Something in the world of floating have you stumped?
Show Highlights
Someone wrote in and asked, again, despite the repeated warnings of the previous episode covering this topic, how to build a float tank properly.
Graham and Ashkahn try their best to restrain themselves and offer some practical advice about how to build your own tanks while also repeatedly warning about things to look out for when going forward with the process.
Show Resources
Listen to Just the Audio
Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)
Ashkahn: Hi. Hi, everybody.
Graham: Hey, I’m Graham.
Ashkahn: I’m Ashkahn and we’ve got info coming at you like laser beams.
Graham: It’s a new catchphrase.
Ashkahn: I’m trying a couple out, let us know what you guys think about that.
Graham: Go to floattanksolutions.com/podcast.
Ashkahn: Just leave a review on our itunes about what you thought about that slogan.
Graham: Today’s question is, sorry I had to clear my throat there. Today’s question coming at you is, “I’m going to build my own float rooms regardless of your deterrences, what should I look for when planning my room?”
Ashkahn: You’re asking us a question because you didn’t listen to the answer of our other question?
Graham: I think they did listen-
Ashkahn: You don’t believe us?
Graham: But they didn’t accept it.
Ashkahn: You don’t value our opinions but you’re interested in hearing our opinions?
Graham: Take two, yeah, try a different one over there.
Ashkahn: “I hear what you say, but it’s not lining up with what I wanted you to say.”
Graham: If you haven’t listened to it, definitely listen to our episode on why you shouldn’t build your own float tanks. The exception, of course, being unless you just actually want to tinker around and play with this and-
Ashkahn: Start a manufacturing company, unless you want to start another business, manufacturing float tanks.
Graham: In either of those cases, absolutely fine, we’re not trying to say don’t go out and have fun and do it yourself projects-
Ashkahn: I’m saying there should be no fun allowed.
Graham: When?
Ashkahn: That’s been my stance this whole time, I don’t know how that’s not come across.
Graham: Is that a new slogan you’re trying there?
Ashkahn: On the Daily Solutions, the no fun zone.
Graham: You don’t need to leave a review for that one on itunes. Just let that one rest. Okay, A), I do think it’s cool if you play around with things and build them, but it’s not easy.
Ashkahn: Just because you want to tinker with something doesn’t mean that’s an appropriate decision in a commercial business facility.
Graham: I’m saying non-commercial tinkering.
Ashkahn: Okay, we’re changing the scope here, this person just building a float tank-
Graham: They don’t say, We’re making all kinds of assumptions with this question. I’m just saying I like building people building float tanks.
Ashkahn: If you want to build a float tank in your house, you go for it. More power to you.
Graham: If you want to build a tank and you want to spend years doing research and development because you want to be a manufacturer-
Ashkahn: Yeah, go for it.
Graham: Even that’s going to be world of pain, but go for it, but if you want it build float tanks for your commercial center, which is hat our previous episode was about-
Ashkahn: Don’t go for it.
Graham: No, it’s bad, it’s scary people who do tend to regret it really bad.
Ashkahn: Alright, clearly this person is not going to be deterred, they didn’t listen to us, we have a 20 minutes of us-
Graham: Go back and listen to that one again.
Ashkahn: You’re going to build your own float tank.
Graham: Regardless of what we say or do.
Ashkahn: What should you do to not screw it up as bad as you will screw it up.
Graham: What does it say? What should I look out for when building my room? Good insurance.
Ashkahn: Let’s start with the fact that the whole sanitation systems are complicated. There’s just a lot to know to build one properly, first thing I would look out for is thinking you know enough to do this. This is going to be hard. I would very carefully research all of the sanitation equipment before buying anything, because this stuff usually is a system where the components interact with each other, so if you’re just like, “Cool, I got the pump figured out and I bought by pump”, and you start buying other things, you may realize that in fact, now that you know a little bit more about the other components, you really want a different pump or vice versa.
Really figure out every piece of what you’re trying to get before you start just buying any of it because they’re going to have to work together and make sense as a whole, rather than as individual pieces.
Graham: Also keep in mind that it’s really hard to find good suppliers, even for things like building your tubs in the first place. If you are doing something fiberglass, and you’re going to be making a mould for your different rooms, not only do you have to pay the entire costs for doing that mould, but you need to make sure you found a good fiberglasser, which is really hard to do without having having some experience. We know of several lawsuits that have happened in the float industry over fiberglassing specifically, just because it’s such a hard thing to get right. You really need people who know their stuff, and at the scale that you’re doing, finding huge commercial professional fiberglassers to do it is going to be difficult.
Then you’re talking about researching different materials, which may or may not hold up over time, or doing a short run fiberglass and hoping that things work out okay. That is the next step. Figuring out where you’re going to source your tub or make it or what you’re building it out of.
Ashkahn: I would also say don’t trust pool and spa people. I’ve said this before but if you trying to build a sanitation system, yeah, really, not even us. At least you got that part down. If you’re trying to build a filtration system and you go to someone who builds pools and spas, I’m not sure they’re going to have the right set of knowledge to inform you well enough on what you’d actually want to do for float tanks. There’s just differences. That’s another thing I’d look out for, don’t just buy equipment from the pool and spa world. There’s pieces on there and materials used that will not hold up to the salt water-
Graham: And if you want to hear us rant more about that specifically, we have another great episode on doing your own repairs and things like that for float tanks. It’s kind of like this question, junior, I guess, just not on as a big a scale.
Don’t trust what anyone says, but do your research anyway and find out what as many people say as possible.
Ashkahn: Or buy a filtration system from a manufacturer.
Graham: And buy a tub from a manufacturer.
Ashkahn: Okay, another one that’s really difficult is the control system.
Graham: Now that you have your pumps and your tubs.
Ashkahn: Now that you’ve messed up all this stuff that the hard, big components, now you gotta mess up the little stuff like electronics and stuff. That stuff is really difficult because a lot of it is not just pre-stock stuff. At least with the filtration system, you’re buying equipment and connecting it with pipe, it doesn’t get too much crazier than that. Then you have to build kind of a brain for the system that has to communicate all this stuff, and then the trickiest part is having to control that somehow.
Somehow from your lobby, you have to be able to run your pumps and turn on music and have some ability to run your system-
Graham: I should say, the brain gets insane itself. You need totally silent relays, you need often actually air relays going into the thing, you need to make sure you’re dealing with some serious currents as well. We’re talking about 240 and it’s not the smallest piece of engineering to actually make something that can handle all of that well and kick everything on when it’s supposed to kick on and in some cases actually even scale up the motor of why pump so that it’s coming on not just immediately full force and a bunch of other little things like that.
Ashkahn: And you’re in a wet environment, these control boxes are often sitting right above the filtration system, so-
Graham: Everything also has to be totally-
Ashkahn: Splash proof and make sure all of your electronics are not going to get sprayed with salt water.
Graham: We know this because we’ve done it, by the way, we built two of our own one off float rooms, and it was not a fun experience. The control box stuff was stuff that we did not plan on being so difficult and was some of the hardest stuff to put together.
Ashkahn: We couldn’t do it ourselves, we had to hire a friend of ours who did low volts electrical stuff and it was even hard for him-
Graham: And then we had to call in someone else, like actual electricians to come fix the stuff that he did like a year later.
Ashkahn: And it was hard for them, and then we just got lucky and someone who was floating with us build the software side of control systems and managed to build a little software system for us to run these things. That person could move from Portland at any point in time and I don’t know what we’d do at that point, I’d have to find someone else who knows this extremely specific language of this proprietary automation software to fix or upgrade or deal with anything if any of that system goes down at some point.
Graham: Look for talented floaters around that could help you, but even that’s not good advice-
Ashkahn: Or let’s look for things that’s generic. I would say as you’re designing things, realize that every single thing you’re doing could break and what are you going to do about it? How are you going to replace things?
Graham: It takes time to help you with stuff, that’s something we definitely did not think about immediately when we were first starting up, but … yeah, go on, sorry,
Ashkahn: That’s right, yeah, how you’re going to fix things? How you’re going to fix things if they break five years from now and you’re off on some adventure somewhere, you’re not even in the country anymore, someone else has to fix this problem. How are you going to deal with that? How are you going to be able to access certain sections of the float tank if you need to replace a component you’re putting somewhere. These are definitely good things to think about as you’re designing something.
Graham: Remember one of my programming friends back in college made his own programming language of shorthand of things that he just wanted to inject into things and that worked really smoothly for him, he’s trying to convince his boss to use it, he’s like, “What about when you quit in a year? How is anyone going to understand this?”, he’s like, “Oh, yeah, good point, okay, I’ll use PHP”. It’s so true, anything that you do that’s custom is also not going to be easy to fix.
Ashkahn: I think another really tough one for float tanks is ventilation.
Graham: Another reason you shouldn’t do this, idiot.
Ashkahn: Getting proper ventilation and maintaining good soundproofing are basically feature designs that kind of butt heads with each other, and it’s hard to figure out and it’s hard to figure out until you’ve really built your whole float tank and you hop in there and you go, “No, that’s not quiet enough the all”. It’s just hard to test things. Basically when you’re building your own float tanks, you don’t have a chance to prototype anything. You’re just trying to kind of build something that businesses then run, getting back into trying to convince you to not do this,.
Graham: Yeah, sorry, sorry. Filtration though, serious.
Ashkahn: Ventilation.
Graham: What did I say? Filtration? Yeah, ventilation. Ventilation. Think about whether it’s going to be passive or active, and know if it’s passive that it’s hard to get just two tiny holes going into the tank to give you proper ventilation. It’s possible, you can get the right kind of convection currents going on but it’s something that you really do need to experiment around with a little bit in order to get totally right, or plan on having some kind of fan that’s exhausting or blowing air in there.
Ashkahn: I think another thing to keep in mind is health department regulations. Check in, make sure you are, if you’re building a float tank, you’re not going to build it and have them be like, “None of this is going to pass”. Often they want just the level of documentation that’s going to be a bunch of work for you to write up the schematics and the manuals and stuff like that that they’re going to be looking for. That’s just work that manufacturers have often already done.
Graham: For sure, legal approval was a really good one to throw in there for things to get for the float room. Actually kind of shocked we didn’t think of that as a first one. Heaters, whether you’re doing inline, under tank heaters, when we built our kind of custom tubs for our float tanks, they’re really oversized. We did seven foot by eight foot, big open rooms, and we used under tank heaters initially and the weight of the float tank just, we think, crushed them and damaged the connections or salt water got in or something happened.
It’s a good lesson that you don’t really know what’s going to happen to a lot of the things you install, and then in the end, we did inline titanium heaters, just so we could have something to heat the tanks that are tearing them totally out. Planning from the beginning for both is probably not bad. If one system gives out then the other one can kick in. In the case of under tank heaters, you don’t know unless you really plan ahead, what that huge weight of water and salt sitting on top of the heaters that you have is actually going to do to the connections.
Ashkahn: Really just lie plan on this tank not functioning all the time for a while, it took us almost a year from when we were like, “We did it, we built our own float tanks”, to the point where they were actually up and running continuously. There was a year of them being up for about a month and then something went wrong to the point where it took us three weeks to get them back up and running again.
Graham: Yeah, and then they’re be up for like two weeks and then down for a week and then … I bet they were down for at least a third of that year.
Ashkahn: Easily, so prepare for that. If you’re building float tanks, do something when you launch your center with them, or have a soft opening for a really long period of time or just mentally and financially prepare for that to be your reality for a little bit until the things actually become stable and get kind of fine tuned.
Graham: I think what happens is that a lot of people see the heavy price tag on float tanks and they say, “I bet that I could design a system that’s both a little more custom and does a little bit more of what I specifically want and also save myself some money on doing this”, and that, in our experience has never been the case. Definitely go into this project in the same way as assuming your tank to be down. Don’t expect it to, in the end, cost less than a manufactured float tank. Both in terms of lost revenue but also just the amount of tinkering and different parts you need to get and dealing with the tubs manufacturers and stuff like that. The prices really add up in a way that you wouldn’t expect if you’re counting your own time and time investment spent on this, then in no ways is this a cheaper prospect than actually purchasing a float tank.
Ashkahn: So to answer your question-
Graham: And good luck. And again, if you are just tinkering a home built tanks, lot of the same lessons apply just without our heavy deterrents as much.
Ashkahn: And things are simpler, you don’t have to have lobby controlled remote system or-
Graham: Yeah, and your filtration, because you can do it over such a long period, all of a sudden, when you’re talking about filtering between clients and it’s six hours that your filtration can run, the demands on that type of filter is just so much less than on a commercial system. Same thing for when it’s just you using it.
Ashkahn: The wear and tear that happens in a tank in your house versus a commercial center is definitely vastly different.
Graham: And that said, your tank will probably go down in the beginning, you’ll still have these issue with different part that click when they shouldn’t and weird ventilation. If you’re the tinkering type, then that’s what you love.
Alright, if you still want to know more about building your own float tank, despite this episode
Ashkahn: Go to floattanksolutions.com/podcast and we’ll tell you too. Bring it on.
Graham: Keep going.
Alright, thank everyone.
Ashkahn: Talk to you tomorrow.
Recent Podcast Episodes
Should Float Centers use Light or Heavy Gauge Studs? – DSP 269
Still no Ashkahn today. He’s taking a couple of post-conference days to himself.
Jake and Graham are on the scene though to answer construction questions, though. Even the straight forward ones, like today. Jake informs us which to choose when doing construction, light or heavy gauge studs when constructing a float center, while getting a little sidetracked when comparing wooden and metal studs.
Construction to Make Your Life Easier – DSP 268
Graham and Jake cover a wide range of construction tips to make running a float center easier. Everything from making sure you have extra storage to installing mop closets with sinks in them for dealing with heavy duty chemicals.
The advice is pretty much a shotgun approach of tips, tricks, and hard lessons learned throughout the years.
Draining Float Tanks into Septic Systems – DSP 267
Graham and Jake tackle the difficulties of draining float tanks and how that process can differ based on different municipalities, different water treatment systems, or whether you’re using a septic system or not.
Water treatment typically involves whole contained ecosystems and highly concentrated epsom salt water can impact that pretty drastically. The guys provide good tips for each type of system and what to be prepared for if you’re operating in a rural area with a septic system.
The Difference Between STC and Decibels – DSP 266
Post-Conference Ashkahn is still out of the recording studio, but fortunately Jake is keeping Graham company in there.
Graham and Jake break down the differences between decibels and STC ratings, two very important to understand when figuring out soundproofing. There’s a lot to digest in this episode, but fortunately the guys keep it easy to understand by providing a broad level overview of the different concepts.
Should I Wire my Float Tanks into the Wall? – DSP 265
Ashkahn is currently recovering from his talk and the after-party last night, but Jake and Graham have gracefully taken the time to answer a construction question again today.
On the docket today is a question about wiring a float tank directly into the wall. Graham and Jake provide an overview of why some people may prefer this (it’s much easier to keep waterproof, e.g.), and why at Float On they use the twist lock for their outlets and how to properly utilize them.
Latest Blog Posts
The Float Tour Blog – Issue #28
Home sweet home! After so many months on the road, it was strange being back here in Portland. We were exhausted, excited, and a little travel weary. The first night back, I slept in my own bed for the first time in three months and the world just melted away.
Having travelled across the United States, I’m reminded of how insular Portland is. We are aggressively fixated on keeping things local. Local beer, ketchup, bikes, pet food, pillows, phone cases… it’s part of our charm. We want to reward people for living here and being a part of the community. It’s so pervasive that, after living here for so long, I kind of forgot that Secret Aardvark hot-sauce isn’t available everywhere, and that most cities don’t even recycle, let alone compost.
The Float Tour Blog – Issue #27
Our northern neighbor – a sister city, of sorts – Seattle is the largest metropolitan area in the Pacific Northwest. It’s the land of Microsoft and Kurt Cobain, and the culture here embraces both simultaneously. It’s tech business professional in the front and rock n’ roll grunge in the back. This blend creates a perfect storm of high energy business life and high energy nightlife, making relaxation a valuable commodity. Floating helps fill the void left by nightmarish traffic and overcrowded restaurants.
Given that it’s so close to home, the float centers in Seattle are a lot more familiar to us. Our visits here were more like a high school reunion than they were like the first day of school. During some of our visits, we were picking up conversations right where we left them.
The Float Tour Blog Issue #26
Vancouver is the largest metropolitan area in Canada, and third largest on the West Coast. It’s a major hub for international trade, with one of the largest ports in the world, giving it a large migrant population, mainly from Asia, the Middle East, and Australia. It’s also been a long-time home to the Canadian film industry, and has even been nicknamed “North Hollywood.” Dozens of film and television productions from major studios film here every year.
Vancouver is very much an international city. It has large boroughs dedicated to varying cultures, including one of the largest Chinatowns in the world. The society here is more receptive to new ideas, always looking for the next big thing; it’s not surprising that floating has blown up in Vancouver as much as it has.
In the last 3 years, 10 float centers have opened up, most of them being larger 4–6 tank centers. The really interesting thing is how they all opened within the same short amount of time about 1 ½ to 2 years ago, within months of each other.
The Float Tour Blog – Issue #25
We finally made it back to the West Coast! We went through the Canadian Rockies and were overwhelmed by the beauty of it all. We drove through hours and hours of winding mountain roads, fertile valleys, and tiny towns so picturesque they looked like movie sets. It was so captivating, in fact, I suspect Graham and Ashkahn may have secretly replaced themselves with robotic doppelgängers to hike throughout Banff.
This post will focus on the smaller communities in B.C. that are bringing floating to new people every day. We also get to visit Canadian manufacturer Pro Float. They’re relatively new to the scene, just opening up earlier this year – another exciting sign of the growth in the industry.
