Something in the world of floating have you stumped?
Show Highlights
Graham and Jake talk about the confusing world of plumbing for your float center. There are any number of unpleasant surprises that can come about when planning the water lines to showers, getting floor drains in place, and making sure everything lines up how it’s supposed to. If the sewer main is too deep or not where you think it is, it can add a significant amount of cost to your build out just to get floor drains installed. Fortunately, the guys have some useful tricks to help mitigate costs and plan accordingly.
Show Resources
FTS Product – The Float Center Construction Packet
Listen to Just the Audio
Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)
Graham: All right. Welcome everybody.
Jake: All right. All right. All right. Welcome.
Graham: I am Graham.
Jake: I am Jake.
Graham: And Ashkahn’s still away for just a little bit longer.
Jake: Yeah.
Graham: In the meantime, still here, still podcasting.
Jake: Still living it.
Graham: Still living it. Still rocking out the construction questions.
Jake: Loving them.
Graham: Speaking of which, here’s another one.
Jake: Oh, goodness.
Graham: “Is there anything that I should pay special attention to for existing plumbing and water supply when I am choosing a space?”
Jake: Pointed question, certainly not vague. Yeah, actually this jumps into that looking at existing amenities first base. We’re curious what’s going on with electrical. We curious what’s going on with HVAC, and we’re obviously curious what’s going on with our plumbing supply and our drainage.
One, how deep is that sewer main? You know we’ve got to be getting rid of all this water from all these showers in these tanks. It’s a very different story if my sewer main is three feet down versus a sewer main that’s like eight feet down. As far as cost goes-
Graham: Or 16 feet down.
Jake: Or 16 feet down.
Graham: Which is the case with one of our clients.
Jake: One of our past apprentices
Graham: They had to terminate their lease that they already signed, and been like, “We actually can’t afford to run all the plumbing that we need to run-
Jake: It involved earth bracing, all kinds of crazy things.
Graham: Yeah, yeah.
Jake: Yeah, they had to walk away.
Graham: And totally mention it was not even something that was on my radar to pay attention to-
Jake: Right.
Graham: -but they can actually make or break a space. It’s just the depth of your existing-
Jake: For sure. We were lucky-
Graham: -plumbing, yeah.
Jake: – ours is not that deep. You don’t know a problem until you see somebody else like, “Ooo, that looks like it stung.” All right. So, yeah, where that things at. How can you access it? Is your space, again, above a parking garage or something like that? How is drainage going to happen? Do you need to build a raised subfloor accomplish your drainage because the landlord won’t let you cut into the slab, or is there a bunch of conduits running through that slab, that you only find out once you start x-raying the slab during the due diligence phase.
So, drainage, clearly a big thing for us. Then also the other side of that that I think people forget a lot, the supply lines coming into your shop, making sure you actually have enough water. A lot of supply lines are three quarters of an inch. If you’re close to the street, and you’re on the first floor of a building, and you only have like four tanks or something like that, that might be sufficient for you if you don’t have neighbors using a bunch of water.
Once you start moving farther away from the source. Depending on the size of your property and if you actually, if you’re on a second story where you’re losing that half PSI per foot that you’re climbing in height, that’s going to change your requirements. You may end up looking at this being like, “Wow, I need to bring a new water main, and maybe I’m looking at an inch and a quarter as far as my diameter for my pipes because I’m going to be running six showers. I’m going to be running laundry. I’m going to have all these things going on.”
If you don’t appropriately size what’s the downside, what happens, zero pressure. People are floating, and then they go to jump in your shower, and it’s a drizzle, it’s a dibble if anything. We actually went through this at Float On.
Graham: Yeah, we’ve been having some issues recently-
Jake: It’s been crazy.
Graham: -with more water pressure.
Jake: You know-
Graham: Largely, it’s a result of some work-
Jake: A neighbor.
Graham: – the neighbors had done.
Jake: Yeah.
Graham: Yeah.
Jake: One of our neighbors came in-
Graham: And works that had been done before and to quite done properly. Anyway-
Jake: Long story short, our water pressure got squelched, and now, we’re in the process of trying to, we’re trying to update that. We’ve done a few bypasses, pass all the crazy stuff that they did. We got back to a decent pressure, but still we have less because they’re pulling all the water they’re pulling. Our next step, and we’re working with the city right now, is to tear up the parking lot behind Float On, and we’re going to run a brand new supply line with a sub-meter and all this other stuff just so that we never run out of pressure again at our shop.
Graham: And by the way that’s kind of the stuff that you’d have to do if you didn’t do due diligence moving into your space.
Jake: Right, yeah.
Graham: Then you realize you need to upgrade. It’s like, “Oh, well, now we need to tear up this sidewalk or this parking lot, or whatever, and then add in a bunch more cost for labor and the extra permits from the city.”
Jake: Absolutely.
Graham: It’s not a small project.
Jake: No.
Graham: And not to say that if you’re in love with the space, and the supply lines isn’t big enough, and you do need to do upgrades, that that’s a disqualifier. Just mentally account for that. Right?
Jake: Yeah.
Graham: You’re added a-
Jake: Much better to do it in the beginning generally. Yeah. Yeah. “How do we determine what’s the right size?” Well, you communicate effectively with your contractor. Every one of those units, like every one of the showers, every sink, every washer that you have on your space-
Graham: Toilet.
Jake: Yeah, every toilet, they have a certain calculation associated with them with how much cubic feet of water is moving through that fixture. Then you basically have a total for your whole space, and then you determine a few other things, like how far you are from your water source and everything. Again, if you’re only 40 feet away, you can get much more pressure on a smaller line.
Whereas, if you’re 200 feet away, you need a bigger line to keep that 40 to 60 PSI or whatever. But just communicate with your contractor. Make sure that they understand that you’re going to be running however many showers at the exact same time, and you may be doing laundry, and they should be able to help you decide on an appropriately sized line.
I think I have another thing about drainage that I actually forgot. I kind of like to get it written out on the floor plans from the landlord where it’s actually located on the property-
Graham: Oh yeah.
Jake: Is it running directly under my space? We know somebody that went through a nightmare, where the landlord, just with pencil, drew on a floor plan like, “Hey, the sewer main is right here.” The tenant accepted it. They went to start breaking ground. They started excavating. They couldn’t find the sewer main. Turns out that the records that the landlord had were incorrect. The sewer main was actually underneath a neighboring spot, which threw their build out back several months because you need to bring in a new supply line. You need to do all this other stuff because you can’t just cut up a neighbor’s spot.
Yeah, so kind of crazy. If they don’t know, you could always apply for a drain scope, which means spend a little money, have somebody come out. They can stick a camera down one of the main drains, like through a clean-out of something like that. That camera’s got a little magnet on it, and they basically inspect the lines. What they’re looking for are breakages in the lines. Do you have roots coming through or anything like that. Also, with that magnet, you can determine where the path of the drain is going, and the depth of that drain. So, if things get wishy-washy and you’re not really sure, drain scope, never a bad idea.
Graham: Probably just a good thing to do before you hop on-
Jake: Yeah.
Graham: and sign a lease regardless. I feel like if we were moving into another space-
Jake: It’s like $110.
Graham: Yeah, I’d want a drain scope-
Jake: Oh, yeah.
Graham: -just check it out. It’s just part of, again, our own due diligence.
Jake: We’re paranoid fellows though.
Graham: Yes, we are pretty paranoid, but again, you just see these things go wrong, and all of a sudden, your sewer main is under your neighbor’s space.
Jake: Yeah.
Graham: It’s just like I don’t want to have to deal with that. I always think of small expenses like that as the very cheap insurance.
Jake: Right.
Graham: That you only have to pay once.
Jake: Absolutely.
Graham: Compared to monthly. You know what I mean?
Jake: “What do you do if you can’t afford to upgrade, if you can’t get to something, if it’s a huge project and the building owner won’t let you upsize?” We have seen a few people utilize pressure boosters. Basically, it’s a holding tank. Your supply lines comes in. It pressurizes that supply lines, so then you get a little more pressure out to your shower heads and everything like that.
I usually see those on well systems where somebody’s working off a well instead of a municipal water supply though, but we’ve seen it in both things. One caution from our contractor, the reason we actually didn’t just install a pressure booster is we had older lines and we ran the risk of putting a pressure booster on there, not our lines, but the lines outside of our shop shared with our neighbor spaces. They were worried that we might potentially rupture one.
They were also worried that if we put a pressure booster in our system, we might pull sediment from our neighbor’s water heaters through our lines back into our stuff, and then start clogging up our shower heads and things like that. So again, there are options other than fighting with the city for three months and cutting up your parking lot, but everything comes, as you probably heard me say over and over again, everything comes with trade offs. It really does.
Graham: Yeah, one last thought on the existing plumbing when you’re moving in is definitely keep in mind that this is plumbing for, often times, the entire building. So, you’re not just counting up the fixtures-
Jake: Absolutely.
Graham: – in your space. You’re not just counting on what you’re doing, and then that’s going to determine the supply lines size. You’re counting everything. Sometimes that even includes past construction. So, it could be that people in the building prior in your exact same space had already added in a bunch of fixtures, and then the person before you in that space took them all out.
So, you kind of need to do some research and find out what’s on file with the city as the maximum number of fixtures that they’ve actually hit for your whole building space. Anyway, there’s this extra step where you kinda just need to realize you’re not the only one often times that’s pulling off of that same water supply.
Jake: And it’s super, super unfortunate if all of a sudden, you realize that there’s work done on a property that was unpermitted, because that does cost. They’re going to fall on you as the new tenant, and possibly on the landlord, but often we see it fall on the tenant.
Graham: The landlord’s really going to make sure that it doesn’t fall on them.
Jake: Yeah, they’re really good at that, real slimy.
Graham: That’s like they’re professionals.
Jake: Yeah, it’s almost like they have a game of taking our money. Just one other note when I’m thinking about drainage and supply and everything. Where are the stacks for the toilets already located? Are you going to be utilizing existing stacks? By stack, I just mean the drainage directly underneath your toilet.
Where are those located? Because if you start moving those around, you do open yourself up to some more ADA scrutiny. Those new bathrooms will need to be compliant. Whereas if you have an existing bathroom, you may not need to make that complaint. As you probably heard on some of my other shows, my stance is that I wish everything was ADA compliant, but you know there’s cost. There’s things there. You know what I mean?
There might be a benefit to leaving that one toilet in that corner and building a brand new beautiful ADA bathroom over here, so that you still have two. So yeah, I think that’s kind of my last thought on that.
Graham: Cool.
Jake: All right.
Graham: That was a good one.
Jake: Yeah, it’s great.
Graham: Just like all of them. They’re amazing.
Jake: They’re pretty good.
Graham: And our answers are so-so, but the questions-
Jake: Oh, the answers, no. The answers are terrible.
Graham: This is spectacular.
Jake: But the questions, piece of art.
Graham: If you have your own, go to FloatTankSolutions.com/podcast.
Graham: I was going to say it.
Jake: You were going to say the /podcast.
Graham: It’s only because you do a better job than I do.
Jake: Okay. Well, here. I’ll do the FloatTankSolutions.com-
Graham: Okay. Bye everyone. Talk to you tomorrow.
Jake: Have a great day.
Recent Podcast Episodes
Is there a “Best” Float Position? – DSP 224
Ashkahn and Graham thoroughly debunk the myth of a “best” float position. The Float On boys explicate their philosophy that there is no right way to float and instead talk about all the different positions they enjoy floating in. They learn more about each other than they expected to in the process.
What to Look for When Hiring a Float Center Employee – DSP 223
What makes a good float center employee? What does Float On look for when trying to find someone to take care of their salt monster tanks and their blissed out customers at the same time?
Ashkahn and Graham break down the qualities they look for when hiring, and what makes the people at Float On so special.
How Do you Incentivize Return Floaters without Memberships or Packages? – DSP 222
How many times has a float center owner had a first time floater come out of the tank and said something along the lines of “that was amazing! I need to do this every week!” and then they never see that person again? How do you get them to come back without committing to a membership or a high ticket package of floats?
Ashkahn and Graham share their thoughts on this exact problems and some of the creative solutions they’ve implemented at Float On to combat it. The key, for them, has been keeping it simple and making it accessible.
How to Schedule Your Float Center During the Slow Season – DSP 221
For most float centers, the summer months drastically change how busy it gets. It seems that zenning out to nothingness is moderately less appealing when there’s a lot of outdoor activities to enjoy.
Graham and Ashkahn share their thoughts on a reduced schedule. Float On runs 24 hours almost every day throughout the year. so reducing their schedule is typically against their philosophies. They explain some of the reasons people might consider it, what are some good ways to go about it, as well as explain some practices to consider avoiding when cutting hours.
Slip Proofing Your Float Tanks and Float Rooms – DSP 220
The solution inside float tanks is slippery. Really really slippery. What is the best way to make sure that float customers aren’t slipping and falling before or after their floats.
Ashkahn and Graham break down the various steps needed for slip proofing for inside the float tank, the first step out of the tank, the rest of the float room, your hallways, or inside your workrooms.
Latest Blog Posts
Float Quarterly – January 2016
It’s been our pleasure to be actively involved in the float industry for over five years now. In 2016, we’re already on track to have more new centers opening, more press covering floating, and more resources for people just entering our salty world than ever before.
With so much action, we’ve decided to send out brief, quarterly updates on our industry to keep people posted on the all the latest happenings. Welcome to our first installment!
Training to Become a Certified Pool/Spa Operator
Each year at the Float Conference, we put on a Certified Pool/Spa Operator (CPO) training course. At first, that might strike you as an odd thing to have as part of a float tank conference. This post will explain what CPO training is and why we think it can be a really useful certification to have on your belt.
Increase Sales by Offering Retail in Your Float Center
On their own, float tanks have a limit to their profits. Retailing has the potential to bring extra money into your shop, but it also requires a lot of work and attention on your part to really be successful at it. At Float On, our retail contributes 6.5% towards our overall sales and 3% of total profit. While this might not seem like a large contribution, depending on your sales, it could end up paying the wages of a whole extra employee.
The Health Department and Float Tanks… How to get Approved!
If you’re working on starting a float center, chances are you’re nervously anticipating having to call the health department. We’ve all heard horror stories of people being asked to follow pool rules that don’t make sense for them, or having to do costly changes to their pump systems.
float tanks not regulatedBelow is our best advice for working with your health department to get your float center approved, but before we dive into that, it’s important to get a bit of an understanding as to how the health department works.