You ask how or why electric mobile sauna? There are a number of reasons why going mobile makes sense, especially if you rent. No permits or special permissions are needed. You just park it in your yard and use it. You can take it with you on vacations or just for a Saturday down by the lake; you can even enter it in a parade. But why electric? Electric is no longer the inefficient dark horse of the energy world that it once was. It can be generated cleanly by wind or solar and is cheaper, cleaner, and easier to use than gas or oil. Although any purist will tell you a wood-burning sauna is the real deal, in some places, wood is not so easy—firewood may be hard to come by and difficult to store, and your neighbors may be too close for comfort or offended by the occasional whiff of smoke. Since I’ve eliminated gas burners from my repertoire (for reasons I won’t go into here), an electric mobile sauna is the next best thing. All you need is a place to plug it in.
When clients ask me to create a sauna, they often push me to do things I might have never considered doing. I’ve gotten requests to make saunas in spaces I thought were too tiny, on trailers, deep in the woods next to a pond, or to convert a cheap shed or laundry room. The most recent project to leave the shop is an electric mobile sauna. The owner has a Tesla electric car, so an electric sauna just seemed to make sense. The colors were more of an emotional choice: I painted it Sea Reflections blue like the ocean, where she likes to swim all year, with a Bonfire Red door to beckon her into the warmth of its interior and Vanilla Ice Cream trim because, well, who doesn’t like ice cream, especially after a sauna?
The how is simple: an 8 KW heater with a standard RV type hook up and a fifty-foot, very-heavy extension cord that connects to a standard car charging port (or special outdoor outlet). This will also work in many campgrounds with RV hookups. In a pinch, it can also be run off an 8500-watt generator.
This sauna also has a solar-powered low-voltage lighting system, just so there can always be light and because low-voltage systems are safer and more versatile than 120-volt lighting. I’ve been using these in some mobile wood burners and freestanding units. The neat little solar panel is a conversation starter; people are suddenly aware that the unit is more than a fancy tool shed trailer. When I tell them it’s an electric sauna, the little 25-watt solar panel gets a second glance.
I envision a fully solar electric sauna next (but probably won’t consider doing unless a client pushes me). It would have to use Tesla’s 270-pound Powerwall home battery, which has an 8kw output capacity. I imagine the entire sauna roof would a have to be a solar panel, but I haven’t done the engineering on this. This would not be cheap, but if someone out there who wants to be the first…. give me a call.
The other evening I came home from work, stressed out about the coronavirus, as many of us are, and decided to light the sauna to ease my anxiety. As it was a nice day, I decided to use the time it took heat the sauna to rake up some leaves that got matted into the lawn under a November snowfall. The breeze, which was out of the south, helped push the leaves into the hedgerow, but it also apparently helped fan the fire on my mobile wood-fired unit. By the time I put my rake down and stripped for a relaxing sauna, the thermometer was pinned at 235° F! Not one to shy away from heat, I jumped on in anyhow.
Always inquisitive, I use such opportunities to add to my knowledge about the sauna. I wondered how hot different surfaces really were with the heat so high. With only a towel on, I ran to the shop and grabbed my digital temperature gun. I use this gadget to test my saunas to make sure they are hot but also safe. The ceiling and walls were close to 300° near the stove, the walls were 230-250° above the bench, the benches were 200° and the lower benches were about 175°. The rocks were 450°—perfect for a good löyly—and the stove body glowed visibly red in the afternoon light, so about 1000° (the brightness of the glow corresponds to specific temperatures). The floor was predictably the coolest surface at 125°.
According to the Center for Disease Control, viruses cannot tolerate heat above about 167° F.1 Therefore, everything in a hot sauna from the lower bench up is guaranteed to be virus-free! No fears or worries as I bask in the heat.
That being said, despite what we all wish, the sauna will not kill a virus that has already infected you, nor will it likely destroy a virus ejected in a sneeze. The sauna will not cure you or protect you if your sauna mates are sick; in these desperate times, it’s probably best to avoid group saunas with strangers. But, taking a regular sauna will lower your stress level, boost your immunity2, and help you sleep better—all in a virus-free sanctuary.
Notes: 1 Reference “Using Heat to Kill Sars / Cov2” [Article>] 2 Reference: “…Finnish sauna sessions on the immune response…” [Article>]
Sauna is an interesting word. It is both a noun that describes the little structures I spend my days making and the action of how one uses that building. Mostly, I focus on the details of building and let the details of how one uses the sauna fall to the individual taste of my clients. I don’t adhere to a dogmatic approach; everyone has experiences and memories to draw from. Different countries have subtle variations: wetter, drier, hotter, timed sessions, birch vihtas, etc. My memories stem from my time at Podunk, in the old Finnish sauna. I remember the five-gallon joint-compound buckets used to gather water from the creek and few much-loved, battered aluminum wash basins as well as plastic wash tubs, wooden back brushes, loofa scrubbers, and other unique bathing implements. There was always some sort of ladle for pouring water on the rocks (which we always called a kipper in some misappropriation of Finnish-ness). And there were various soaps and shampoos—some common, some not so, like the dark-brown Finnish pine tar soap, which, despite its comparison to the sticky pine tar we brushed on our skis, actually felt pretty good.
Podunk.
Once the sauna got good and hot, we stripped down as unceremoniously as possible and went in. The first round was always be pretty talkative and end with a healthy ladle-full or two of water on the hot rocks until we had to bolt out the door and head to the creek. If someone were annoyingly loud, sometimes a good löyly would be timed to quiet things down. In the second and third rounds, if someone had bothered to make birch vihta from the tree outside the Podunk sauna, we might take great pleasure in thrashing each other (gently) with the leafy switch. The old Finns would make vihta in the spring out of fresh, soft birch leaves and keep them in the freezer. Now, you can actually buy them from Finland, dried and vacuum packed for a reasonable sum. After softening them in water for twenty minutes, they smell just like a fresh birch tree.
The last round in the sauna was the time to wash: after getting hot again, we took turns on the little washing bench, scrubbing ourselves (or each other) with the loofa or stiff sauna brushes and some sauna soap. Finally, a rinse with warm water washed off all the dead skin and residue of a week’s hard work, and we would leave the sauna all fresh and natural smelling. None of us ever had to wear deodorant or poufy colognes.
Pouring water on the rocks.How to have a sauna bath.Simple beauty of an ice lantern.
Sometimes I sauna with friends, sometimes alone. Always, it is the same: get hot until sweat just pours out of me, cool off, repeat; scrub my skin, maybe switch my back with the vihta, wash up, rinse down the sauna. It’s a ritual of sorts, but not like how a ritual in the church is dictated to you. As in church, there are ritual objects that create focus and help direct the actions, but instead of incense and gold, they are plastic and wood. And unlike church, there is no sin in doing it anyway you want to. The brushes, basins, ladle, soap, and vihta are there to help maintain the flow of the sauna experience. To the uninitiated, it may seem strange, but after a few times in a sauna, it all makes sense. It is just a bathhouse, after all.
Lately, I have found that the top of my noggin does not have so much insulation from the heat of a good löyly, so I have taken to wearing a felt sauna hat, which is sort of like a Shriner’s Fez, which is to say that it makes you feel just a little goofy. But then again, I wouldn’t want to be accused of taking the sauna ritual too seriously!
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