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.
The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) generated content has me worried about the future. People live, dream, and work in the digital world and increasingly use AI to create content, which seems to be the end, not the means to something tangible. As an artisan who has always worked with my hands, it’s a mystery how something like Facebook gets valued in the billions of dollars while those of us who actually produce products that are used in the physical realm rack up value only with each object we make.
There is a real disconnect from the process of making in our society; a few computer clicks are all it takes to have a product show up at your door.
As a maker who must rely on an efficient procurement process to keep my shop stocked, I get the impulse to use AI business tools, but I try to remember that there is always a person on the other end. For example, we buy vihtas (leafy birch-twig switches) that are from Estonia; I envision the worn hands that gather and bind the birch. I appreciate it when materials come with a hand-written note of thanks or other human touches. The same search for human connection applies to my communications. Each time I get an email inquiry, I have my AI filter humming—is this a real person? With the pandemic of spam and spoofing, I typically won’t even answer the phone unless I know the caller, and I spend way too much time deleting texts I don’t want. I occasionally scan the web to see what other sauna builders are doing. This means wading through a minefield of AI generated crap. Not only do many sites not have any identifiable person attached to them but their product is simply stolen images of other people’s work. I recently had to send a cease-and-desist notice to someone marketing a full array of my saunas as their own. Included were photos I took from inside my shop or in my backyard, complete with my sculptures. If someone is going to be so brazen, why not just steal my humanity and include a photo of me? This is now happening with deepfake videos that generate simulacrum talking heads of celebrities and public figures.
The good news is that building a sauna requires physical materials and actual hands-on work. I can guarantee that each of the images on my web page are real, that the photos were taken by Scarlet and me in locations we were actually at, and that they display just a sampling of the 150 or so saunas I have built.
The splinters I pull out of my hands on a near daily basis are real as well.
We are a family-run business. It’s basically just the two of us. There are no pushy sales reps or people working phone banks off site (or in another country). If we do answer your call, it is only because the saws stopped running long enough for us to hear it ringing (which is why we prefer email), and even though it may take a few days to get back to you, I guarantee it will be a real conversation. Hopefully, one that leads to a face-to-face meeting and enduring relationship. Saunas, after all, are all about human connections.
As you scan the web on a weekend morning, looking for that perfect sauna experience, be aware that the only real sensation may be the aroma of the freshly brewed cup of coffee in your hand. If you don’t yet have your own sauna, find a friend who does or one of the many public saunas that are sprouting up and immerse yourself in the physical realm, sans digital devices.
Thankfully, AI will never have anything to do with enjoying the blissful bodily experience of taking a real sauna!
The use of stick hardware is an endearing feature of our saunas that falls under the rustic elegant motif that we employ. This hardware also falls under the category of Finnish Pragmatism that is an influence in my design; whereas, superfluous embellishment is avoided and using what is at hand is always desired over spending for what you don’t really need. In my head, I keep an inventory of all the random parts I have collected over the years and stowed away in my shop. When a need arises, I quickly do a mental scan and see if something in stock will do rather than going to a hardware store or jumping online.
Likewise, I often resort to Nature’s Hardware Store when I need things like door pulls and towel hooks.
It is amazing the variety of parts I can extract from the intricate workings of a tree.
The best is hickory because of the way branches crook when they take off in a new direction, and it is very hard. In fact, they make baseball bats out it. Recently we had to fell a Hickory, so I salvaged all the door pulls and towel hooks I could from it.
wood-fired outdoor sauna
The spirit of the tree will live on, greeting sauna users with a sturdy handshake each time they enter the sauna.
It’s the small personal touches and attention to detail that makes us proud of our work and makes our work fun and enjoyable. By avoiding the cold and the common place, we make each sauna as unique as its owners.
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