What is water hardness? 

Water hardness is, at its most basic, the presence of certain minerals in water. Historically, water hardness was a measure of water’s ability to form lather during laundering. Harder water, due to it’s high calcium/magnesium content, would not lather as readily (or at all). For a long time there were many different scales for this, due to different countries with different languages measuring different chemical reactions.

Today we measure Total Hardness, the total amount of both calcium and magnesium in the water, in parts per million (ppm). There are also individual tests for magnesium hardness and calcium hardness. Total hardness is not useful for float tanks, since we add about 300,000ppm of magnesium sulfate to our water.

The measurement you would potentially find useful to your tank would be calcium hardness, and even that is not really necessary to monitor.

Why do we (usually) measure water hardness?

High calcium hardness can cause scaling, a crusty precipitation of excess calcium. This is especially harmful to water heaters, as calcium has an inverse temperature solubility; in water, calcium is exothermic, which means it gives off heat when combining with water. This also means that the warmer the water, the less calcium can remained dissolved in it. For this reason water heaters are particularly vulnerable to excessive scaling, which can cause the heater to work harder to less effect. This not only raises the cost of heating your water, but will ultimately result in the heater failing.

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 in perfect condition takes a fair amount of work and vigilance.

Water that isn’t maintained properly can lead to bad float experiences and become unsanitary and unsafe.

We test the condition of our water twice a day using a variety of measurements, basically one for every important variable water condition. Because some of our tests take a bit of time, we gather water samples from the tanks in between floats and perform measurements later when we aren’t busy transitioning rooms and checking in floaters.

Everyday, we check the following conditions in our tanks – temperature, temperature setting, filter psi, water depth, specific gravity, hydrogen peroxide concentration, alkalinity, and pH levels.

I (Marshall) started my career in floating as an intern, coming in to the shop each Monday to learn about floating, sanitation, and better understand the intricacies of construction projects. For every four hours I worked, I was expected to schedule myself a float as part of the curriculum. Being able to float once a week as part of my learning process would have been enough to keep me coming back week after week, but I also soon realized that I had stumbled into a very strange and special place.

I stuck around as an intern for more than 6 months before they had a part time opening. Half a year after that, I was working full time at Float On.

A source of future employees

At some point you might want to a hire an employee that you know is enthusiastic, dedicated, hard working, and you know you and your coworkers can get along with. If an intern is willing to come back week after week and work in your shop with next to no reimbursement, it is a pretty good sign that they are enthusiastic about floating.