 And so the title of my presentation is kind of that health inspectors, which I am, I'm a health inspector in Alberta, in Canada, I live in Edmonton, and I sit, oh thank you, in the house, represent, oil money. Okay, so Canada has health inspectors and we're nationally certified and so this is my opportunity to tell you about us. We, we're important but you know this is a new trend, this is a trend for us, we're kind of new on the scene and what I can do is, yeah sure I'm a regulator in my little province but at the same time I can speak to health inspectors across Canada and help them help you in a way, right? And I think that should come through in my presentation is how to do that and I met Paul Reeves who's someone similar to me but in the States here, hopefully we can help our profession understand you, which should lead to a better experience for operators and owners. So we don't know, we don't know, I don't, I don't think we're going to get any argument from the group that health inspectors don't know anything, right, so the only really, I wanted to point out, if you can see where I'm pointing there, is that Alberta had a standard for sensory deprivation tanks, it was published in 1996 and in 1996 I was just barely out of high school, I didn't know anything about it but our province had a standard for this stuff and it was actually probably, you know, decent for its time but I've taken every step I could to get this removed from the internet so if you're trying to find this or you have a copy of it good for you but I tried to take it down off Google because it doesn't really represent where I think your industry's at. Has anybody seen this before or aware of it? Yeah, so just because I'm from Alberta, this is not a live document in Alberta, we don't enforce legislation using this standard anymore and so you should know that. I think the big thing that speaks to is things like chlorinating your tank and you must have a 5 ppm of chlorine and, you know, I also don't want that or I think we can do better than that so, you know, I try to get our legislators in Canada not to use this as a reference and as this trend of flotation is growing in my city and in my province and across Canada and North America we do the same thing you do with Google stuff and we say like what's going on? What resources can we get? And this, I thought this was really interesting that, I think this is a float on kind of resource, right, where you can get materials that help you kind of navigate your way through the health department because you're entering pretty much an unregulated area yet health departments seem to love you or hate you. I think they love you. They love to be involved with you but I thought this was interesting because I take a lot of ownership over my profession and I am heavily involved in my profession and I, when I see something like here's some tools to help you educate the health department I thought you know there's a need there to build some resources on my end like on health inspector and probably like the quintessential health inspector reference for you. Has anyone ever seen a movie goes back a few years ago about, it's called Ghostbusters? And there's this guy named Peck, Peck, his last name is Peck from the EPA and he walks into that ghost containment unit and he doesn't understand it and he just feels like there's something bad about it and he says I don't care about your opinion just shut the thing down. I feel like you might think that we're Peck, right, so next time the health inspector comes to your place just kind of mutterpecker under your voice and we'll know what you mean and honestly I'd rather see something like this you know kind of a gentle call up for help than what we typically see signs in the door saying you know get lost health inspector or worse but you know I think what's valuable from this note is we get a little bit in health we get a little bit throw the baby out with the bath water we lose the forest for the trees because we in flotation is a good example of that because you've got this was you just heard this potentially groundbreaking way to keep people healthy in a mental way and health inspectors are worried about some poop particles floating around in the water and I think you know as extreme as this might be it's really what we have to keep in mind when you're a health inspector is the greater balance or the greater idea of health so what can you do to kind of pick up on that resource and kind of educate the health department I think let's have a quick talk about what what you are and what you're not because what I do now is I inspect tattoo studios tattooing piercing nail salon and I would call those in wherever you live you probably have a standard for tattooing like you open your door to be a tattoo studio you must be inspected and here's the rules same with make nail salons and these services and then there's something else where you live likely where they've defined something called a health service and the health service is something that is designed to like protect or promote health you probably see how you're probably more like them and not the other now we talk about health services they regulate some health services you can't just do surgery on people you must they call those restricted activities where I come from so not everybody can do a surgery on someone you must be belong to the College of Physicians in my province to do stuff like that but there's this kind of open area where there's unregulated health activities going on where you live and where I live okay there's also unregulated personal services and these personal services like I said tattooing and piercing are the regulated ones there's all these things I see and you can come ask me afterwards what all these words mean but these are like the unregulated go to any mall and you'll see a lot of these services well maybe not suspension but dermal rolling there's a lot of that going on in aesthetic salons lasers big one everywhere it's generally unregulated this is all for like cosmetic purposes right like there's no health effect to this there's no health component to laser hair removal you just don't want hair threading it can go on and on so establishing some ground here that there's some unregulated personal services and there's unregulated health services and that's okay the reason why we regulate is to take some freedom away from the operator and say look for health reasons we need to we need to make sure you're doing it under these under these rules and the list goes on so we've established here we've got like regulated and unregulated personal services which are kind of the cosmetic effects and then we've got regulated so your restricted health services and ones that are not and I think that you're most likely here because really what you're doing is offering something that's for health for health reasons not for cosmetic reasons I mean your skin feels great when you come out but it doesn't you're not going in there for that purpose right so I think knowing who you are like why would we talk about that your ultimate job is an owner in it when you have an unregulated health service is to make sure that you're not hurting anybody really and that's that's what health inspectors really want to know is is this service gonna hurt somebody and in my promise we call that a nuisance but in where you live you might call it a health hazard but as long as I think ultimately what you have to do to the health department is kind of prove that you're not creating a health hazard and that's maybe advantageous so what else aren't you this is a swimming pool that I inspect to in my city called West Empton Mall this is the water park in West Empton Mall it's like the one of the largest indoor water parks so I think it's important to to separate yourself from swimming pools so you're not you're not personal services and you're not swimming pools and this is why you like no other pool have an opportunity to make sure that every person gets a shower I wish I could do that at this big place but I can guarantee you all those kids just ran right in grabbed the tube and jumped in your patrons the people who use your pool tend to not be the type who poop in their diapers and leave it in there right like you they tend to be like have their have their faculties about them and then you also get that one on one with every floater and I think talked to a lot of you about the importance of that and how you get to say to to every patron like I need you to have a shower and this is how you do it and take your clothes off all these things you get to do I think that's very valuable and we don't get that in swimming that single user I know there's multiple users in flotation but that's rare single user in a pool at one time a pool of water is different than this right so you're not this and of course what's different is circulation filtration is not happening while you're floating I think the biggest thing to like poop scares health inspectors you call that the fecal oral route so when you tell me your anal about health I'm actually kind of ticked off but what I want to stress is you know have that discussion with your health department like what what are they upset about and if they're worried about the ingestion of fecal matter it's likely not going to happen I floated and I know if I get that water in my mouth it's coming right back out and I know that if I have a cut and then it's going to sting and I got to get out and shower it it's not going to get in my eyes or you know I know this this is in your favor you know this is why you're not swimming it's because you get all this these safety factors already built in so we talked about that in the workshop and I can kind of formulate kind of why you're not a swimming pool you know you're not a pool and I think you need to really be clear on that distinction or else you're gonna get lumped in with pools so what else can you tell the health department I think just generally and I've seen a lot of great designs out there the other thing about my presentation I'm sorry I've only seen like four studios in my whole life so I haven't seen every pod and tank and room and cabin and so the pictures I'm showing are not meant to show anything bad necessarily just just so you don't have to read words all the time but some really the basics of your system are going to be you know the pump through a filter and this flow of water inlets and out and some sort of outlet taking it back to the pump you know you should have those basic components and you all view and where I come from we don't really say it must be done like you can have these kind of home put together jobs but or you could have something a little more formal but there's some of the things that we talked about in the workshop little tiny things that it's gonna do it better every time you make a new version of your pod I've seen some of the maybe some tubing clogs up so what can you do to fix that and I've already heard some really good advances on that putting your chemical in after the filter not before we'll get you more results in terms of killing germs I'm just gonna fly through some of this stuff is you know but from when I did this to now from what I see is out there things have really improved I want to talk a bit about turnovers I know turnovers came up and it drives people crazy but turnovers are really meant to be how much time does it take for all that water in your pod to go through the filter and come back out and it's almost an imaginary number for me in flotation because you can run your circulation and get me theoretically for turnovers but then when I shine my flashlight on the surface there's still hairs floating around so I know that not all that water got in there so I just wanted to talk about the importance of skimming and whether that's you should ask yourself in your pod is the water actually being skimmed off because the dirtiest most infectious water in your pod is right on the right on the surface there and so that that's got to get off somehow either manually or through like some suction action of the filter in your pod and I just made a note here to say like we kind of want what you want you know we want to tell the public this is safe you know I've talked to many people who've asked this is flotation safe and they they come in with this face it's like it's gross and then I'll say no I know I've been to many of them I floated myself they have filtration circulation they have some sort of disinfection strategy and you turn that frown upside down they go oh yeah I'm gonna try that so you're doing that I'm doing that but if we're both doing that and then you know they go and look at your water and there's hair floating around I think that that's not helping either of us right so flotation I want to just yeah that that bit about so I'll go back a bit about skimming and turnovers I think that we should keep discussing that and I know that you know entrapment isn't really a concern in my mind the common sense would tell me that you're in there and there's no circulation going on but the entrapment of swimmers and entanglement of hair and swimming pools is a big issue I think there's an opportunity to speak to that with with pods and cabins and things like that I mean what I would do if I was you is put the baiters feet at this end that's one thing you can do to prevent their hair from getting caught I think anytime you look at your pod after a floater's been in there you should always look at your suction outlets and make sure that covers in good repair and not broken or jagged so no one can get caught in it emergency call buttons are great I mean you have all of these things you can do is almost like six or seven layers of protection you can build in you know to kind of meet the intent of what I would call that VGB study in legislation but what we ultimately want is safe water and we talked about this in the workshop and so all of these parameters you can tell me about but they don't really mean a ton to me as a health inspector nothing on here really tells me if you if you're keeping track of temperature and specific gravity and alkalinity that doesn't tell me that no germs are gonna grow even the presence of peroxide alone you're probably running into a lot of pushback from health department saying that's that's not enough that's not good enough what we really want and what we love are like residuals and numbers and so I think we talked about in the workshop maybe the potential for measuring millable so in Alberta in our swimming pools we moved away from like telling operators to put a bunch of chlorine into the pool what we'd rather you tell us is show us that you can keep your millables your oxidative reduction potential of the water high and if you if you can do that then I don't really care what disinfectant you're using ORP rules so if your ORP is high you're gonna kill any germs that are in the tank but we're gonna need to talk about that because your water is a little different I don't know how the salts gonna match up with the probes there's lots of work to be done there if you must use chlorine or bromine potentially maybe you can ask to use less because again in Alberta 0.5 ppm is the minimum residual for swimming pools that's really low that's almost similar to drawing a bath for yourself you're gonna probably pour that much chlorine into your into your bathtub or have a shower in that much chlorine so that's a really low level of chlorine and at the right pH it's very effective at killing germs I think ultimately what you can do is test water and I know it depends where you're at where you live your access to labs and the labs capabilities but proving that nothing's growing in the water is really valuable and then the horizons might be something like ozone ozone I don't see a lot of that in swimming pools but ozone can kill germs and I've it's been shown to kill you know pseudomonas and what we're worried about in in float tanks and emitson but there's that indoor air quality concern so be prepared for that discussion with your health department ultraviolet and peroxide together I think is the you know on that on the horizon is such huge potential but right now what I what I don't get when I inspect is you know there's no measurement of the transmittance of UV so the intensity of that light killing the germs through the tube it's gonna cost a little bit of money it's gonna you know be a next-generation thing but we got to know how much UV light is getting through that tube does the presence of a UV light doesn't mean it's working and that you know matched up with the presence of peroxide is gonna be I think ultimately where you're gonna be happiest if you don't want to use chlorine so again just kind of moving through this peroxide and UV thing just look for the summary of that discussion because we talked about it a lot but if the health department's a little worried about peroxide and UV and that being some sort of carcinogenic activity just remind them to go to their nearest strip mall to the teeth whitening kiosk where they put that peroxide gel on your teeth and then shine a UV light on you it's the same technology right so that that's gonna kind of be one of those real world examples that makes it seem a little less risky and ozone like I said good potential to use ozone there I'm not looking you know by any means a chemist but at the same time I think there's potential to kill germs but that it's just that air quality issue we got to talk about and pseudomonas is like I call that your target organism pseudomonas aeruginosa if you if you were at the workshop you'll remember what when I would lay there and say what it what could infect me and where it could get into me pseudomonas I worry about a little bit and so that's your target organism I really think like chlorine does work but maybe you could use less peroxide and UV if there's potential there ozone is as well I think that would work and then just borrowing from this study done at at the float lab you know I don't think pseudomonas does very well in in the in the float water you take flow water out to put some pseudomonas in there and day later you have a three log reduction that's significant and I think we you know we're obviously gonna have to do more studies but I think that that's very very you know appealing me as Alpen specter and keep in mind if I get pseudomonas on me do I fall over on the stage and die probably not we again pour pseudomonas into our bathtubs we let it shower all over us this morning when you had a shower there's there's pseudomonas kind of all around us so we can tolerate some it's just how do we let it grow do we let it set up shop and that's really your as an owner your job is to make sure it's not so what do I tell other health inspectors I got like a minute here so sorry I'll move quick I say don't use that old Alberta documents and none of you should be using it either okay I don't mean to do this to cast dispersions but let's get rid of that thing because it's too old and don't copy just because like the next door state or the next door province made a regulation don't copy it you know make your own learn about what this industry is that before you make a regulation go and do an inspection and understand each system specifically because everything's different your source water is different the pods are different the technology is different and then if you're going to take a sample make sure you take more than one one sample tells you nothing you have to look for a trend okay and you have to like read and we have to react to the different results you get and this is what I what else I tell and it was this is act this presentation is perfect timing considering what we just heard we really should be when you talk about the total thing about health look there's just so much positive out there versus nothing negative like I can't find any sort of like outbreaks related to float tanks yet we seem to think there's going to be one one day right so we have to keep this balance in mind that's what I tell health inspectors I hope you would agree with that that's my Twitter if you ever want to check me out I tried to put a bird on it but I couldn't and I think that's it so I'll see you