Having grown up around and in the waters of Cayuga Lake, whose long finger touched the shores of my childhood stomping grounds, it is no wonder that my dreams often turn to things nautical. When my friends and I first started taking saunas at Podunk in our early teens, the fantasy topic of floating saunas came up frequently. We loved swimming in the lake, but its waters are only warm enough for swimming from the beginning of July to about mid-September. What better way to extend that season than with a sauna? A sauna on a boat! Sweating not just near the water, but on the water. (Oh, but we did enjoy running naked to the creek!)
I’ve had an ongoing affair with boats. Especially a love of canoes that goes back to my discovery of the Adirondack waterways that form an almost continuous route from civilization into the deep wilderness and back (the caveat being that short carries are required).
I started making a boat years ago: a strip canoe affair. Not strip, as in naked, but strip as in thin bands of cedar, all joined and sandwiched between two epoxy and fiberglass layers. I never finished that boat; its progress was aborted midstream after I broke my collar bone in three during a trail running race. The unfinished shell still looms over my shop as a reminder, high up in a loft space. So, suffice it to say, that when a client approached me about building a much bigger boat, I had my hesitations.
Mark initially wanted a beachfront sauna. Then zoning and other issues steered us to thinking of a floating sauna. My childhood fantasy! Granted it is not a new idea; in fact, there are several in Norway and other places. But on Cayuga Lake? This was to be a first. It made sense, in a fantastical way. He had ample dockage but limited beach. He was willing to invest in the idea and take the risk, and he was a nice guy, with just enough chutzpah to make it happen.
Client Mark and Family on Maiden Voyage of Sauna Boat, Cayuga Lake, New York.
The design phase took over a year. It was a real challenge because it entailed not just carpentry but nautical engineering. Precision was required, and my hand-drawn methodology needed some sharper pencils. Some thirty pages of drawings later and we were ready to build. We had a great fabricator for the frame, ladder-stair, and railing (Service Machine Tool in Elmira, NY) and some other great help along the way, but the whole thing—all twenty-six feet of it—was assembled in the shop. It was a predicament as the beast took over, floor to ceiling, and there were threads of self-doubt along the way to trip over.
I am not a boat builder, so there was as much learning as doing, but we pulled it off—including the challenging assembly of four round cedar windows trimmed with authentic ship-salvage portholes.
There were a lot of other finicky details. (I’ve come to understand that boat building is all finicky details.) The biggest challenge was loading and transporting the beast on an oversize low-boy flatbed truck. At one point, we had the 10,000-pound hulk levitating on three forklifts as the low-boy flatbed backed under it. The guys at Lansing Harbor Marina gave us confidence, especially after it passed its initial float test. After a few months of tweaking, we took the maiden voyage, complete with a champagne toast.
A unique feature of Mark’s sauna is that it is a fully navigational boat with twin electric motors. The sauna is heated with a gas-fired heater and has 12-volt electric lights powered by a solar-electric system. Ideally, it will be used on calm days when friends and family can drift out to the middle of the lake, experience sauna, jump into the clear waters, cool off on the roof deck, and repeat until the fantasy has been fulfilled. Maybe even under the stars or northern lights.
Thanks to everyone who helped make this possible. Thanks especially to Scarlet, who believed in the dream, and Mark and Karie, who supported it.
The old sauna at Podunk had two rooms: a small dressing room and the larger hot room. The old Nippa stove sat between them, embedded in a masonry wall. Sitting on the benches we stared at the business end of the stove with its pile of rocks, and the stove was tended from the dressing room side.
This arrangement always made sense to me and is how I have been building my saunas for thirty years. I learned to weld in art school and set up my own studio soon after. Ozzie, the owner of the Podunk sauna, would send people my way for stove repairs. After seeing how other stoves failed, I designed and started making my own stoves using much heavier plate on the top. In the older stoves, the heat would soften the thinner steel and typically lead to collapse under the weight of the rocks. I also kept to the external feed (thru-wall) and designed my stoves to be fired exclusively that way. As kids, we loved to pretend we could speak Finnish by stretching vowels and jamming consonants together to make up Finnish sounding nicknames for each other. I called my stove the Lämpimämpi by combining Lemp and Memp. Finns will chuckle at this because it translates to warmer.
I called my stove the Lämpimämpi by combining Lemp and Memp.Finns will chuckle at this because it translates to warmer.
There are so many advantages of the external feed (thru-wall):
The fire-tending, and associated ash debris, is kept out of the hot room, and you don’t have to tramp in and out with your boots on to tend the fire.
Venting a small space can be complicated; a sauna stove requires significant combustion air which can create drafts, or worse, steal oxygen from the hot room. The external feed draws air from the dressing room or outside.
Any stove front requires thirty-six inches of clearance to combustibles in front of it. This can’t be mitigated by heat shields. This severely limits the layout of the hot room. However, it is easy to get three feet in front of the stove in the dressing room.
Any stove also requires a noncombustible hearth (stone) eighteen inches in front of the stove. Hot ash and coals falling from the stove are a major source of fires. In a crowded and dark sauna room, these hot coals can easily be overlooked, fall under duck boards, etc.
A flickering flame may be romantic site, but it is the soft heat off the rocks you want, not the searing radiant heat you get from sitting in front of a blazing fire.
Typically, the fire may be almost out by the time the sauna is ready. The rocks should be the focal point. Also, following the 36-inch rule above, you can’t have the stove front facing the bathers, unless the sauna is excessively big.
If you are providing a sauna experience for others, you can discreetly tend the fire without interrupting the bathers or invading their privacy.
The external feed or thru-wall stove heats the dressing room just enough to allow hanging out and watching the fire while the sauna heats up.
Installing the external feed may seem daunting, but it is not that difficult. A firewall with the requisite size opening will be required. This can be achieved in different ways: solid masonry, which will add thermal mass (the sauna will take longer to heat); or a hollow insulated firewall with steel studs and cement board, tile or stone facing or stucco over metal lathe (which I typically use). A metal sleeve will be provided with the stove to dress up this opening and provide further heat shielding. My Lämpimämpi stove has an integrated heat shield/rock basket that works with the wall opening so that fresh air coming in is heated directly by the stove and directed over the rocks. This is an advantage over simply having the rocks sit on top inside a steel box. As with any installation, all listed clearances need to be adhered to, but with this method, the stove will take up less space in the hot room and make for a cleaner presentation. For your next sauna, consider this traditional, thru-wall approach to situating the stove.
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