The ‘one last obstacle’ turned out to be much more of a problem than I anticipated, but we got past it.
We’ve got our demo tank running in the basement now, and Sara and I have both been in it! It took quite a lot longer to it fully set up than we anticipated, but along the way it’s already been totally worth it as a test bed for the public center we’re building.
If you’re not on our mailing list yet, get on it! Soon we will invite a few lucky names off it to help us give it a try for free.
After a couple weeks of waiting, a lot has started to happen with our home float tank.
We’ve washed and moved the tank into the basement, and I’ve put together the electrical system and welded the plumbing, and I’ve made two trips out to Lexington to load half a ton of epsom salt in the back of my Hyundai, and we’ve spent a weekend pouring it fifty pounds at a time into the tank.
I had hoped to be able to announce today that my lovely wife was actually in the tank getting blissed out, but unfortunately we have run into another obstacle. Progress, though. Progress is happening.
A whole lot of fix-it detail follows.
The tank we acquired included a powerful pump and a swimming pool-sized filter. Or at least, it had the parts, but for weeks I had no way to confirm whether they actually worked. It can be harmful to turn on a pump with no water in it, and in any case would prove nothing except that it made noise.
To test it, I had to get new PVC piping to replace the parts that had been hacksawed up when the last owner took the tank apart. Home Depot doesn’t carry 1½-inch flexible PVC for plumbing this sort of thing, though — it seems to be kind of a specialty item for hot tubs and saltwater aquariums.
Last week mail-order finally arrived, and I could cut up and dry-fit everything in the driveway. Here’s the tank with water in it and the pump running at last. The picture hardly does justice to how powerful the pump is — that water is churning hard.
Probably most of us have had the experience of staying in a bath too long, so that the water cools too much and stops being comfortable. A float tank is essentially an oversized bath, and we want to be able to stay in for hours without ever losing that Goldilocks neither-hot-nor-cool temperature. So we need a heating system.
When I acquired my float tank, it wasn’t so much a functioning system as a collection of parts, and most seriously, the thermostat was missing. I’ve acquired a replacement and was testing it out last night — thought you all might be interested.
The biggest news on our recent progress is that we’ve acquired our first float tank! We found a great deal being offered on an old tank, and decided to take the leap.
It’s a Float To Relax tank from the 80s that had been residing for a while in someone’s yard, so it needs quite a bit of TLC before it’s going to be ready to go. The seller had inherited the tank, and did not even know the manufacturer or model, never mind whether all the parts worked. Most significantly, the temperature control system is entirely missing, so I’m going to have to rebuild that. And the pump and filter are disconnected in enough different pieces that I do not yet know if they even work.
But it holds water, and refurbishing this beast will teach me a lot about how these tanks really work. Continue reading First tank acquired