Vol. 1 · No. 1 · July 2026
The current issueDepartment · 11 listings
The heater is the engine — and the spec sheet most buyers get wrong. Size in kilowatts to the room's volume, add margin for glass and outdoor walls, and decide between wall-mount compactness and tower heaters whose hundreds of pounds of stone give soft, rolling steam. Wood stoves free you from the grid entirely; electric units with Wi-Fi controllers mean the sauna is hot when you walk out the back door.
The NumbersJuly 2026
Most people wildly overestimate what a sauna costs to run. Here's the actual formula, worked through for electric, infrared, and wood-fired — with real numbers.
“An 8 kW heater, a 20-minute session, the average US electricity rate: about 33 cents. Cheaper than the coffee you'd have after.”
InsideThe formula · A worked example: electric hot-rock sauna · Infrared runs cheaper still
Read the article7 min
Session length
19+ min
Sessions over 19 minutes were associated with roughly half the sudden-cardiac-death risk of sessions under 11 minutes in the KIHD cohort.
The fix: Size the heater to the room — an underpowered stove never holds protocol heat.
What actually helps
The heater decides whether your sauna hits protocol heat or plateaus lukewarm. Get three numbers right.
Buyer's GuideJuly 2026
The heater is the engine, and kilowatts-to-volume is the spec most buyers get wrong. Get it right and 90°C is easy; get it wrong and you've built a warm box.
“A wall heater holds 50 lbs of stone. A tower holds 200+. That mass is the difference between a hot box and a proper sauna.”
InsideKilowatts to volume · Stone mass makes the steam
Read the article6 min
The science
The heater is the engine — and the spec sheet most buyers get wrong. Size in kilowatts to the room's volume, add margin for glass and outdoor walls, and decide between wall-mount compactness and tower heaters whose hundreds of pounds of stone give soft, rolling steam. Wood stoves free you from the grid entirely; electric units with Wi-Fi controllers mean the sauna is hot when you walk out the back door.
Session quality depends on real heat: the protective associations in the KIHD data strengthened with sessions over 19 minutes at proper temperature. · JAMA Internal Medicine, 2015
Electric sauna heaters are among the highest-draw appliances in a home — the NEC requires them on their own dedicated, correctly sized 240V circuit. · National Fire Protection Association, 2023
Running cost is modest: even an 8 kW heater at the average US residential electricity rate costs well under a dollar per session. · U.S. Energy Information Administration, 2025
Sources
The Monthly Dispatch
New saunas and gear worth knowing about, session protocols, and the heat-therapy research behind them. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.