It’s been a busy year at Rob Licht Custom Saunas and as the holidays approach it is a good time to look back everything that’s been accomplished, the hurdles we’ve gotten over, and to be thankful for the blessings we’ve received.
We started the year in the midst of the pandemic which made for some challenges but mostly the pandemic has meant a huge uptick in the sauna business as we all became more centered on home life and more reluctant to go out into public for things like gyms and saunas. Besides the several projects I have completed locally and around central New York I have fielded calls and emails from folks desperate to have their own saunas from as far away as Europe and Australia. I never set out to become a sauna expert, but here I am, 25 years into making them, and people are seeking out my knowledge from all over. In the process I feel like I have made many new friends. The global sauna community is alive and well. At the same time, due to the pandemic, I have mostly refrained from seeing all but my closest friends and family. It’s a strange new world but I am thankful to be connecting to so many people, if only on Zoom.
For my new friends I have designed and consulted on saunas from Maine to California— that has kept me busy when I was not getting my hands dirty. But whenever I can, I am working with my hands, either in my 3000 square foot shop, which I am ever grateful for, or I am on jobsites. It used to be that builders would simply stop in the winter and spend the dark months sitting around the woodstove reading back issues of Fine Homebuilding, but now we all seem to be out there in any weather. My cut off is 10° F; any colder and I want to be by a fire, in the sauna, preferably. Good gear helps; I’m especially grateful for my boot warmer and insulated pants.
Mobile Saunas showcased in the shop. Lansing, NY
Nothing I do is cookie cutter—I would die of boredom is life was too easy— thus the custom in my business moniker. This year I seemed to run the gamut of sauna permutations: First, a garage retrofit to a Yoga and sauna retreat, then a quiet walkout basement electric affair, then a classic one room wood burning sauna on a idyllic creek, then a more urban collaboration in Syracuse, followed by a tiny personal electric sauna in a bathroom, a rustic elegant wood burning retreat in the trees, and a distance job downstate. Currently I’m finishing up an electric sauna in a historic boathouse on Cayuga lake. I’m hoping to take it for a test drive, with a jump in the frigid water, by Christmas.
Garage Retrofit for Hot Yoga and SaunaClassic Creekside Sauna set 50 ft from swimming hole. Idyllic.Walkout Basement Electric Sauna BlissBackyard Sauna Design, Urban Collaboration in Syracuse, NYRustic elegant wood burning saunaCozy interior of a backyard sauna
In between all of these I have sold a few of my Lämpimämpi sauna stoves and many sauna plans. DIY interests, especially in the mobile saunas which are really big now. I get a kick out seeing my designs being brought to life by many different hands. It is also fun to see all of the other builders following in my steps. The more builders, the better. There is plenty of work to go around and I encourage anyone who wants to take the work seriously to pursue it with a passion. I did offer a sauna building class this year but had to cancel; Covid has thrown a wrench into a lot of plans. But stay tuned: perhaps 2022 will be the year.
Covid also threw into a wrench into the supply chain. We’ve all heard the phrase “supply chain disruption” by now. I bid jobs in the beginning of the year only see to prices on materials I quoted go up by 250%. Some materials simply vanished from the shelves. But now things have settled down and I also started ordering and stock piling materials well in advance. I can keep several saunas worth lumber and supplies in my big shop and insulate myself from some of the inflation—another reason to be grateful for the big work space.
Rob at the shop!
I’ve been working alone for most of the year, which actually suits me fine, especially with Covid lurking. Workers are hard to come by: not only are the skilled trades losing new blood, but, I think, the pandemic relief made a lot people lazy and unwilling to get off the couch. Scarlet, now my partner in everything, has been my greatest blessing. When she can escape childcare duties she has proven to be the hardest worker I could wish for. I could use a few more workers like her: eager to learn, unafraid of dust and dirt and willing to sweat. She also manages all of the marketing, so give her the kudos for the web media you see. The business feels like it wants to grow so if anyone is seriously interested in building saunas and wants to relocate to Ithaca, drop me a line.
For those of you lucky enough to have a sauna, I hope you get to celebrate the New Year in it for there is no better way to bring in the new and shake out the old. It’s been my tradition for four decades now and I hope to continue for four more.
Taking Sauna with Scarlet by the Lake, December 2021.
Lately I have been thinking about the application of the foil I use in my saunas as a radiant vapor barrier. Perhaps this is because it almost Christmas and I was thinking of how we decorated the tree each year. The final touch would be to drape foil tinsel over everything; our mother would have to constantly damp down our enthusiasm by reminding us to place it carefully on each branch, not to throw it.
This suspicious “sauna” foil is Aluminum-coated Plastic—upper working temperature of only 55-120° C.
There are tricks to using the foil but the first and most important step is to buy the right stuff. Like the tinsel we put on the tree, the foil may actually be aluminum-coated plastic— which you don’t want to use. That plastic is likely polyethylene which, if you look it up on the material specification sheet that every product has, it has an upper working temperature of 55-120° C, meaning it will likely melt at typical sauna temps. Sauna Foil, available from any of the familiar sauna suppliers, is aluminum foil on a kraft paper backing. I used to find it with fiberglass reinforcing thread, which is helpful because the stuff tears easily. Also helpful is 4 ft. rolls, rather than 3 ft so you can do a wall in 2 passes, but I have trouble finding this too. I recently tried a new supplier selling 4 ft rolls of “sauna” foil, but upon opening it had a suspicious plastic look to it. That night I put it in the sauna and within seconds it began to distort and curl up like the polyethylene I suspected it was made of. (See illustration above)
The second thing is to design the wall correctly. I read and see a lot of misinformation that touts using no air gap with foil. The air gap is essential. The foil works by reflecting radiant heat. All “black bodies” give off and absorb radiant heat that travels in a straight line from one hotter object to another cooler one, the hotter the body, the more heat it emits. The sauna rocks radiate a “soft” heat to you, the walls, and the benches, and that is why you want the sauna to be laid out so that everyone has a view of the rocks. The fire, if seen through a clear glass door, also radiates heat— but at a higher intensity. Too high for a comfortable sauna (but great for ambiance.) When that heat hits foil, it is reflected back into the room or the backside of the cedar—if there is an air gap of at least 1/2″. If it touches the backside of the cedar the foil— also a perfect conductor—pulls the heat away from the cedar and transfers to the wall space behind.
Air Gap. A Sauna Building Best Practice.
I’ve understood this for along time. The first semester of college I took a class: Solar Design and the Energy Efficient Home. We learned all about insulation, heat transfer and basic building skills. The first day of lab, where we were building a timber frame house, I was handed a Makita 12″ circular saw. My building career started right then and there.
With the web of misinformation out there I had to think of a way to illustrate this basic principle of thermodynamics that I learned my freshman year. So, one slow day in the shop I rigged up an experiment and photographed it. (see illustration below) I set up a section of cedar wall about 18″ from my infrared shop heater and fastened 2 pieces of foil to the back, one with a 3/4″ air gap, and one with no gap. After an hour the cedar was 250°F on the front—like it is often is in my sauna. The back of the cedar was 121° F, which is impressive by itself. The back of the foil with no gap was 115°F, meaning it was acting as a perfect conductor, and the back of the foil with an air gap was 71°F: room temp. The air gap was clearly making a difference, 45° in this case.
The thermodynamic experiment begins.After an hour on cedarback of cedarback of foil, no gapair gap makes big difference!
The foil is a perfect vapor barrier rated at zero perms— meaning no vapor moves through it. But unless you layer it properly, with insulation behind it, the moisture will condense on it, or the first cold surface it hits. Even in a perfect build, there might be cold spots in the insulation (typically about the size of a mouse hole), so there likely be some condensation, but not a problem if there is air movement. The air gap behind the cedar allows air to circulate around the cedar, removing any moisture and ensuring that the wood heats and dries evenly and remains stable. Heating one side of a board and wetting or cooling the other is how you make curved boat staves.
There are other tricks to using the foil- like unrolling it and re-rolling it foil-in, or using temporary magnets when working a commercial job with metal studs, but the key is to use care. Use plenty of hi-temp foil tape and patch tears as you go and work with a partner if possible.
I suppose you could build a sauna by putting a heater in a refrigerator box- but that would last about a day and be incredibly wasteful. Cedar touching foil won’t ruin your sauna and neither will plastic melting in the walls where you don’t see it. But if you are going to take the time and bear the expense of building a sauna, you might as well do it right and so it will last generations. I guess my mother was right: applying foil carefully and not just throwing it up is the way to work.
Building a sauna requires many skills. Basically it is a small house; there are windows and doors, a roof and a foundation; framing, sheathing, subfloor, and the like. It also requires a design, and many cases, a permit, which will include drawings such as a site plan, showing required set backs and orientation. All of this I can do— from plans and permit applications to foundation to chimney. I pride my self on being able to do it all and to being as comfortable holding a drafting pencil ( yes, I do drawings old-school) as I am a pick-axe or nail-gun. But the truth is, sometimes it is best to let others do the work they do best so I can focus on what I do best, which is the sauna.
Recently I had a job where distance made it much more efficient for the owners to use a local contractor to build the shell while I did only the sauna interior and the overall design. It turned out that Tim and his crew were much more adept than me at not only building the shell but carefully replicating the trim details of the 150 year-old adjacent main house. By the time I got to the job site the interior was ready for my sauna work.
Just like everyone else during the pandemic, planning sessions happened on the web or via text; we only actually all met once. Despite that, or maybe because we weren’t in each other’s hair (a sauna is, after all, a very small space), things flowed very smoothly once we got over the scheduling speed bump caused by the pandemic-induced supply chain upheaval. The sauna sits perfectly between the historical architecture of the house and the modern look of a contemporary sauna. It was a team effort that paid off.
Increasingly I hear from clients who want their sauna as a way to enhance their hot yoga (Bikram) practice. It’s a perfect pairing: what better way to follow up (or warm up for) a yoga session than with an even hotter sauna!
Recently a couple asked me to convert an old dingy freestanding cinder block garage into a sauna/ hot yoga studio. First I made sure the cinderblock wall was stable and did some minimal repairs. Then I isolated the block wall from the warm, humid space by adhering expanded polystyrene (XPS) foam board to the walls. This is critical as it prevents moist air from hitting the cold cinder blocks and condensing. Then I framed in the space, insulated the walls with mineral wool batts and finished the yoga space with drywall and the sauna with cedar (with the requisite radiant sauna foil layer and air gap). New windows replaced the old; the dramatic deep window recesses a result of the thick walls. Bamboo flooring over floating sleepers over foam board created just the right bounce for the yoga space, while the sauna has traditional duck boards. LED lighting added just the right ambiance. The heart of the sauna is the Harvia Cilindro heater with it’s 200 pound rock capacity. Amazingly, the old building was plumb and square— the original masons did a good job. Fighting an out-of-square space is the bane of all renovators.
This project was a complete transformation for this building (see below), turning it from a creaky old, under-utilized garage into a revitalized space for self-transformation. Make an inventory of the neglected spaces on your property awaiting transformation and give me a call!
a sanctuary just a step away from homeOperable vent with slider doorFloating Bench, Hot Yoga Studio
You ask how or why electric mobile? There are a number of reasons why going mobile makes sense, especially if you rent. You need no permits or special permissions. 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 to difficult store, and your neighbors may 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 been requested 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. She also wanted the benches to flip up so it could be a mobile hot-yoga studio. 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 standard car charging port (or special outdoor outlet). This will also work in many campgrounds with RV hook-ups. 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.
What I envision next (but probably won’t consider doing unless a client pushes me) is a fully solar electric sauna. 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 there is someone out there who wants to be the first…. give me a call…
I just completed this bright blue, yellow and white gem of a sauna situated on a red deck. The color was the client’s choice; he wanted something that would brighten things up and be in stark contrast with usual suspects of taupe, dull brown, and moldy blues that afflict his neighborhood and so many other American housing developments. Why are builders so afraid of color?
The use of bright color in homes is often associated with places like seaside Baltic towns and Reykjavíc, Iceland—and for good reason. In the deep of winter these places are plunged into darkness as the sun hovers near the horizon or barely makes an appearance at all. Battling the winter blues should make the use of bright colors almost mandatory. Of course these places all have saunas too (or in the case of Reykjavíc, massive public hot springs), another way to survive the depth of winter. I also learned, when I was an artist-in-residence in Nova Scotia, that fishermen traditionally used bright colors in their houses simply because it’s left-over boat paint. Boats are painted brightly so they can be uniquely identified at sea, so, in a way, the colors express something unique about the individuals who live in there. Now, of course, the brightly colored fishing village is almost a tourist mandate.
Looking back on recent sauna projects, I see a shifting trend in color choices made by my clients. From authentic dark brown Viking tar, to blue-grey, then, brighter reds and blues and greens, and now, this latest color feast. There is also a trend in design to use more bright colors such as on the running shoes I saw in the gym yesterday that were an eye-popping florescent orange. I have been following the designer Ingrid Fetell Lee who writes about creating joy with color in her book The Aesthetics of Joy. She is persuasive about using more color for the simple reason that it creates joy. Although I teach color theory, I have a tendency to stick to blacks, grays and low intensity colors in my art, a trend that I have been to trying evolve out of. Perhaps I can take some cues from my clients and take some color risks in my own work. This latest sauna project actually makes me think of a late Mondrian painting such as Broadway Boogie Woogie in which he reduced his palette to the three primary colors and sought to use color as the basis for expression.
In this latest sauna project my interest in sauna and art actually converged. The warm interior heats your body and the colorful exterior warms your spirit. Thanks, Karl!
Looking back on recent sauna projects, I see a shifting trend in color choices made by my clients. From authentic dark brown Viking tar, to blue-grey, then, brighter reds and blues and greens, and now, this latest color feast. There is also a trend in design to use more bright colors such as on the running shoes I saw in the gym yesterday that were an eye-popping florescent orange. I have been following the designer Ingrid Fetell Lee who writes about creating joy with color in her book 
