Something in the world of floating have you stumped?
Show Highlights
So HDPE stands for High Density Polyethylene. It’s a type of plastic and it’s incredibly handy for float centers. Float On switched to using this any place they previously would’ve used wood in their building materials.
Graham and Ashkahn break down exactly what this miracle product is, where you can buy it, all the different uses it has in a float center, and some special tips and tricks of getting it just the way you need it.
Show Resources
Listen to Just the Audio
Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)
Graham: The question for today is, “What is HDPE and where the hell do you buy it?”
Ashkahn: Hmm.
Graham: Okay. Well, HDPE is high density polyethylene.
Ashkahn: Yep.
Graham: And you buy it at high density polyethylene stores.
Ashkahn: High Density Polyethylene Emporium.
Graham: Yeah. Basically it’s kind of like a plasticky plywood.
Ashkahn: Yeah, just plastic, yeah.
Graham: Almost is what, that’s, plywood, yeah.
Ashkahn: Plasticky plywood, I see what you’re saying there. I’m with you now.
Graham: And we use HDPE in a lot of areas where we would use wood.
Ashkahn: Yeah.
Graham: Because wood will get destroyed by all the moisture and salt and things like that. We want something that, of course, is just totally non-porous, and HDPE kind of fits the mold.
Ashkahn: Yeah a few float centers have a few wood things and buy special wood, and they put serious sealant on it and stuff like that. So I think there is a certain thing you can do to make wood work, but it’s easier just to buy plastic. It doesn’t quite look as nice, it looks like plastic.
Graham: I think it looks nice.
Ashkahn: It doesn’t look like a cheap little toy or something like that, it’s got some different finish to it that looks a little more matte or has a little bit of texturing and things like that.
Graham: For example, we kind of end up building these custom pump boxes around some of our pump filtration situations that we have going on. And we’ll end up building those out of HDPE for example, we’ll use HDPE as the platform to set our float tanks on with vibration isolation pads underneath.
Ashkahn: This is like, boats use this material to build their cabinets or parts of their outdoor things like doors, too. Different parts that are actually exposed to water. And basically the reason people like is it’s a plastic material, so it’s not gonna get damaged like wood or corroded like metal. But you can cut it, usually like with just a normal circular saw, like you’d be cutting wood. And you can screw into it like you would wood.
Graham: You can take it out to movies with you.
Ashkahn: Just like you would with a piece of 2×4.
Graham: Build yourself a little stand-up Ashkahn and Graham that you can keep with you at all times. Very flexible.
Ashkahn: You can manipulate it and you can work with it in the same way that you can with wood, but it’s made of plastic, and it’s strong and for a float center it’s water and salt resistant. And-
Graham: So, what were you gonna say?
Ashkahn: I was gonna say there’s certain versions, there’s brand names of HDPE out there that are a little bit more expensive and often it’s because they have some sort of UV resistant material mixed in to the HDPE, because again this is used a lot for boats and things like that.
Graham: SeaBoard, is that what it’s called?
Ashkahn: SeaBoard is one of the brands, I don’t know if there’s other brands, that’s definitely the one we know of.
Graham: Yeah. And they’ll just end up being more expensive. So the more generic HDPE, just because it’s gonna be used in float tank rooms, which are getting no exposure to sunlight at all, barely even exposure to fluorescent lights.
Ashkahn: So, yeah, you’re kind of just looking for generic HDPE boards. They come in all sorts of thicknesses and you can usually ask the company where you’re getting it from to cut it down to certain sizes for you. Because these things can be big, and they can be pretty heavy.
Graham: That gets to the second part of the question, which are what are these stores? Like big contractor plastics stores. Like heavy duty industrial supply, but for plastics, is often where you’ll pick this up.
Ashkahn: Yeah, like the places we found them are, you know, on the outskirts of town in the kind of area where you find all kinds of weird industrial stuff. And it’s just a company that deals in all sorts of different plastics is usually where we find it.
Graham: We were kind of joking at the beginning, but it is kind of a plastic emporium, is where you go to grab these things.
Ashkahn: I think I literally found ours just by Googling HDPE. Or another one is you can look at SeaBoard, and that’ll actually help you find specifically places that sell it, and then you can ask those people if they have generic HDPE as well.
Graham: Very clever.
Ashkahn: That’s actually how I remember finding the place we bought it for. The guy was like, “you don’t really need this SeaBoard stuff, why don’t you just get this other stuff we have, it’s the same thing without this UV stuff.” I was like okay cool, sounds great.
Graham: And for the record, do you remember what the thickness is that we use for the HDPE board when we’re usually getting it for under the tanks?
Ashkahn: For under the tank? I think we go with one inch.
Graham: I think so too, but now I’m thinking .75.
Ashkahn: It’s either .75 or an inch, but I’m leaning towards an inch. But I don’t know, somewhere in that range is probably okay.
Graham: We’ll call this off the record. Somewhere between three quarters and an inch is what we use under the tanks.
Ashkahn: But it’s heavy.
Graham: It’s really heavy.
Ashkahn: Like the nice thing is these come in a, well you can get plywood in bigger pieces than 4×8 as well, but same with HDPE, you can find it in larger pieces so you can actually use like a single piece underneath a float tank, but sometimes we cut them in two just for the ease of getting them into the room and not having it be like a huge gigantic single piece thing.
Graham: Also why it’s totally worth having the supplier actually cut it at their big warehouse, because it’s really hard stuff to move around in a big solid piece.
Ashkahn: The inch thick stuff is like, I mean it’s real heavy to lift the like 9×5 piece of one inch HDPE board. But once you get it there, it’s great. We’ve had it for some years now and like, it’s held up great. I haven’t noticed any damage or anything like that.
Graham: Oh yeah, not a problem with it at all. And little pro HDPE tip here, too. On the kind of sharp corners or edges of the HDPE you can actually sand that down like wood too. So really get rid of any kind of sharpness that you have when you’re putting it into your float rooms. Kind of like cut it at a curved angle and sand down the sharp little edges.
Ashkahn: Yeah, you can do anything. I make my clothes out of it. Protective. When I go clean the float tanks I’m totally covered.
Graham: It’s hard to get through the door, but. Alright. Anything else that you wanted to pass on about HDPE?
Ashkahn: I’ve never really looked into other, I don’t know if there’s like a low density polyethylene that would be like lighter, easy to work with. So I don’t know maybe someone can do more research.
Graham: High density monoethylene.
Ashkahn: This does seem to be a very generic, easy to come across thing. I guess it’s more expensive than wood, too, you should know that.
Graham: Oh, yeah.
Ashkahn: Like a big 4×8 sheet an inch thick was like two hundred something dollars if my memory is serving me correctly, something like that, maybe more?
Graham: It is more expensive, definitely. And we did used to have plywood in our rooms for the base of the tanks and stuff, and eventually we just had to replace it, so. The downside of going with something that isn’t impermeable is its life is ultimately limited.
Ashkahn: Yeah, for under the tank I would not use plywood.
Graham: No.
Ashkahn: It’s hard to get under there. We have ours set up to the point where, here’s another little tip for you guys here-
Graham: Just between you and us.
Ashkahn: Check this out. Here’s a little thing we got going on. We take our float tanks, we put them on an HDPE board, and the reason, I guess we should say the reason we’re even putting them on HDPE board in the first place is because we have all of our float tanks sitting on top of vibration isolation pads. We don’t want to connect the vibration isolation pads directly to the float tank unless your manufacturer says it’s okay, but we don’t want to connect them directly to the float tank because they’re just these little things. They’re like three inch by three inch pucks. So we’re worried that the strength of the fiberglass just sitting on those few small points will not be strong enough to have all of its weight distributed just over small-
Graham: Oh I’m convinced, I’m so certain that would cause problems.
Ashkahn: So instead what we do is we connect the three inch pucks, three inch by three inch pucks, to a piece of HDPE and then we set the whole float tank down on top of the HDPE board so then it goes basically float tank sitting on top of HDPE, sitting on top of usually 11 of these three inch by three inch vibration isolation pads. Kind of spread out in a pattern.
Graham: I just realized the acronym for that is VIPs by the way. Go on.
Ashkahn: The HDPE sitting on these VIPs, and the benefit of that, if you use HDPE and if you specifically use kind of water resistant anti mold mildew vibration isolation pads. Which, usually, most people use ones made by Diversitech. They use like EVA kind of material. The benefit at that point it that everything’s waterproof. And you can actually spray underneath your float tank.
Graham: Which is awesome.
Ashkahn: So instead of being worried about wood as salt just starts to get under there in these hard to reach places, or for whatever reason, you have something, a leak coming out of your filtration system and salt’s now underneath your float tank. When you have a system fully set up like this you can literally just take a sprayer or a hose or whatever and just spray underneath the float tank. If your slopes are set up well-
Graham: I was gonna say, if room is sloped properly then you have a drain possibly under there-
Ashkahn: Yeah, boom.
Graham: And a filtration that it’s running to.
Ashkahn: Now you’re talking. All that water just comes right back down, goes down a drain, that’s it. You’re living the good life. You can go sit back on your HDPE lounge chair and pull a martini out of your HDPE martini cup, and you know.
Graham: Pour some liquid HDPE in there and just go to town.
Ashkahn: Hang out. Relax. Its over. You’re done. Float tank takes care of itself at that point. So anyway I think that answers this question.
Graham: Yeah, if you have any more questions about fancy acronyms send them in to fts.com, that’s not it, it’s floattanksolutions.com/podcast
Recent Podcast Episodes
HIPAA Compliance – DSP 330
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) required the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to develop regulations protecting the privacy and security of certain health information. This means that most medical information recorded by healthcare providers has to be stored based on a certain standard of security.
This is only just now becoming an issue in the float industry as centers are starting to accept insurance and medical referrals. However, this is still extremely rare. If this is something that may affect you personally, definitely research additional resources to make sure you’re in compliance.
Getting High (on air) in Float Tanks – DSP 329
Graham and Ashkahn light one up to honestly answer what they think about people coming into float centers high.
The guys share their experiences having Float On share a wall with a dispensary and the number of problems (or lack thereof) that it has caused over the course of many years.
Sit back, grab some munchies, and enjoy the ride with these guys.
What you Need to Know about UV – DSP 328
Have you ever wondered why the UV light on a float tank needs to be replaced so often? If the light is glowing, doesn’t that mean it’s working?
Ashkahn and Graham tackle everything you need to know about UV light, how it works in a float tank, and most importantly, how it can go wrong. This episode is dense with information useful for anyone who uses UV in their float center.
What’s going on with the MAHC? – DSP 327
The Model Aquatic Health Code is a document released by the CDC and has made waves throughout the float industry as this year it included a section on the ideal health department code for float centers as well as pools and spas. Some folks are worried about this because it may mean more rigid and unruly regulations in certain areas.
It’s been a few months since its release, so Graham and Ashkahn give an update to how it has impacted the industry and what it means going forward. Also, Ashkahn learns to abuse the show notes.
Logo Copycats – DSP 326
If you’ve ever looked at a collection of logos from various float centers, they can start to look a little similar. How do you avoid this when designing your own float center logo? Is it a big deal?
Graham and Ashkahn dish on logo design, the importance of simplicity, and a not so subtle reminder that the “don’t be an asshole” rule exists for a reason.
Latest Blog Posts
Should I Have One or Multiple Styles of Float Tank?
If you had every model and type of float tank you’d be running the Burj Khalifa of float centers, with an estimated 38 unique float tanks, which include pods, custom open pools, cabins, vertical tanks, and inflatable or portable float devices currently on the market (not even counting old models).
This is all to say that there are a ton of options out there when considering tanks for your center.
Whether you’re opening a two-tank center, or a bajillion-tank center, do you want all the same model, or will you have some variety?
Why ROI Calculators Suck! (or at least why you should use caution)
“What is an ROI calculator?” I hear you asking. “ROI” simply stands for “Return on Investment”. An “ROI Calculator” is just a tool that outlines the cost of something and generates what your anticipated profit will be over a certain length of time. Usually annually.
We should make a distinction between a simple ROI calculator (i.e. a widget built into a website with limited inputs), and a financial plan (complete with P&L, cashflow, and balance sheets). Both are going to try and do the same thing, but one is going to be far more detailed and accurate.
Roughly what we’re going to be talking about is a return on investment for your whole business, but return on investment can (and should) be used for lots of different aspects to your business to help you determine how best to spend your company’s money. Usually, though, that’s going to require a lot of detail that a simple widget can’t provide.
How to compete on price without slashing prices
Let’s say you’re a float tank center and more centers are starting to show up in your town…
Or, maybe you are that other center starting up a town that already has float tanks…
As new centers enter the market, the typical response is to run promotions on daily deal sites, promote large specials, and/or run Facebook Ads selling floats for much less than the usual offerings.
The best case scenario is this price slashing behavior subsides shortly after the neighboring center opens.
But what if it doesn’t? What if an existing competitor decides their new price is even lower?
How do you compete with a price slashing neighbor without competing on price?
Learn a few ways to make price a non issue with your customers…
Float On’s Halloween Spooktacular!
‘Twas briny, and the epsom groves fluttered with salt-bats, a lurking fog floating atop the murky bog. From the dark maw of silence came a guttural groan, an eerie utterance akin to those of monsters. From the depths of darkness, that groan turned into what mortals...
