Wood-Fired Sauna
Washing the sauna stones before loading them on the stove
After months of research and much work, we ran the first test of our new wood-fired sauna last Saturday, on January 31, and we had our first full run on Sunday, Feb 1. Including Sunday, we’ve had three sauna sessions this past week. In short, the sauna is amazing.
Mike is really happy with how it turned out, which is super good news. With how much time he spent researching sauna stoves and chimney pipe and coming up with the design of how to build it and put it all together, it’s a great relief to know he feels good about how the sauna functions. Since he’s never built a sauna before, even with all the research he did, there was still a large element of whelp, hopefully this works! Meaning: hopefully we bought a big enough stove to heat up the square footage of the sauna room we built; hopefully all of the effort put into insulating the walls and the ceiling paid off; hopefully the design of the ceiling and the floor boards having space in which to bring fresh air in and the venting up top will work as planned to keep the air flowing the way it needs to both during the sauna sessions and afterwards to dry it out so the wood doesn’t mold from the moisture.
There are a number of elements and factors at play when it comes to building a good sauna. And since our sauna stove is wood-fired, there are additional considerations to pay close attention to as well, such as proper ventilation, ensuring there’s enough air intake for the wood to burn well, and installing a necessary heat shield around the stove so we don’t catch the wood walls or ceiling on fire. There was a lot for Mike to have to learn and figure out.
We have a lot more work to do on the building in which the sauna room is housed, but the sauna itself is operational! Now that we know the sauna works and gets hot enough and the stove breathes properly and the room vents well, we’ve segwayed into the experimentation process in regards to learning the art of the sauna. Mike came across an old timer from Sweden online talking about how it takes 100 sauna sessions to learn how to fully dial in and run your sauna the way you want it and like it. At first that sounded a bit dramatic but now I’m starting to get it. Especially with a wood-fired sauna where you have to figure out how much wood to put in and how often, on top of determining how much water to toss on the stones and how to balance the temperature with the humidity, it makes sense it will take a little while to sort out. Everything takes practice. So…3 down and 97 to go!
The oak door and the brass door knob we got at our local home re-use center in Missoula - thank you Home Resource! And the heat shield around the stove was metal torn off from an old roof given to us by our friend Chance - thank you Chance!
Thus far, we’ve been slow rolling our way into becoming regular sauna people. We’ve gotten up to 165-degrees F, but we’re still new at this and figuring things out and right now 150-degrees feels pretty darn good and is fairly easy to reach. We just ordered and received an official sauna thermometer and hydrometer in the mail this past week, so we’re in the process of calibrating the hydrometer right now, which involves sticking it in a ziplock bag sealed up with a bottle cap full of salt and a little bit of water. Apparently after 12-hours the hydrometer should read 75%. If it doesn’t, you toggle the calibration screw to 75% and you’re all set.
It takes about an hour after lighting the wood in the stove to get the sauna up to the temp in which we enter and start our session. And Mike has been using about 10 smallish sized sticks of wood for a full run, meaning one hour of warming up the sauna and another another of run time where we cycle in and out in.
Since we don’t have running water, while we paired our first full sauna session with hooking up our outdoor shower to use afterwards, for our last two saunas we simply used a bucket of water and a washcloth to wash off after we sauna, which worked great. This time of year, we can’t leave our outdoor shower hooked up because the unit, the water pump, battery, and the hoses can’t freeze. Since we need to store all of the parts of the shower inside the cabin in the winter months it takes a little while, and is a bit of a hassle, to get everything out and hooked up whenever we want to take a shower, which for us amounts to once a week. If I didn’t have such long hair I could see taking even fewer showers in the winter months, as it’s pretty easy to use a washcloth to do a body scrub down, but after a week my hair feels like straw so I don’t feel at all inclined to take less than one shower a week based on that.
We feel glad to add a wood-fired sauna to our slow-sprouting village here at EM. We’re hoping folks will come out to enjoy it with us as well. Mike made it big enough to fit 6 people comfortably. Everything we build here at EM is with others in mind. The sauna is good medicine for the body, the mind, and the soul.
