimp out my float tank.” Like, should I leave well enough alone-
Ashkahn: Unnecessary labor.
Graham: Yeah, yeah. But you know, things like, yeah, actually … like we talked about during a different episode … draining your tank, and cleaning it out on the inside and refilling it every so often, making sure to get the inside of the pipes. Things like changing your impeller, changing UV bulbs.
Ashkahn: Cleaning the impeller.
Graham: Whoa, did I say changing the impeller?
Ashkahn: Yeah. You don’t need a new impeller, but-
Graham: Cleaning the impeller, getting all the hair out of there. And all of that is regular maintenance that does feel a little intense when you’re doing it for the first time, like actually taking apart your pump, and breaking spindles in the middle of the night, and stuff like that. You know.
Ashkahn: So here’s the deal. Here’s the deal, is when you-
Graham: Break it down for us, Ashkahn!
Ashkahn: Break it down here! When you’re doing maintenance, I think there’s two things that I like to keep as general rules that make all of this go a little bit easier. One of them is to only do one thing at a time. If you have to like change the UV bulbs on all five of your float tanks, or something, do one UV bulb per week. Don’t just spend one day being like, “I’m just gonna do all five tanks at once,” because you know when you do stuff like this, there is a pretty decent chance you’re gonna mess something up.
And even if you don’t mess anything up, like you put it all back together, and it’s just kind of leaking all of a sudden. And there’s just stuff like that happens, like way more than you would want or think that it would. And sometimes it’s to the point that your float tank is kind of down. You’re gonna need to spend a few days fixing it.
So, only doing one thing at a time allows it so that, one you have time to deal with stuff when it goes wrong, and also, if, in the worst case scenario, something happens to some point that you do actually have to cancel floats for that next day or two days or something, if you just have one float tank down that’s a lot easier than having all of your float tanks down all of a sudden. You may be able to scoot appointments around to the point where you don’t even actually have to call and cancel on anyone, if you’ve just got one float tank down.
So that’s usually what we like to do. We never took on more than one maintenance task like that for our float tanks per week. And the other thing that is a really nice rule to kind of keep is basically, usually this maintenance has, there’s a certain amount of pieces in whatever machinery you’re taking apart that are really easy to break. So like when you’re replacing UV bulbs, the glass tube around the UV bulb, the court sleave, or the bulb itself, or basically giant long pieces of thin glass, those are easy to break. In pumps, there’s usually like a little porcelain spindle kind of holding the impeller in place. That thing’s really easy to break.
Graham: Really easy to break, yeah.
Ashkahn: See, we’ve broken so many of them! So, I kind of have it as a rule that we do not ever open anything. A pump, a UV light, we don’t unscrew or start messing with anything, unless I have spares of those fragile pieces already on hand. Because the spares are usually pretty cheap, you know, those spindles cost like ten dollars. But not having one and breaking one means it’s three days, or four days before you’re gonna have to get that emergency shipped to you, and that’s just like three or four days that your float tank is down.
So that can be a really big difference in how screwed you are when you break something. So, those are kind of main things, don’t do more than one thing a day, and if you ever touch anything, make sure you already have spares of the fragile parts available to you.
Graham: Yeah, and if you’re really nervous, or it’s expensive machinery that you’re talking about here, like actually doing maintenance on your UV system, or doing maintenance on your pump, it doesn’t hurt to look online for the manual, to check in with the manufacturer. They have technical departments that you can talk to and make sure that you’re doing things right. Like taking apart your pump, you actually need a calibrated torque wrench, where you can like exactly know how many pounds of pressure that you’re putting into-
Ashkahn: Sometimes, sometimes. Not all times.
Graham: Yes, okay, fine. Some pumps you need that, right? And if you don’t know which pump they are, it can cause problems.
Ashkahn: That’s true, yeah, you can tighten things and it’ll like warp the-
Graham: The actual pump housing. And that, you need an entire spare pump to fix. So don’t be afraid to reach out for help and guidance, too, again both from manuals, and from technical departments.
Ashkahn: And you’re really gonna be surprised how few parts are inside of these pieces of equipment, than you think. Like the first time I took a pump apart I was like, “Oh boy!” And I opened it, and I’m like, “Wait, there’s three pieces in here? That’s it?”
And like a UV light, a lot of people’s UV lights, those kind of Delta UV ones and stuff, if you open up those, it’s literally just a tube. There’s like a glass tube and a light bulb in it, and the rest is just a big, open, empty, hollow cylinder. Like so you know, it’s nice. It’s nice to like understand what these things are and how they work, and that way, in the future, if you notice something is having a problem, you probably have a better chance of kind of understanding what’s going on, and understanding if it’s important or if it can wait. Getting comfortable with your equipment is really useful.
Graham: Yep, and the first time that you change your UV sheaths and bulb, just plan on having like two backups or something like, those are often the easiest things to break. I think in our shop, that’s like the biggest kind of serious maintenance thing that has gone wrong, yeah, just over and over again.
Ashkahn: Broken a lot of spindles, too! Yeah, and separate the UV thing. If you’re worried about breaking glass, you don’t want it to be connected to the rest of your float tank system, so if you do break something you can like totally flush it out and clean it without any concern of any glass getting into your float tank.
Graham: Yeah, that.
Ashkahn: I mean yeah, we can … If we had more specific idea of what-
Graham: Maintenance-
Ashkahn: What you’re trying to do, we could give a more specific answer, but in general, that’s it. Like do it, it’s probably not gonna be quite as crazy as you think, but make sure you’re going into it-
Graham: Plan for the worst.
Ashkahn: -prepared. Yeah, yeah. Make sure the worst case scenario is not gonna totally screw you over and bring all your float tanks down.
Graham: And don’t wait for something to break. I mean, doing regular maintenance is absolutely the way to extend the life of your float tanks, and pay the least amount of money, and stuff like that.
Ashkahn: And it’s good, what we do at our shop is we take all this bigger routine maintenance and we just, we schedule it out across a year. So we’ll use like our Helm software with these task generators, and set these things to show up, like these tasks, to pop up one week apart. So, we’ll go through six weeks of clean the impeller in room one, and then clean the impeller in room two, and then clean the impeller in room three, and then six weeks of changing our UV bulbs, and then six weeks of draining and filling our tanks one tank at a time.
And as we do, you know … and there’s enough stuff like, that to kind of like every week, there’s one big task that needs to be done. And so if you, yeah, you can actually sit down and kind of plan out like your year of maintenance.
Graham: Cool, and if you have anymore questions for us, head on over to floattanksolutions.com/podcast.
Recent Podcast Episodes
How to Build your Mailing List – DSP 325
Graham and Ashkahn consistently emphasize the importance of mailing lists, but today they dive in deep to talk about how to build a mailing list, giving their best tips and tricks to collecting emails and how to make sure you’re getting the right people signed up.
How to Deal with Employee Conflict – DSP 324
Graham and Ashkahn address the unenviable task of dealing with disagreements between staff members as a small business. This is an area that Float On has needed a lot of help with in the past. The best practices of Human Resources aren’t very intuitive in interpersonal relationships, so hiring a professional is almost always a good idea.
Float Tanks in the Military – DSP 323
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Graham and Ashkahn give their scoop on what they know about the military’s use of float tanks in their research and training programs.
Best Cleaning Practices without Burning Out Employees – DSP 322
Every float center has to compromise somewhere on how much cleaning to do between transitions. Where do you draw the line and how do you make sure that you’re keeping your employees happy without sacrificing sanitation?
Graham and Ashkahn remind everyone that “perfect” sanitation doesn’t exist and that making solutions collaborative in a work environment can do wonders for morale and problem solving in situations like this one.
Good Website Copy for Float Centers – DSP 321
Most websites you visit are filled with words. And that may seem simple, but if you build a website, you’re going to have to be the one to come up with those words. How do you decide what to put up there and how much is too much? What should you focus on?
Graham and Ashkahn tackle the elusive web copy problem for float centers and provide some helpful tips for anyone who’s feeling a little overwhelmed at the concept.
Latest Blog Posts
Timeline for Opening Up a Float Center
Opening up a float center is a lot like climbing a mountain. Even if you can see the peak, it’s a lot further away than you think, and when you finally get there, the journey and the destination usually end up being different than previously assumed.
In this post we’ll lay out a general process and timeline of what you may encounter on your path, from initial idea to actually operating a center.
Can you have volunteers at your center?
So you’re thinking about using volunteers in your float center?
Before we clarify what a “volunteer” actually means, we’ll first explore why a float center might be considering them in the first place. While it can be a way to provide floats to people who are otherwise unable to pay, the impulse to bring in volunteers can also stem from a desire to get some sort of free labor (later in this post we’ll dive into why you can’t actually do this, but it’s important to recognize that the instinct is understandable, especially when you have someone lined up and willing to work for free).
In addition to a desired boost in overall productivity, it’s also a way to invite more people into your center to experience what you do. Some customers actually want to help out and see what happens behind the scenes at a center.
Floating and Athletics, a Strong Relationship
One of the beautiful things about the float tank is that it serves to rejuvenate the whole person. — the body, mind, heart.
Broadly speaking, it’s a tool for homeostasis, an ideal environment that supports balance, health, and growth. This piece will look specifically at floating and athletics. For anyone who defines themselves as an athlete, or as a general pursuant of athletic endeavors, the float tank can be a powerful asset.
In this post, I’ll discuss individual athletes who float and how to look at this from a marketing perspective. I’ll also discuss past and present research, and share some thoughts on how the relationship between the athletic and floating communities might continue to unfold.
A Skeptic’s Guide to Floating
I think it’s time we addressed the giant metaphorical elephant in the salty metaphorical room — there are lots of exaggerated and untrue claims about the benefits of floating being spread around the industry.
Some are anecdotal, some are only half true, and some are just patently false. Floating has historically had a strong oral tradition tied to it — the practice has survived through word-of-mouth, one passionate floater teaching another everything they know. The unfortunate thing about this is that the information disseminated can’t be reliably tested or shared with others on a broader scale. You can’t use “my buddy Chris” as a source for a health benefit of float tanks in a newspaper article, much less for a research paper.
Now that we’re becoming a bit more mainstream, we thought it would be nice to add some clarity to what we should and shouldn’t be telling people about these difficult-to-understand, saliferous containers.
