My good friend Daniel has come home for a few days so we decided to take the trailer sauna down to Podunk, his family’s homestead, where, as a youth, I was indoctrinated in the way of the sauna. The old shack built by the original Finnish owner of the property has long since gone to the squirrels, but our memories of saunaing on cool summer evenings are still as vivid as the lush green canopies of the giant poplar trees that stand as sentinels in the field by the riverbank, keeping the creek from advancing any further as it swishes across the valley. On a geologic scale, the creek— the same that carved the falls at Taughannock— slithers like a snake, back and forth, carving a new path every few years. In our short lives we can remember when it made this turn or that, turning a rocky bank into an inviting swim hole or turning the old dipping spot—the one we would run down to from that old sauna, hooting and hollering— into a rocky shallow.
There is a new swim hole now. It’s an Olympic sized pool compared to what we used to dip in, allowing for real swimming as opposed to the slow rolls we used to take in the knee deep water just below where the pipeline crosses. As we lay there with our heads pulsing from the effect we called “sauna stoned,” minnows would nibble on our fresh cooked skin. With this new hole, the creek is more perfect for a sauna now than it was then.
I parked the trailer just on the edge of the bank and fired it up. The fact it was close to the creek where the spring high water often lapped the trunks of the poplars did not matter; this was a temporary affair, a brief encounter with our own youth, a dip into the pool of nostalgia. Once it was hot we climbed aboard and were transported back in time some forty years. My little stove holds a hundred pounds of rocks, all glacial erratics, transported here by the great river of ice in a time before memory. When heated, those rocks are capable of producing the best löyly, letting off a burst of steam that sends us out the door and clambering down the banks to the sweet cool water of the creek. It’s impossible not to let out a few whoops.
As a respite to the maddening distractions and over-stimulation of our times, people often seek out “authentic” experiences. There is often an understated desire to eschew technology and the associated flotsam that pollutes our memories of a simpler time. We laugh when we try to remember when phones were attached to the wall and being accessible meant you checked your answering machine only once a day. Life was slower and I don’t think there is anyone over 40 who can’t appreciate that. As far as traditions go, not much can beat the sauna, which has a 2000-plus year history.
Often, clients come to me seeking some sort of authentic experience—often tied to some childhood sauna at a summer lake-house or a weekly family ritual. They don’t want just an ordinary gym or hotel sauna; they want something deeper and more profound, something central to this notion of life slowing down. I imagine Sauna as a slow moving cinematic experience that is the complete antithesis to Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi film about life out of balance. In the sauna, the heat should melt not only the bodily stress of the day but also the sense of time itself. To be authentic, the experience should not follow a prescribed formula but be should simply be what naturally evolves in a Zen-like way of intentional non-intention.
What evolves naturally depends upon the built environment. Like cathedrals, which were designed to encourage spirituality, I build my saunas to encourage contemplation. It’s not just the temperature of the room, but the details that your hand or eye will settle on. The arched roof, view out the window and selected grain of the boards provide visual distraction so your mind can settle into the experience while your body adjusts to the heat. The surfaces, sounds and smells of the sauna are meant to awaken your senses.
When I am in the sauna I think about this, but I also try to think about nothing! I simply do what comes naturally- sweat, pour water on the rocks, cool down, look at the night sky, repeat, and then wash up. There is no magical order to the ritual, no rules to adhere to; the point is to create your own. I cannot create for my clients an authentic experience, but I can provide the catalyst in the form of a little magical space.
Finishing a job is always a sweet endeavor. I usually budget in one day of fussiness—a day when I can pay attention to all of the little details, get the stove in place and then, as a last step, give the sauna a test run. This is when I get to see how my efforts have paid off and take note of how the sauna actually fires. Is it hot enough? Is it light and airy and does it have that right sauna “feng shui”? Does it reach a good temperature and would Ozzie, the Finn who started me on my sauna-building path, approve.
The job I just finished is a modest affair: bare bones in that Finnish sort of pragmatism. I converted a kit-built garden shed, the type you’ll find parked on the edge of a big box home store parking lot, into a simple sauna with no dressing room. I liked the challenge of working within a modest budget, and I liked the folks: down-to-earth modern day Helen and Scott Nearing types. I had to remind myself that a sauna does not have to be a luxury item, affordable only by those in the higher income brackets, but that a sauna should be essential and ubiquitous as indoor plumbing.
I lined the inside with knotty pine—a low budget alternative to cedar. Sitting on the top bench I noted that the smell of pine reminds me of my forays into woods here in the east and is a close and familiar smell—unlike the rarefied smell of cedar. Aside from the knots, which will bleed sap forever and inevitably find it’s way into someone’s hair, it is a fine wood to use. It is not as stable as cedar but the inevitable cracks will open the sauna up and let it breathe. We always said that Ozzie’s old sauna at Podunk, with its gappy knotty pine walls and sagging ceiling, felt better than any other.
MyLämpimämpi stove fired fast and hot. The rocks quickly reached good löyly temperature and the first splash of water had me moaning in ecstasy. At no point did I feel that claustrophobic locker-room-sauna feeling of not being able to breathe. The dual windows filled the space with light. The benches will hold the couple, their kids and several neighbors. In term of the essentials, it is a perfect sauna. Nothing more is needed– no fancy tile work, no dressing room, no fancy cedar trim work. It works, plain and simple, and it works well. It was the best sweat I’d had in a while and a good sweat is almost payment enough.
The one thing that always comes up when people ask me questions about building saunas is: how do you insulate it? Intuitively, one might think that the sauna, with it’s high temperatures, would need more insulation than a house and should be as tight as possible to conserve energy. In fact, I’ve had building inspectors give me a confused list of requirements using such logic. The reality is that a sauna is such a different beast than a living space that most of the calculations have to be thrown out the window. R-value, the number printed on most insulation products, is the resistance to heat flow of a given material for a given thickness for a given temperature difference (delta T) between the hot and cold side of the material. Typically, in our region, delta T is assumed to be 35° but, in a sauna, the delta T might be 165 degrees Fahrenheit! So, in terms of heat loss, we get some very different calculations! To really understand R-value, you need to think in terms of it’s inverse: the U value, or coefficient of heat transmission. U value is expressed in units of Btu/hr/sq. ft./°F, or, plainly, how much heat is lost per square foot for every 1° temperature difference. A typical sauna, with R-13 average insulation, might lose 4000 Btus per hour (or 1200 watts). But, A typical sauna stove generates 25-40,000 btus of heat per hour, so losing 4000 btu’s is not a big deal. (It is more important if you use an electric heater: an 8 kw unit, can only put off about 20,000 btus in an hour.) The other factor to consider is that, unlike a living space, you are not trying to hold the heat for very long. So, you don’t need to stack up piles of insulation in the walls and ceiling. In fact, many old saunas had no insulation at all.
What R factor does not measure though, is radiant heat flow. Radiant heat is like the sun warming your face; it is the short wave radiation that you feel. At higher temperatures, short wave radiation becomes a bigger factor than convection. To contain that radiant heat, we use foil, (think: thermos bottle or emergency blanket) but foil, being highly conductive, only works if there is an air space between it and the heat source. The foil doesn’t have to be visible to work; it can be buried between other layers of materials. In my Saunas, it is behind the cedar, with an air gap.
Saunas are also not meant to be tight, stuffy boxes. They require airflow to move the heated air and steam and to make them comfortable. The old Sauna at Podunk was the best one around because it was old and drafty and it always smelled fresh. Counter to today’s high tech homes, ventilation has to be has designed into the sauna room to let it breath passively; the trick is to do it without creating annoying drafts.
When you sit on the bench and enjoy the relaxing warmth of the sauna, you probably aren’t running all of these calculations through your head- and neither am I! What I do know, from 40 years of sauna experience, is what does and doesn’t work. Mostly, you want a good pile of rocks (kiuaskivet) that are hot enough to alternately bask you in their radiant heat and make good steam (löyly) and convective heat off of the heater (kiuas) to produce waves of heat that gently wash over you as you breathe in the fresh aroma of the sauna. You want air, some light and a feeling of openness and connection to the outdoors. It’s not so much science, as it is art, or perhaps a melding of the two.
If you do have specific questions about designing your own sauna, feel free to give me a call or email. Or better, have me come over for a consult. If you live far away, I can even do one-hour phone or Skype consults. In the future, look for classes I’ll be offering on Sauna building, where I can go over all the science—and art—of Saunas in greater detail.
My latest project came about because of the enthusiastic insistence of the client, who, with typical Finnish ingenuity, decided that her tiny “garden shed” needed to become a sweet little sauna. Typically, for the electric saunas I build, I carve out space in the recesses of a dark basement or some other unused corner of the house; this one had its own bright little shell for me to work with, perfectly placed a few paces from the kitchen door. The exterior had its own charm, so I left that alone except for the new galvanized metal roof, which mirrors its surroundings. It is clandestinely tucked into the yard so that, unbeknownst to the neighbors, there is a whole world of warmth inside.
It immediately reminded me of a Tardis—which, for those of you not up on Dr. Who, of the popular British TV series, is a time machine in the form of a phone booth; when the door is opened, an enormous interior is revealed (Tardis is an acronym for time and relative dimensions in space). My challenge was to make this 64 square foot shed completely functional as a sauna and feel larger than it is. So far it has surpassed my expectations: it feels roomy, airy and comfortable for 2 or 3 people with a heat that burns deep and a löyly that lingers just long enough. I even fit in a foyer/disrobing area. Stepping out of it in a cloud of steam it is hard to reconcile the size of the outside with the comfort of the interior.
Like the Tardis, the sauna is a time machine; once inside, the heat takes you to another dimension as minutes turn to hours and worries melt away like the face on a Dali watch. Sometimes I want to thank my clients more than they thank me—for the inspiration to create something so perfect and for taking me out of my world and into theirs.
Just beyond the reaches of the village of Trumansburg, where I grew up, the settlement of Podunk was home to some 30 people and a cross-country ski shop. The place was run by Osmo Heila, a Finn, who also sold juicers and sauna stoves, and was an ambassador for all things Finnish. There was a rustic ski lodge, a modest circuit of trails, and a sauna. I was good friends with the family and spent winters there skiing the trails and summers taking saunas and hanging out by the creek.
The original owner of the property was also Finnish, and, following tradition, he built the sauna before the house. It was constructed out of locally cut wood and with a modest profile. Despite a few upgrades over the years, it maintained a typical Finnish pragmatic aesthetic. New parts were eschewed in favor of jury-rigged repairs, like the paint can that became part of the stove-pipe. There were a few feminine touches, like curtains in the dressing room, but the sauna room contained only the bare essentials: stove (or kiuas) with its pile of rocks, a water tank heated by the stove, simple benches, and buckets, brushes and loofas for washing. A window, propped open with a stick, provided ventilation. The spalled concrete floor had a drain and wooden slats, called duck boards, to walk on. The pine wall boards had resinous knots that oozed sap into shapes that made us think of strange creatures. Returning to Podunk in the years after high school, it always seemed the same. The same mementos were in the dressing room, the same plastic buckets were on the benches and the creatures on the wall had barely moved. But, like the creek, meandering behind the sauna, it was slowly changing: being swallowed by the bushes, sinking into the earth and eroding away.
Taking a sauna consisted of several sessions of heating up, each followed by a cooling down or a plunge into the creek, and, lastly, a scrub and a rinse in the sauna room. Afterwards, we relaxed in the house and shared food and drink. Eventually, somebody looked at a clock and we all suddenly became aware of the hours that had passed. We called this lost sense of time “sauna time”.
Applied to everyday life, “sauna time” means slowing down, stepping away from technology, and observing the subtle changes. It is an appreciation of all that is impermanent. The continuity of life doesn’t come from holding onto things, but from the rituals, traditions and relationships that one carries in their heart. As the sauna at Podunk slowly degrades into a pile of boards, I am reminded that Sauna is much more than just a building and that building saunas is about much more than just carpentry.
The one thing that always comes up when people ask me questions about building saunas is: how do you insulate it? Intuitively, one might think that the sauna, with it’s high temperatures, would need more insulation than a house and should be as tight as possible to conserve energy. In fact, I’ve had building inspectors give me a confused list of requirements using such logic. The reality is that a sauna is such a different beast than a living space that most of the calculations have to be thrown out the window. R-value, the number printed on most insulation products, is the resistance to heat flow of a given material for a given thickness for a given temperature difference (delta T) between the hot and cold side of the material. Typically, in our region, delta T is assumed to be 35° but, in a sauna, the delta T might be 165 degrees Fahrenheit! So, in terms of heat loss, we get some very different calculations! To really understand R-value, you need to think in terms of it’s inverse: the U value, or coefficient of heat transmission. U value is expressed in units of Btu/hr/sq. ft./°F, or, plainly, how much heat is lost per square foot for every 1° temperature difference. A typical sauna, with R-13 average insulation, might lose 4000 Btus per hour (or 1200 watts). But, A typical sauna stove generates 25-40,000 btus of heat per hour, so losing 4000 btu’s is not a big deal. (It is more important if you use an electric heater: an 8 kw unit, can only put off about 20,000 btus in an hour.) The other factor to consider is that, unlike a living space, you are not trying to hold the heat for very long. So, you don’t need to stack up piles of insulation in the walls and ceiling. In fact, many old saunas had no insulation at all.
