Having spent years in Phoenix, Arizona I understand what it’s like to walk outside and think you are breathing from a hairdryer. However, not that I am back in New England I miss the “cleansing” aspects of the dry heat. And have been considering getting one of these outdoor saunas. Check out this page, scroll down and see some of those, they look pretty cool. They run around 7 grand, right about where a nice hottub system would be.
I dunno if I’d be as elaborate as the linked photo, with the rocks and everything, [though I’d definitely want to] I think a nice outdoor sauna would be awesome in the cold winters.
So does anyone have one of these? Any Scandanavian dopers or European dopers who have one? How often do you use it? Do you like the health benefits?
I have only been in saunas in hotels but I do have to say they make some attractive products and I haven’t ever seen anything quite like it. The price list seems reasonable too although I am sure it is much more expensive when everything is figured in. I want a nice hot tub badly myself.
We have an indoor, free-standing sauna that we adore. It’s been with us since late last summer. I bought it on eBay, most likely, in retrospect, from the Russian mob. The price was great, though. We’re in Colorado and we have used it all winter. Maybe it’s a philosophy thing. My husband’s Ph.D. is Value Theory.
I have a sauna in my house (as do a lot of people around here - I’ve rented student hovels that had saunas, and we have a public sauna here in town) but it’s not a dry heat sauna. The largest ethnic sub-group in this area is Finnish, and the type of sauna here is just about always a Finnish - that is, wet - sauna.
I like it quite a bit, but Mr. Athena loves the thing. I’d say he’s in it about every day or every other day in the winter, and at least a few times a week in the summer.
We built ours in a room in our house. It had a drain in it already, so we pulled down the drywall, added some vapor barrier (basically plastic around the walls & ceiling), put in a a spigot for water to put on the rocks, a sauna stove, and re-did the walls with cedar and build benches. Total cost was around $3K if I recall correctly.
Personally, I’d never buy one of the free-standing saunas, because they’re expensive and I’ve never seen one that really felt authentic. But I grew up with saunas (we had a cabin we spent a lot of time at when I was a kid, and the only bathing option was the sauna because the cabin had no running water) and I tend to be picky about them.
I agree to some extent that I’d like to see one before I bought it. I’m off to Colorado in a couple weeks and I’m planning on checking them out at a friends house in Boulder. He said there was a retailer there…
FWIW, we had a little closet-sized Finnish (dry heat) sauna in our house when I was growing up. We all loved it and used it a few times a month. It’s especially delightful after you’ve been out playing in the snow, or if you feel a cold coming on. My sense memory of the smell of cedar at 160 degrees is still very vivid…
Yeah, I’ve been there (lived in Boulder for 11+ years). I probably haven’t been there for at least 6 or 7 years, but at the time, they had no clue how to build a Finnish sauna.
To be clear, mine is a Chinese-made of pine from Lake Baikal, as designed by Finns. It’s a pine cabin with a bench and a heater with basalt stones and a bucket and a wooden ladle. The heater is electric, on a 30 amp dedicated circuit.
Definitely a sauna person (note: cultural bias may apply). We have a communal sauna in the basement of this apartment complex (this is extremely common in Finland for older apartment buildings; newer ones tend to start having saunas built into every apartment), and residents can pay a monthly fee and get a weekly hour-long session reserved for them. The sauna is then programmed to heat up at those times only. Unfortunately, it’s slightly over a student budget, so currently I don’t go as often as I’d like to.
My parents have one with two stoves at their house; one is electric and the other wood-heated. This is because when they were renovating the house, the factory of the company that made this specific kind of wood-heated sauna stove hadn’t been built yet. So they got an electric stove for the meantime. They mostly use the wood one now, though. It’s a small, fierce beast, heats up to 100 degrees Celsius in about 45 minutes without needing to add much wood, and the sauna smells much nicer and the löyly feels more authentic.
I’ve used a sauna to nurse a hoarse voice back to health, using lower heat and lots and lots of water with eucalyptus extract thrown onto the rocks. I don’t know about any other health benefits, but I do feel exceptionally clean after a sauna session.
I love the smell of eucalyptus in a good Finnish sauna. My favorite routine was to spend 10 minutes in the sauna, get nice and sweaty, quickly shower off, and dip in a cold (15C) pool. Leave pool. Lay for 10 minutes. Repeat. Awesome. And if I feel like cooking myself, I like the 100% humidity Turkish steam baths (which is different than what people here are calling a wet sauna), as well–those can feel like being boiled alive.
Either way, after two or three passes in the sauna/cold water/rest, I don’t feel like moving for the rest of the day. I’m a completely limp noodle.
