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
Monthly Budget for Float Centers – DSP 305
Graham and Ashkahn break down the real truth about how closely they watch their budget for Float On on a monthly basis.
The truth is… not much. As it turns out, monthly expenses for float centers don’t have huge variations unlike businesses that rely on retail, for example. Graham and Ashkahn explain they developed a sense for what’s within reason.
How to Sign on Float Ambassadors – DSP 304
Float Ambassadors have been with the industry since the beginning, but gained popularity sometime in the last few years. What are ambassadors and how to float centers find them? When they do find them, how do they get them to represent floating?
Graham and Ashkahn share their experiences with the practice of finding float mavens out in the world and the impact they’ve had on Float On.
How do you Talk about Psychedelics? – DSP 303
It’s no secret that the inventor of the float tank, John Lilly, was also an early psychonaut and used the tank for mental exploration in conjunction with LSD. Not everyone in the float community appreciates this shared history and some actively try to distance themselves from it given the taboo nature of psychedelics.
Graham and Ashkahn share their thoughts on psychedelics and floating and how, as a business, they can be completely separated while still being important, as well as explaining why some people might reasonably decide to disassociate from them.
What About 75 Minute Floats? – DSP 302
Most float centers divide on floats offered between 60 or 90 minute floats, but some split the difference right down the middle and offer 75 minutes. Graham and Ashkahn share their thoughts on this tactic, what they see as the pros, cons, and things to consider when implementing it.
Free Floats for Teachers – DSP 301
Graham and Ashkahn give their perspective on the pros and cons of giving free floats away for teachers. Giving out free floats is the Float On way and giving them to a specific group of people who could really use them sounds like a good idea.
The guys break it down and address some of the concerns any float center may have about running a program like this.
Latest Blog Posts
The Basics of Float Tank Sanitation
Some of the most common questions you’ll get as a float center operator involve the cleanliness of the tanks. This post will be an introduction to some of the most commonplace sanitation methods used in float tanks. These are generally either chemicals that go in the water or devices that attach to your filtration system. We’ll be discussing chlorine, bromine, ozone, UV, and hydrogen peroxide, which accounts for the sanitation methods used on nearly every float tank on the market.
Testing and Maintaining Float Tank Water Quality
Editors Note: This is a revision of a past blog post, updated to reflect the most current sanitation methods and standards
In a perfect world, you could just pour water and salt into a float tank and it would stay pure and clean and fresh and salty forever. In the real world, conditions in the water are constantly changing, so keeping your water safe and clean takes a fair amount of vigilance.
This post covers how we maintain basic water quality in the float tank, except for sanitization methods, which will be covered in their own beastly sanitation blog post. Stay tuned for that coming out next week!
Floating, mental health, and wellness
This post will explore the intersection of floating with the concepts, beliefs, and experiences related to mental health and wellness, with a focus on anxiety and depression. I’ll explore my own story as it relates to floating before diving into the current intersections of floating and mental health, with a look at past, current, and potential opportunities for research and personal growth.
Massage, Acupuncture, and Float Tanks… A Chat with Sandra Calm
We’ve seen lots of float centers that aren’t just float centers.
Many have massage, some offer counseling, some have yoga classes next door. Lots of people start out either by incorporating float tanks into a larger business, or with float tanks only being one of many modalities at their center. Being specialists in floating, Float On has not mastered anything else.
So, to help gain insight into this growing aspect of the industry, we contacted our old friend, Sandra Calm. She started up The Float Shoppe here in Portland with her husband and podcast sensation, Dylan Calm, back in 2011. When they first opened, they had just two float tanks, and slowly added acupuncture, massage, counseling, along with two more tanks. Talk about expansion!
She was more than happy to take some time for the industry to help us understand just what it’s like to run a center with multiple services by answering some questions.
