Each person that floats at your center will take two showers: one before their float, and one after. These showers are definitely necessary. Before a customer enters a float tank, you’ll want them to shower in order to make sure that water contamination from skin oils and dirt is minimized, and after a float a customer is going to need a shower to remove the salty residue from their skin.

The cost of these showers quickly adds up, and makes your water bill one of the most expensive recurring costs of owning and operating a center, especially if you’re in an area with a limited or expensive water supply. Furthermore, most people enjoy hot showers, which can put an unfortunate strain on your water heater. Our float center, Float On, pushed our 50 gallon water heater beyond it’s limit (with 4 simultaneous showers followed closely by 4 more), and we HAD to install low-flow showerheads in order to have enough hot water for all 4 rooms.

That being said, there are a few simple tactics to lower your usage, and consequently take stress off your water heater and lower your float center’s water expenses.

Install low-flow showerheads

The flooring in your float rooms is going to be a top priority in the design and construction of your float center, but what about the floors around the rest of your center? You wouldn’t expect a float center to have black carpet, yet that’s exactly what we have running down the hall that leads to all our float rooms.

Earlier this week our vacuum cleaner got jammed and I didn’t have time to troubleshoot it for about 5 days. After a quick fix of pulling out some jammed gunk, I vacuumed our upstairs hall with its black carpet runner and was amazed by how easily this carpet went from funky to almost brand new looking.

Here is a before shot of a highly trafficked area directly in front of our Tranquility Room. What we have found is that the salt tends to burrow in between the fibers of carpet. The picture above shows a lot of salt, but that is after 5 days of no vacuuming. Carpet will actually absorb quite a bit of salt before showing it on the surface.

Because of the salt shifting to the bottom, it can take some very thorough vacuuming to get everything up, but surprisingly that’s all it usually requires. There isn’t a ton of scrubbing a working at salt stains.