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
When should you call it quits? – DSP 94
Deciding when to close down is a challenge in any business, but it can hit especially hard for a float center. The upfront costs to build out are much higher than other industries, many of which simply cannot be recouped. When do you decide that it’s time to cut your losses and move on? What expenses can you recoup?
Graham and Ashkahn tackle this difficult question with laying out some sensible guidelines about what it means to run a business and how to go about it in a way that makes you comfortable.
Leaving a tank unattended for a week – DSP 93
Float tanks are like giant salty babies sometimes. Between water sanitation, temperature control, and filtration…they require a lot of attention and care, and even when you do things perfectly they can still make giant salty messes everywhere. So how do you leave your baby alone for a week? How do you prepare for that? Unlike a human baby, you can take your float tank with you (or at least it’s unlikely).
Choosing a Shower Disinfectant for your float center – DSP 92
A recommendation for a shower cleaner should be a fairly straightforward answer, right? Well… maybe not. Graham and Ashkahn are very particular about the definitions of things like “sanitation” “disinfectant” and other common cleaning terms. In this episode, they take the time to explain what product labels typically mean and what you want to look for when getting a surface cleaner for your float center.
Be ready to dive in and do some extra reading when getting into this episode. There’s a lot of terminology to parse and clarify. Fortunately, it’s Graham and Ashkahn so they have lots of really clear advice, like “don’t mix bleach and ammonia (or any homemade cleaning product, really)”.
When Does a Float Start? – DSP 91
Time management and maintaining your schedule is one of the most important quality controls in a float center. If you can’t get people out on time, it can throw off your schedule for the rest of the day. So, when does a float start? How do you measure that time? And what do you do if a floater starts late? Cut off their float? The next persons?
Graham and Ashkahn have been running Float On in a particular way for a long time now, and have particular insights into the challenges of how you manage your schedule.
Tips for filling an empty service schedule – DSP 90
There are fewer things more stress inducing for a float center than seeing their schedule for the week and having it just be completely empty (Maybe watching your pump start up and spray water over your entire float room, but it’s a close call). What do you do in that situation? And how do you prevent it from happening in the future?
Well, Graham and Ashkahn have tried everything, from doing shout outs and deals on social media, to literally walking down the street trying to convince people to come in and float while the tanks were empty. Some tactics are more effective than others, but what it really comes down, at least in Float On’s case, is being prepared to give out a ton of free floats.
The guys talk about the effectiveness of each strategy they’ve tried and how they’ve reached out to contacts to form mutually beneficial business relationships and really get the ball rolling with filling up their tanks.
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