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 the heat sauna to rake up those leaves that got matted into the lawn under a November snowfall. The breeze was out of the south which 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 down for a relaxing sauna, the thermometer was pinned at 235 degrees! Not one to shy way 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 so, 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 glowing 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. 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 immunity and help you sleep better- all in a virus free space. Maybe it’s time to think about having your own sauna so you can create your own virus-free and worry-free sanctuary.
Sauna is an interesting word. It is both the noun describing the little structures that 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 his or her own experiences and memories to draw from. Different countries have subtle variations: wetter, drier, hotter, timed sessions, birch Vihta, etc. My memories stem from my time at Podunk, in the old Finnish Sauna. I remember the 5 gallon joint-compound buckets for gathering water from the creek, and the various cheap plastic wash tubs, brushes, loofa, and other bathing implements. There was some sort of ladle (which we always called a kipper in some mis-appropriation of Finnish-ness) for pouring water on the rocks. And there would be various soaps and shampoos–some common, some not so common, like the Finnish pine tar soap, which, despite its comparison to the sticky pine tar we would out on our skis, actually feels pretty good.
Podunk
Once the sauna got good and hot we would strip down as unceremoniously as possible and go in. The first round would 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 so as to quiet things down. In the second and third round we might take great pleasure in thrashing each other (gently) with a birch vihta if someone bothered to make one from the birch tree outside the Podunk sauna. The old Finns would make them in the spring out of the fresh soft 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
would be time to wash: after getting hot again we would take 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 some warm water
would wash off all of that dead skin and residue of a week’s hard work and we
would leave the sauna all fresh sand 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 the way a ritual in the church is dictated to you. As in church, there are ritual objects that create focus help and 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 just to help establish the flow of the sauna experience. To the uninitiated it may seem all strange, but after a few times, it all makes sense. It is just a bath house, 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!
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!
I just completed a large (9×12 foot ) sauna at Silverlaken Glampground near Letchworth State Park. This is such an ideal setting for quiet retreats or group gatherings: a main lodge in a historic cottage, private cabins and luxury tents next to sparkling Silver Lake just miles from one of the most popular state parks in New York. The sauna is the perfect centerpiece for small or large gatherings. A group sauna is different than a small intimate home sauna; it is a unique social situation where you may commune with strangers and make new friends all while stripped bare of the trappings of social status, class or superficiality. It can be a perfect setting for friends to solemnly celebrate life’s important moments: a reunion, a wedding, a men’s retreat or whatever occasion that will be enhanced by closeness and shared exhilaration. The sauna easily holds a dozen or more bathers and is a stone’s throw from the lake.
As I always do, I tested the sauna before leaving a finished project. The new owner was elated as a I brought it up to temperature while I explained the intricacies of sauna; after a round we jumped in the brisk lake. It was the perfect way to end an exhausting effort and make my long haul home a relaxing one.
If you are in Western New York and looking for a unique place to stay and want a sauna experience, I recommend you checkSilverlakenout! (listed on Airbnb)
The Kiuas, or heater, is the heart of the sauna. In a wood-burner, it is commonly referred to as the sauna stove, but a wood stove it is not! There is a lot of misconception around the kiuas and how it is different from a wood stove that you might use in your house.
First, some history. The modern house stove is really a heating device designed to add comfort to your home while conforming to certain safety and smoke emission rules. Typically they are not used as primary heating appliances, unless you live in a cabin off-grid somewhere. Back in 70’s, during the energy crisis, woodstoves become popular as a way to save money. They were pretty much unregulated and varied in design from a kit that consisted of a door and a flue collar you could slap onto a used fifty-gallon drum, to a more complex Vermont Castings wood stove. Earlier stoves had little control over combustion; these evolved into airtight units that could keep a smoldering fire all night, if not for an entire season. I had one of these and didn’t let the fire go out all winter except to clean it. Cleaning the chimneys on these was imperative: when wood—especially if it is not cured for two years— is burned slowly by reducing the combustion air to near nil, creosote forms as the result of the resinous gasses condensing on inside of the cool chimney walls. As a result of the slow burning, these stoves emitted a lot of smoke. After many houses were lost to chimney fires, safety regulations were put into place and stoves were required to use catalytic converters, much like on your car, that reduced emissions. These required a religious adherence to the use of dry wood, lest your catalytic converter clogged up, which most of them did. Those evolved into today’s stoves that use a carefully designed system of baffles and airflow to make stoves burn efficiently. Now, all wood burning home heating device installed in the US must comply with UL (Underwriters Laboratory) safety standards and increasingly stringent EPA standards for particulate emissions. The stoves work well and are very cozy but, by design, they don’t get very hot fast, nor are they meant to burn all night long, not to mention all season long. Because they are intricate with interconnected parts, they are all cast iron. The exception is some stoves made in the pre- catalytic converter era, which were welded steel.
So, that is a wood stove. You may find a used one and think you can build a sauna around it, but the truth is, with the rare exception of one of those 70’s all welded steel (but not a barrel!) stoves, you can’t. You can build a small hot room with a wood stove, but it will never be a real sauna; here is why: A sauna stove, or kiuas, is designed to do one thing: heat sauna rocks. It is the hot rocks that heat the sauna, that produce the burst of löyly steam and that are true heart of the sauna. Early saunas did not have a metal stove- they did not even have the technology to make a metal stove- all they had was wood, earth and rocks. The kiuas was essentially a hollowed out a pile of rocks. The fire was lit within, the room filled with smoke, and, after the rocks got hot, the fire was extinguished and the room cleared of smoke and then the rocks heated the room. The closer you can get to that smoke or Savusauna experience, the better.
A sauna stove is not a wood stove; it fires hot and fast, it burns sticks, not logs. It’s job is to heat rocks. If fired correctly, you will never have to clean the chimney- a hot fire will combust all of the sticky wood gas. It is welded steel—which can have water poured over it while red-hot. Cast iron cracks or explodes when subjected to this. It can take the weight of a hundred or more pounds of rocks sitting on top of it when cherry red. Ferrous metal takes on specific color when heated; at 1400° F. it is cherry red. At that temperature, an 1/8 inch plate of steel is as malleable as taffy on a hot summer day at the beach. I repaired many sauna stoves where the top looked like an egg carton from the stones pressing down on the hot metal, so I started making stoves with half-inch thick plate at the top. I fire my stove so hot that I see dark cherry red glowing underneath the stones. If you fired your home heating wood stove like that, you would be crazy. I swear that sometimes I could read a book by the glow coming off of my sauna stove. I like to push the limits so that I know it is safe.
When you light a sauna stove, you want to fire it, that is, to bring it up to temperature quickly. Use paper and dry kindling and then stuff it full of sticks, not logs (wood scraps from building saunas work great). Because they are for intermittent use, they are exempt from the EPA particulate rules but, the truth is, once it gets going—after about ten minutes—it should burn so hot that there is no smoke at all. Other than the shimmering light from the heat, I can’t tell my sauna is heating up by looking at the chimney. House woodstoves are tame devices, meant to be safe. Sauna heaters are another beast; that is why I will never install a wood burning kiuas in a sauna in or attached to a house. They do burn down now and then.
If you are building your own wood-burning sauna, you may have a building inspector involved or have to get a wood burning appliance inspection for your home insurance and that may require a UL listing. The only heater with UL label on it is the Lamppa Kuuma stove; most of the others are made for the European or Canadian market, which uses different standards, so before you click on “buy” you should have a conversation with any inspectors involved. They may love the idea of a sauna or they may think you are crazy to sit in a small hot room and throw water on a red- hot wood stove, in which case you’ll have to convince them that it’s something that’s been done millions of times without incident. In any case you will need to make a safe installation of your Kiuas – there are clearances and heat shields and floor hearths; none of these can be cheated on, unless you don’t mind owning one of the ones that burns down. There is also combustion air to consider- which is why I like to fire mine from the outside. The sauna stove sucks up fuel and oxygen, better to not be sucking the air out of the tiny room you and your friends will be in. Not such a problem with a house wood stove (but with newer air tight construction and tiny homes, it is).
So, before you get that old woodstove you find on Craigslist, do your research and think about investing in a real sauna stove because the kiuas is the heart of the sauna and the kiuas is not a wood stove!
My stove pipe will get cherry red!
After ten minutes, a hot fire fire should burn clean and smoke-less
All stoves will smoke initially
Nothing bigger than arm your arm!
This armload of ash (the wood) will fire the sauna
Fill it and let it burn hot before closing the ash drawer
My latest mobile sauna project started when a customer contacted me wanting a mobile sauna she could use for hot yoga. It’s my standard five by eight foot trailer sauna but without the benches. The arched roof allows for plenty of room for stretching out and the floor is soft cedar. The heat comes from a Scandia propane-fired heater. It’s a cute little unit that weighs under 2000 pounds. Tow it to the next yoga retreat and show off your downward facing dog
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 
