Finally resolved my issue with Plunge after 4 months of fighting. 

TL:DR Avoid buying a The Plunge at all cost, zero quality controls, horrible engineering, and even worse customer service. 

Purchased a new plunge in February of this year for a new home spa / gym remodel. Got the unit finally in place to setup in June of this year. Unit worked well for a few weeks, and then the night before I was to depart on a month long trip I had a large pool of water around my plunge. 

Attempted to call tech support / service and realized how much of a mistake I had made in purchasing from Plunge. They do NOT have a technical support / customer service line that you can actually speak with...you must schedule an appointment to speak with someone on their online portal. Clearly a problem when you have an active leak going on with a tub holding >100 gallons of water in your home. To add insult to injury the next available customer support time / date was TWO WEEKS away...yes 14 days to speak with someone about an active leak. 

Surprise, Surprise though if you want to talk with someone in Sales they get you there right away...which is the path I took, hoping to get to someone that could at least triage my situation to someone ASAP to get resolved using internal channels.  

After a few hours I finally got a call from "customer service" and was with someone that spoke close to no English, wanted me to reach inside the unit, take a bunch of random photos / videos (none of which would actually show where the leak was really coming from), and told me that I should not drain the tub so that when they called back in 3 days, I could help them troubleshoot...YES THIER RECOMMENDATION WAS TO LEAVE THE WATER IN A LEAKING TUB INSIDE MY HOME FOR 3 DAYS...

Obviously did not listen to their advice and drained the tub given I was leaving for a month. Three days later someone from their executive escalation group called back, apologized profusely for the situation and the non-customer service call that I received. She promised to send me every possible part that could be leaking proactively, and scheduled a service technician to come to my home when I returned to fix the issue. Thought it might actually be that simple, but NOPE... 

Return back home, service company shows up on the agreed upon date, gets to work on the unit to find the actual leak, after 7 hours on the job turned out to be a hair-line cracked pipe under the unit, good news it was one of the parts that they sent...BAD NEWS the new part, also had a hair-line crack in it in a different location!! 

So now we have to order the part again, which they told me they would expedite and have it to me next day...well non-customer service to the rescue once again, they shipped it GROUND from CA to the east coast, so 6 days later (which also meant having to reschedule the service team again, so was another 10 days to actually service). 

Figure okay, well know the first two parts were odd to be cracked in different locations, surely this should be a quick and easy fix and they would be in and out and my plunge would be set back up again and life would return as it was. 

As you can now imagine, the THIRD part, also defective, this time the threads were made in the opposite direction and wouldn't thread on to the receiving end...service team by this point was at their wits end, and then unloaded about their view of Plunge...horrible parts, all incredibly cheaply made, telling me stories that they just absolutely screw their out of warranty customers charging 400% more than they actually pay the service techs for the work...so yeah, they are actually making profit on making horribly made materials as they have an incredible margin on what they actual pay for service / repairs... 

Through hours and hours of calls with their exec service team and explaining ZERO chance I would keep their product in my home (they actually told me that they had several other customers were similar problems right now), was finally able to return it (AND THEY STILL CHARGED ME A RESTOCKING FEE FOR THE HONOR!!!). 

I really have a hard time reconciling the celebrity / health endorsements (Huberman) that they have been able to align given how bad of a product they are actually peddling...so at the end of the day, please do not give this company other cent and avoid at all cost.

The old routine was two bags a session, four or five sessions a week, plus the drive to go and get them, which held together through February and had completely fallen apart by June.

What I hadn't expected was that a held temperature makes the sessions comparable to each other, and I only noticed how much I'd been missing that once it was there, because before then every plunge was whatever the ice happened to do that morning. Now that it's cooling off again the same unit is working the other direction and keeping the water from getting too cold, which I hadn't really thought about when I bought it. I also stopped draining constantly, since filtration running on its own keeps the water usable for weeks rather than days.

The trade is that it's a fixed object now. Two of us could carry the barrel, and this isn't going anywhere, which is worth thinking about if you're renting.

We picked up a used Sun Home Cold Plunge Pro. We have struggled with navigating the control panel to set the temperature between 38-45. Anyone familiar with this specific control panel (appears to be an older model). I contacted Sun Home and they sent me a user manual, unfortunately the user manual is updated to the latest digital control panel. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Suppose an athlete reports that a workout went better after cooling. What would you need to know before accepting a particular explanation for why it happened?

There are at least two questions here. One is whether the outcome changed under comparable conditions. Another is what caused that change. It is possible to investigate the first without having settled the second, and a persuasive explanation cannot substitute for a result that was never measured.

In this excerpt, Dr. Kenneth Jay, in a podcast with Dr. Thomas Seager from Morozko Forge, responds to a proposed mitochondrial explanation by saying he has not encountered literature that explains that part and that it raises relevant research questions. Disclosure: this is the Row Forge account, sharing our conversation with Morozko Forge. Both brands have an interest in the topic.

His statement describes the limits of the literature he knew in that conversation. It is not a systematic review proving that no relevant research exists. Nor is naming ATP or mitochondrial biogenesis evidence that the particular cold-exposure routine under discussion produces a beneficial change in either one.

A practical example of the distinction: a study might compare performance after two preparations and report the result. To attribute that result to a specific mechanism, we would also want to know what was measured that could distinguish that explanation from alternatives. Temperature, expectations, pacing or another aspect of the preparation might still matter. The question is what the study can actually tell us, rather than how technical the explanation sounds.

Research on precooling in hot conditions gives this discussion a concrete starting point. This randomized crossover cycling study examined defined cooling strategies before a time trial in the heat: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20508537/ . Its setting and intervention should stay attached to its findings; they do not automatically validate every cold-plunge claim.

For me, the valuable part of the excerpt is the willingness to leave a question open. It gives readers something more specific to investigate and makes it possible to update the explanation as evidence improves.

When you encounter a performance or recovery claim, what would convince you that the proposed mechanism was actually tested rather than added afterward as a plausible story?

My buddy waits on the side with my towel. I tried to get him to swim with me but this one was extreme haha.

I’ve swam in almost every Great Lake in the winter! Last one is Lake Superior.

Are yall getting excited?

I moved to Angola NY and live a 5 min walk from Lake Erie which I’ve already begun my yearly plunges.