During the first weekend of May we held another incredible sauna building class at the shop with participants coming from as far away as Tennessee. It was a jam-packed four days as I went over everything sauna related, from layout and design and function of the sauna, to installing cedar tongue and groove, and bench, window and door details. We capped each day with a sauna, and even took the mobile sauna down to the lake for a Friday evening picnic.
Master sauna builder Rob Licht teaching an intensive 4-day class at his sauna building shop in Ithaca, NY
We were lucky to have two projects underway in the shop to show and students got a chance to practice a little hands-on building. We also did several small demonstration projects so everyone could see close up how details like chimney assembly and stucco firewalls come together. By the time everyone departed on Sunday we had made a group of new friends.
During the Pandemic we were all denied access to public gathering spots and people rearranged their lives around home. Everyone worked at home, played at home, and socialized at home. When the dust settled, we all saw some advantage to this reclaimed space in our lives. The big winners in all of this were home improvement contractors and suppliers, including myself. My phone has not stopped ringing since 2019.
One huge area of growth for saunas has been the home gym market. Even now, when most public gyms are back in full swing after a few years of cautious access—including no sauna use— people are approaching public gyms with trepidation. Tight, airless locker rooms, equipment shared by hundreds of people, and saunas with a little too much “patina”, all went from being tolerable to a complete turn-off. A shoulder injury on my real bike has sidelined me to using only the recliner bikes at my local Y. Sitting in a room full of people breathing heavily, in our isolated headphone bubbles is not what I call exercise bliss. Neither is the sauna anything approaching the desired experience I write about in these pages. I avoid it completely.
So, it is no surprise that those with the means are investing in their homes and building elaborate gyms with saunas and even pools, where exercise and sauna can be a blissful experience. Where you know you are breathing only your own air in a space that has been cleaned to your standards and where you can sit meditatively in the sauna and not feel the whoosh whoosh of the treadmill on the floor above. In your own sauna the blue light screen of an illicit cell phone will not disturb you, and conversations with random strangers won’t stray into political abrasiveness.
After the pandemic gave us pause and the opportunity to reflect upon what is really essential in this life, it is no wonder that I have been so busy helping people realize this vision of a sauna in their homes. Sauna is essential, as is control over your own health and fitness. Creating the personal environment for it all to come together is a luxury beyond financial means, it is a luxury of thought and intention, of knowing what to value first. If you want to have a quality of life where being healthy and fit can lead you to being able to experience so much more, then make it priority to have a space at home where you can exercise and practice mindful bodily experience. A yoga mat in a corner and a few weights or exercise bands is all you need to get started; adding a sauna would be the icing on the cake.
A recent project was for clients whose priorities of fitness and health and family led them to me. I built them a roomy sauna in the their home gym, which is one to die for. But what mattered most was not the nice set up or expensive equipment, it was that they had made being healthy together a priority—and that is something we can all afford. Even though I would love to have their gym set-up, when I am cranking it out, sweating buckets on my old bike-on-a-trainer next to the water heater in our basement, I am just as happy and alive as I could be in their gym (and my wood-fired sauna out back rocks!) As we age, there is no going back to reset the clock; you have to simply keep moving and use your body. Movement and exercise can be done with little or no equipment; having a Sauna is a nice reward and perfect compliment. Your body will thank you!
Growing up in this land between the lakes, I spent my share of summer days loafing about the lake shore. Many friends had cottages on the lake, and I always dreamed of having our own. Now, with one in Scarlet’s family, passed down from her grandmother, Dede, that dream is a reality. An authentic cottage, in my book, is more than just the simple, semi rustic building by the water; it is a multi-generational gathering place steeped in family traditions. At times it may be used by a single family group or even a solo practitioner, but at any time it may become a gathering place for a large group of cousins, aunts and uncles, hopefully announced, but not always. The sleeping situation may require creative solutions: every couch typically opens out to a bed; hammocks are strung between trees or porch posts and daybeds are standard for every room. A one- or two-bedroom cottage can sleep ten or more in a pinch. Life is communal and privacy is found only on solo swims or paddles towards the middle of the lake. That is not a detriment, but an expectation taken for granted; maybe not so fun as an adult who needs undisturbed sleep, but heaven to a pre-teen who can stay up late and giggle under the covers with cousins for hours.
There is a code of maintenance with cottages. As with all things, everything must be kept up, but here, the said efforts to maintain must be almost invisible so that the status quo is maintained. The human efforts to push back against the forces of nature, which constantly threaten to erode our existence, must be kept in a delicate balance with said forces. Being next to a lake, those forces can rear up unpredictably— like when the boat house roof was sheared off during a storm this spring. But the new roof looks like it has been there for fifty years. The weathervane, with its lake trout constantly swimming into the wind, was rescued from a neighbor’s beach, untangled and replaced after a fresh coat of paint, but so that it still looks weathered. Use nothing too new, (or new looking), use minimal effort, and keep polished professionals out of the mix (unless they are capable of slightly shoddy or hurried work- like the kind that comes with working with a beer in hand.) Keep the markings of family history- especially those pencil lines measuring the growth of generations on the kitchen door jamb, and cutesy painted signs, but repair the inevitable rot that seeps in and tries to destroy all history.
There is term for all of this: cottage life. It means paring down to the essentials you can fit in one bag (never a suitcase, which has implications of a hotel) and always having a good book or crossword puzzle to kill time with or signal that you are having alone-time.
Pitching in for meal prep or clean-up (choose one) without question is required. Dishwashers are forbidden in cottages since washing dishes is another way to share in the collective consciousness: one washing and one drying. The kitchen is always small, requiring dance moves to navigate around one another, but it is wholly adequate, and the utensils spare, but serviceable. Most cottages have a few months set aside for seasonal rentals so nothing of great value is kept there although everything there has sentimental value. Family history is written in the worn edges and missing parts; The knife that grandpa used to clean fish, the cutting board that is bowl-shaped from a half century of use, or even the trinket on the windowsill that God-knows-where it came from, thus no one dares to get rid of it at the risk of disturbing the delicate balance of cottage hierarchy.
There is no visual way to describe a family cottage—photos won’t do. It is more of a scene than a structure, more of a shared history than individual experience. You can’t buy into it and it can’t be sold. Sadly, many cottages do have to be sold, due to rising taxes but hopefully, the new owners realize the value of their acquisition and tend to the history of the place with care.
As much as a cottage has to offer- like Scarlet’s family cottage that she has been visiting since her childhood, the addition of a sauna is like ice cream on the apple pie. Not completely necessary, but it sure is a good combination. Saunas are gathering spots that present communal experience. They enhance the routine of cottage life: morning sauna, evening sauna, all day sauna. They extend the swimming season indefinitely; on Cayuga Lake, the swimming season is typically two or three months (depending on how much polar bear is in your DNA.) With a sauna, lake dipping is possible is all year!
So, with all of this in mind, we recently converted a small room in the walk-out basement of the cottage into an electric sauna. Never mind that the floors above all sloped several inches in ten feet or the head-room is barely six feet, we worked with what we had and created a perfect oasis of heat. Some family members will have to work on their bad posture to avoid bonking their head, but once on the bench—whose height is always measured from the ceiling down— all is well. An existing steel framed basement hopper window was converted to cedar and now frames a perfect view of the lake. The 9 kw Harvia Cilindro heater with its 200 pounds of rocks holds the heat to make the sauna usable for hours with repeated löyly.
Now that it is mostly done (cottage projects never seem to be finished) we have been using it daily while there and it is making our late summer stays at the lake perfect. I can’t wait to come out later in the season, or even winter and still enjoy a jump into the lake.
I always loved physics because it deals with the tangible effects of the forces of nature— the interactions between matter and energy—that explain the things that we feel or see on a daily basis. Specifically, I want to delve into the transfer of heat, which seems to be a hot topic in sauna forums.
There are three methods of heat transfer: conduction, convection, and radiation. In a sauna, (and everywhere else, unless you live on a planet at absolute zero: -460 °F) there are all three. Heat always goes from a warmer object to a cooler one, and a closed system is entropic, that is to say, if you sip too slowly, the ice will melt and your drink will eventually all be the same lukewarm room temperature. The transfer of heat is greater when the temperature difference (ΔT) is greater, and it slows over time, until the temperature equalizes in a system, which, for our study, includes not just inside the sauna, but the environment it sits in. Which is to say, no matter how well you insulate it, eventually the sauna will reach the ambient outdoor temp, unless, like a house (or a sauna in a house,) you keep the heat on. This is a factor in freestanding sauna design as we have to assume the starting point is anywhere from 0 to 100°F (unless it is fired up constantly) and the desired bathing temp is 180-220°F. In a house we are trying to hold the temp at about 70°, in the residential sauna, we need it to hold temp for a few hours, at the most.
Conduction is the transfer of heat from one solid or liquid to another by direct contact. You Grab a (foolishly installed) metal doorknob to the sauna that is either 200°F or 10°F, depending on the season, and which way you are going, and the heat rapidly conducts either to your hand or from it, with a resulting shriek. Same is true if someone pushes you against the hot stove as you try to leave the sauna, burning your butt to the point where sitting was impossible for two weeks, as happened to me once. This is conduction which we typically try to avoid in the sauna, but it happens. Less dense materials, like your towel, mitigate conduction, which is why we look for low density boards like cedar, not hardwood, for the benches, which would feel like a hot iron on your posterior.
Convection is the transfer of heat through the movement of fluids. It is in part driven by gravitational forces whereby warmer gasses or liquids are typically less dense and lighter and thus tend to rise as cooler ones sink. This create a convective loop as the heat is circulated to, say, the walls of the room, or you on the top bench, and then the air cools and falls, creating an endless loop. I say typically, because there is this oddball exception: water close to freezing gets less dense and thus freezes on the top of lake or pond, making hockey, ice plunging after a sauna round, and life on this planet, possible. If the movement of air is stopped, say by the fibers of mineral wool or two close layers of glass, it becomes an insulator. Air itself holds very little heat per volume-more than a thousand time less than water, whereas water holds twice the heat energy of granite and about the same as steel. A large volume of this dense, heat holding material is called a thermal mass, which can mitigate the fickle effects of convection, especially when the air is coming and going, by acting as reservoir of heat. That is why we try to keep the door closed in the sauna—all of the air convecting nice warmth around us is disturbed by the cold air rushing in to take it’s place. But that’s not so bad—as we actually want the fresh air—as long we have some thermal mass to mitigate the swings in temperature.
In home construction, the emphasis is on controlling convection: eliminating it inside wall cavities and not allowing warm air to escape from heated (conditioned) spaces, especially up high where it creates a chimney effect, whereby escaping warm air creates negative pressure and sucks in cold air from wherever it can. In a not-so-old house on a cold night, put your hand over the wall outlets—even on interior walls— and you will likely feel cold air being sucked in. More so if a you have a big cozy, romantic, fireplace with an actual chimney and a roaring fire, which feels great, but sucks the heat right out of house.
In a freestanding wood fired sauna, there will be leaks and cold air coming in. That’s ok because we want fresh air, as long as we control where it comes and goes. Air and steam will move the heat around but eventually it settles into strata: hot up high and cold down low. Air movement can help break up this layering of cold to hot, but it is difficult to control. Thus, the upper bench will always be hotter; unless you have an Aufgussmeister to move the heat around with his swirling towel dance.
The last method of heat transfer is Radiation. Sounds bad, like Chernobyl, but radiation is everywhere; all objects with a temperature above absolute zero emit thermal radiation, mostly in the infrared range that we can see with a special camera. At a certain point heat becomes light you can see and the color of the light corresponds exactly to a temperature. The dull red glow of a poker in the fire ( or the top of my sauna stove when I fire it hot) is 1200°F. The surface of the sun burns at 5772°K, which is the color of the sunlight we bask in on the beach. Fortunately, the sun appears relatively small, otherwise we would burn up instantly. We radiate as well; after getting sunburned, your skin will be hotter than the person next to you and will radiate heat to them. In fact all bodies, especially black bodies, which are not necessarily black, radiate and absorb heat, depending on which is hotter. The only things that are not black bodies are things like foil, which reflects most heat directed at it. Surface area and angle of incidence also matter; the more surface area and the more parallel two surfaces are, the more heat transfer. Temperature difference matters too: too much and the effect is intense, like when I pour bronze and have to stand an arms length away from the pot of molten metal, or stand on a subzero surface in winter and feel the heat being sucked from my body. Too little difference in temperature (ΔT), and radiation is hardly noticeable. Direction is also important. The fireplace heats our front but not our back. I have a story about a cold drizzly camping trip where all we could do to stay dry was to keep putting our jackets on backwards then forwards as we sat by the fire. And in all these situations it is aluminum foil that saves the day: as an apron to wear, a foil surface to stand on, or an emergency blanket over the shoulders. Foil blocks radiation, (but it does need an air gap, lest it become extremely conductive); without any barrier, heat, like light, radio waves and the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum can radiate millions of miles. Those episodes of Leave it to Beaver are still traveling through space.
In the sauna, radiation is really important as it creates this enveloping heat coming at us from everything hotter than 98°F. If the whole room- walls, benches and rocks, is 200° or more, we will feel the heat coming from each of those surfaces. Colder surfaces like a big window, or that guy that just got out of the cold plunge, will suck heat from us. Something too hot—like a blasting fire in a single wall stove pipe— will feel searing. In an electric sauna, the rocks need to cover the elements so we don’t see/feel the searing red heat. The much cooler—but still hot–rocks will then reradiate the softer heat. Foil, behind the cedar wall (or other wood), will reflect the heat back towards the cedar which will re-radiate towards the interior. The walls need to be just so hot. Radiation also mitigates the effect of the constantly changing air. The air may be cool, but the radiation of the hot surfaces will cut through the cold like the winter sun on your face. Speaking of, nothing like a full body sun-bath on a calm, freezing day to boost the sauna experience! The thermal mass mentioned above will continue to radiate heat even as the door is left open. Cool air swirling in will kill the radiation buzz for sure, but as soon as the door is closed that warm fuzzy feeling will come back.
So how does all of this daydreaming back to high school physics class inform how I build my saunas? A lot. I want the radiant heat off of the stove to work for me, warming me just so, like the sweet spot in the campfire where you should put your skewered marshmallow (but never do). I aim for a soft radiant heat, like a ΔT of a few hundred degrees at most (me: 98°, the rocks 400°,) but also omni-directional heat (which gets all the walls and benches up to 200° before taking a sauna) and not too intense (make sure the fire has died down and the stove pipe, if single wall, is not too hot). A big window is pretty to look out of, but not too big, as it will suck the heat away from you and a cold cascade of negative convection will sweep over the floor. Thermal mass is great, but not too much, because the sauna will take forever to heat up, and no one seems to have to time for the daylong ritual sauna used to be. I have my bathers all facing the rocks and typically the stove is fired from outside, so there is no worry about the intense (visible) radiant heat through the firebox glass door, which, as cozy as it sounds, may feel too much sitting around a hot campfire and is not the kind of heat you want in a sauna.
Recently I heard, in an online sauna forum, two seasoned sauna veterans saying you don’t want radiant heat in a sauna. I believe they misspoke. You don’t want high intensity radiant heat, but no radiant heat just is not possible, unless everything has reached a state of equilibrium. That is to say, you are as hot as the rocks, thus cooked like a goose (or the sauna is only 100°F). As long as you are cooler than the rocks, stove, walls and benches, heat will radiate to you. It is said that when you close your eyes in a good sauna, you cannot tell where the stove is.
How do we get there? Fire it hot to get the rocks and the whole sauna hot, but let the intense fire die down before getting in. Use radiant foil behind the wood (with an air gap) so the foil can reflect heat back into the wood, use a high rock capacity stove or heater to hold and radiate the heat, and make sure everyone can see the heater so the radiant heat—which travels as waves, like light— reaches everywhere.
You can always tell when there has been a really good sauna; everyone coming out looks so… radiant!
Having grown up around the waters of Cayuga Lake, whose long finger touched the shores of my childhood stomping grounds, it is no wonder that our dreams often turned to things nautical. Since we first started taking saunas at Podunk in our early teens, the fantasy topic of floating saunas always came up. We loved swimming in the lake, but its waters are only warm enough to swim from the beginning of July to about mid- September. What a better way to extend that season than with a sauna? What a better way to sauna than not just near the water, but on the water (oh, but we did enjoy the naked runs to the creek!)
I’ve had an ongoing affair with boats: I have a love of canoes that goes back to my discovery of the Adirondack waterways which form an almost continuous route from civilization into the deep wilderness, and back; the caveat being that short carries were required.
I started making one 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 about my luck with boats.
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, and 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 this is not just carpentry but nautical engineering; precision was required, and my hand-drawn methodology needed some sharper pencils. Some 30 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 26 feet of it— was assembled in the shop. It was a challenge as the beast took over—floor to ceiling—and there was a lot 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 work of four round cedar windows trimmed with real ship-salvage portholes.
There were a lot of other finicky details (I have come to understand that boat building is all finicky details). The biggest challenge was loading and transporting it 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.
The unique thing with our sauna is that it is a fully navigational boat with twin Electric motors and the sauna is fired with a gas fired heater and has 12-volt electric lights powered by a solar system. Ideally it will be used on a calm day when you can drift out to the middle of the lake, sauna, jump into the clear waters, cool off on the roof deck, and repeat until the fantasy has been satiated. Maybe even under the stars, or Northern Lights.
Thanks to everyone who helped make this possible, Especially Scarlet, who believed in the dream, and Mark and Karie, who supported it.
