Recently, you may have read the news about the fire at Driftwood Public Sauna in Milwaukee. Fire caused a total loss of the newly built facility, which looks to be a building on a trailer parked near the waterfront.
My sympathies to the owner, Derek Collins, and his team who clearly put their heart and soul into this project, which looked beautiful in the before images. As a small business owner, this is a worst nightmare scenario. Even with good insurance, recovery will be difficult (there is go-fund me page).
But let’s not all go running away from wood fired saunas with this image glued to our minds. Woodburning sauna stoves installed correctly are not dangerous.
Sure, the old Finns would build their saunas away from the house because, well, sauna fires do happen, and even the old sauna at Podunk clearly toed that line many times, evidenced by the seriously charred wood we found when we deconstructed it. But modern stoves and the associated chimneys are engineered and tested to heat a sauna. They are not cobbled together like the way the pragmatic old Finns did things, fabricating as much as they could from scrap metal. And neither should you be cobbling things together and taking safety shortcuts.
The fire is “under investigation”. Looking closely at the image of the fire, I know exactly what caused it. Fire rises; the lowest charred point is the point of origin.
I know that stove: the Harvia Legend Duo 300. It is meant to be fired from the outside— which is perfect for a public sauna where the fire tender has to do their job while staying invisible. According to the instructions, It is meant to be fired through a masonry firewall (see above instructions) with a minimum of 12“ of masonry one each side, yet in the photo of the fire I see plywood right next to the stove. I don’t want say it, but WTF?
On the inside there is (was) a tiled fire shield with what looks like the appropriate 1” air gap behind the stove extending to the ceiling. This looks nice, but a fire shield is not a firewall. A Firewall is entirely non-combustible, a shield simply protects a wooden surface behind it.
The plywood clearly got too hot (remember Ray Bradbury’s Farenheit 451: the temperature wood and paper combusts!) A hot stove will reach well over 1000°F on it’s surface, and so will anything touching it. I’ll actually let mine get to a dull cherry glow on top (that’s 1300°F) just to test my installations.
I go to job sites where there other contractors working, sometimes on my designs, and I commonly see manuals tossed in the trash and my written instructions totally disregarded.
I know reading is hard ( and harder when you turn fifty and need cheaters to read anything), but, sometimes the obvious is right in front of you: you just have to read it. I cringe when I see online images of woodstoves installed too close to combustibles. It’s not like speed limits—10 inches means 10 inches. And the sauna elf will enforce that!
Wood fired saunas can be dangerous—but so can anything installed improperly. Me, I’d rather run from a burning sauna naked then get zapped with 240 volts while barefoot. Let’s keep building wood-fired saunas, but safely.
