wood fired sauna

[mn woodcutter]

Anyone have a wood fired sauna? I've been wanting to build one and was looking for tips.

 

[svk]

Yes. What do you need to know?

 

[mn woodcutter]

Yes. What do you need to know?

Anything I can. Can I use a standard garden shed and line it with cedar? What's the best kind of stove? I've seen some stoves load from the outside? Do you need a floor drain? Do you use a certain type of stone for the steam?

 

[svk]

Yes. Insulate, poly, then cedar paneling. I used seconds from a local mill. A lot cheaper and I was able to pick through the stack and find enough sections of clear wood to do my whole sauna. Was about $300 for roughly a half pickup load of seconds that were 1"x5"x8'

I've got an old Spartan stove from Eveleth MN (google spartan stoves) but Kuuma (as member @lampmfg ) makes a very good one too. The model I have is still being produced. You can get standard stove or with integral hot water tank in case you don't have running water. (Side note, the sauna will be hot long before the water is). You can set the stove up to feed from outside just be careful with spacing to burnable material. People will normally use a combination of metal and masonry around the stove where it connects.

DO NOT make it too big. Keep ceiling lower because heat rises. No sense heating up extra area.

Benches again should be cedar or I've heard of folks using aspen or basswood also. Low density and no pitch wood is a must.

Yes you want a drain.

Lake Superior shore stones. Other stones may explode from water being poured on at high temps.

 

[MechanicMatt]

Lake superior has superior stones, ehh?

 

[Johnny Yooper]

Yes. Insulate, poly, then cedar paneling. I used seconds from a local mill. A lot cheaper and I was able to pick through the stack and find enough sections of clear wood to do my whole sauna. Was about $300 for roughly a half pickup load of seconds that were 1"x5"x8'

I've got an old Spartan stove from Eveleth MN (google spartan stoves) but Kuuma (as member @lampmfg ) makes a very good one too. The model I have is still being produced. You can get standard stove or with integral hot water tank in case you don't have running water. (Side note, the sauna will be hot long before the water is). You can set the stove up to feed from outside just be careful with spacing to burnable material. People will normally use a combination of metal and masonry around the stove where it connects.

DO NOT make it too big. Keep ceiling lower because heat rises. No sense heating up extra area.

Benches again should be cedar or I've heard of folks using aspen or basswood also. Low density and no pitch wood is a must.

Yes you want a drain.

Lake Superior shore stones. Other stones may explode from water being poured on at high temps.

dang it svk, it don't pay for me to reply now........you musta been lookin' over my shoulder as I was tappin' on da keyboard!

But, for mn woodcutter's benefit, I'll toss in some pics to back up what you've stated, and maybe stir up some thoughts in case he wishes to get creative. This project was done in '97 so all the build photos are 35mm and in an album somewhere, but the digital camera captured the benches and chinking which came way later, and various pics over recent deer seasons. It all started with 6 weekends in a cedar swamp in May and June with the husky 51 and a '71 Chevy K10 shortbed and resulted in the sacrificing of 80 trees (50 cedar, 30 spruce). Used popple for the benches, upon strong recommendation from the local Finns but agree cedar and basswood are also top notch. Tip if building benches (besides using hidden fasteners, of course) - find your favorite lawn chair and measure the angle of the back and duplicate that for the benches, very comfy; I think I had about a 5 degree tilt. And those are genuine Lake Superior rocks in case you're wonderin'. 12 gal. stainless reservoir gets the water boilin' and we make a lot of steam when we toss on the rocks. For the most part, basswood and popple are our favorite species for this stove for quick hot fires, but we will throw in maple, yellow birch, etc. for overnight if it's really cold out, this keeps it at least 80F when morning comes, and then quick to rock it up to 130F from there. This is where we solve all the world's problems when the gang gets together during deer season. One question I do get is why we didn't install crank out windows to keep our favorite beverages cold, but seems we solve more problems when holding onto a bottle.

When I die, I don't need to go to heaven......I'm there every November.
I

 

[firebrick43]

Which stones are bigger/better? Wisconsin, Minnesota, or Yupper stones? Or are all pretty small?

 

[svk]

Which stones are bigger/better? Wisconsin, Minnesota, or Yupper stones? Or are all pretty small?

Well a lot of the south shore (WI, MI) is sand so naturally the north shore of MN.

In reality any you can find but I think it is illegal now to pick stones. But if you did find them, multiple different sizes of stone help create a better distribution of steam.

 

[svk]

@Johnny Yooper that is a great job with vertical logs. I'd say thats all but a lost art these days.

 

[svk]

Also I'd strongly recommend a guard around the stove. Our wood fired sauna is small and my wife slipped and got a nasty burn one time. Depending on the stove 6-8 inches of air space between the stove and a wood guard is sufficient.

 

[svk]

Here's the wood sauna at our hunting cabin with new cedar t+g. These were seconds but you never could tell.

Here's the stove after I wire brushed and repainted. See the different sized rocks? The different colors are just for aesthetics. Also I put Thompson water seal on the walls to prevent water spots, you can see a slightly different tone from new in picture #1

Here's the guard I built around the electric stove at our family cabin. I built one just like it for the wood sauna with a removable slat to feed the fire.

 

[svk]

Shortly after start up this fall. Next year's black ash in the background.

 

[ppkgmsy]

I built mine using rough-cut spruce for the exterior. I get it from a local mill. It's good looking, cheap, and lasts forever. For the interior, I used milled poplar because I didn't want any sap around. I insulated like crazy in the walls and ceiling. I didn't put it in a drain, I left the floor uninsulated, and minute, imperceptible gaps between the floor boards for water to drain. The gaps also provide ventilation so when there's a lot of sweat, there's no stale smell. Two levels of benches with enough butt room to sit and enough headroom at the top so it's comfortable. I rounded off the edges of the benches for max comfort.

I'd also suggest a window somewhere. I snagged a small, flawed window from a local guy and put it in the door. Adds a bit of light and a sense of spaciousness.

Also, it's probably obvious, but I made sure all my screws were set way deep so there's no chance of snagging a delicate body part.

I live in NCentral VT and even when the temps are near 0, the sauna heats up fast and holds heat well.

 

[svk]

One of my bucket list projects is to build a savusauna (traditional smoke sauna) at my cabin. Rather than a stove with chimney, a savusauna has an open fire built on a pile of rocks inside the building. Before using, a vent near the ceiling was opened to allow smoke to escape. Then water is thrown upon the hot rocks.

Finnish folk used the savusauna for giving birth as the ash residue from previous fires made the room completely inhospitable for any type of bacteria.

http://collections.mnhs.org/MNHistoryMagazine/articles/45/v45i01p011-020.pdf

Or visit this link then click on "Types of Sauna"
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_sauna

 

[Johnny Yooper]

@Johnny Yooper that is a great job with vertical logs. I'd say thats all but a lost art these days.

Thank you svk.

Me and the hunting gang switched from gun to bow back in the '94 season and we discussed building a sauna at camp to stay cleaner as required for bow hunting; the guys simply wanted to grab a bunch of 2 x material and sheathing, but I wanted to do it old school, just once. You see, my dad and grandpa built the cabin in '53 and added a breezeway and large woodshed a year later, and a garage up the road.....everything was done in vertical log, so I didn't think a plywood sauna would fit the bill. I told my dad my plan and he looked at me and said: "you don't know the amount of work you're in for". My hunting partners thought I was nuts. I figured I needed about 120 logs for the job, so me and one of the guys toiled in the swamp for 12 days fightin' the skeeters, cutting and hauling out cedars by hand to the truck and transporting them to a landing area where they were peeled and stacked under a makeshift open roofed building to dry until fall. A couple of neat things came out of this project: my dad took down some old tools from the woodshed attic, one of which was a sliding tool my grandpa made to measure the logs (we had a pitch on the roof, so each log was slightly different in height), and another was his old adze, even got a sharpening lesson on that. So it was cool to use the same tools they used back in the 50's when the place was originally built. After a while the guys were getting into working with logs and the old tools and anxious to see the end result. We spend time there throughout the year in addition to hunting season and we sit in the sauna and look around and they say 'we're glad we did it this way....it's one of a kind"......I don't say a thing.....just sit there, sip my Sam Adams and smile. As the project progressed, I could see a little excitement growing in my dad, maybe reliving his high school years when he worked with his dad to cut the trees and erect all the buildings. He said they had it a littler harder, they did a lot of cutting in the winter and hauled logs by hand on an old metal and wood sled (still have that), and they did a lot of peeling with drawknives; he said grandpa never used a chainsaw....I can't imagine how many trees it took them to do what they did. Another tip from dad for the sauna project was to cut the trees in the spring and they will peel like bananas; run an axe down the side of the log to slit the bark and they sure did peel easy. We had enough logs left over to build an outhouse, as the original one on site dates back to the Depression era, built of hemlock by my great grandpa, and although still standing, needed either some repair or just build a new one. Looking back, the memories and the pictures with my dad and the guys made it all worthwhile.

 

[Johnny Yooper]

Here's the wood sauna at our hunting cabin with new cedar t+g. These were seconds but you never could tell.
View attachment 393124
Here's the stove after I wire brushed and repainted. See the different sized rocks? The different colors are just for aesthetics. Also I put Thompson water seal on the walls to prevent water spots, you can see a slightly different tone from new in picture #1
View attachment 393125
Here's the guard I built around the electric stove at our family cabin. I built one just like it for the wood sauna with a removable slat to feed the fire.
View attachment 393127

!

Very Nice! I like the cedar(?) shake wall. I have 10 gal. of multi colored Lake Superior rocks from a friend who found them cleaning out his garage (which served as a sauna by the previous owners)......I'm gonna use them for a future sauna in the basement at home.

 

[svk]

!

Very Nice! I like the cedar(?) shake wall. I have 10 gal. of multi colored Lake Superior rocks from a friend who found them cleaning out his garage (which served as a sauna by the previous owners)......I'm gonna use them for a future sauna in the basement at home.

Thanks. That shake wall is in the sauna at our family cabin and was done by my grandpa when they put the sauna in back in the 70's. He was an excellent carpenter.

 

[svk]

@sawjunky23

 

[mn woodcutter]

@sawjunky23

?

 

[svk]

He asked me a question about sauna construction so I dug this up.