How to Make Your Sauna Hotter 175+ (Proven Fix)

If your sauna doesn’t get hot enough, there are a few proven fixes you can use to make it perform better. I’ve been testing these methods for years, from adding heat lamps to modifying poor heater layouts, and they really do work when done safely. In this video, I’ll walk you through what to use, what to avoid, and how to make your sauna actually feel like it should.

Read the transcript >

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Transcript

So let’s do a quick update to this. It looks like I haven’t updated this in a year either, so adding heat lamp bulbs to infrared saunas is a great way to make any sauna work in cold basement, cold garage, unheated space in the north. Obviously you can’t take an outdoor infrared sauna in negative 20 Fahrenheit and expect to put a 250 watt heat lamp bulb in and cure the fact that it’s not insulated and everything else.

That’s not the intention of this. If you go to, let’s see, if you go to YouTube and you look at this video from six years ago, right, it’s me showing you how to add heat to an infrared sauna. There’s another one in this series that shows you how to shield, you know, a sunstream or something because I myself and a bunch of other people bought one and it had super high electric fields in it at the time.

Similarly, the way that we were modifying these things, right, is not exactly like it used to be. Because why? Well, some of these, I’ve taken, I’ve removed some of them and I can’t tell on these, right, some of these are actually and when you have the neck of the bulb, right, when you use a Rubilux bulb or a TheraBulb or anything like that, they’re more expensive.

There’s pros and cons to them, right? If you look at Andrew Latour of Gemba Red’s blogs and stuff, he has some great YouTube videos where he tests with a spectrometer a lot of the heat lamp bulbs. Now in his opinion, there’s not much difference to them. Using them for the purpose that I use them for, I think there is a little difference.

It’s not that I disagree with him at all. I think his information is better than mine actually, right? And I like that his information substantiates what you actually feel and I think the best value for the money is right in line with what he says. It’s the Philips bulb.

and I get that from actually using them. Why? Because it feels a little bit hotter. It feels like the coating isn’t so red like on the more expensive Rubilux and TheraBulb and stuff like that.

I feel like it down regulates some of the heat output just a little bit. Now I’m being super picky right but there’s other things to consider and let me show you what they are. The reason that I point this out is because when you look at the neck of a bulb that has a complete red neck literally the neck of the bulb where it comes down to the E26 brass connector is also red.

This does a couple of things. People don’t point this out but you figure it out really quickly when you’re using something that has a plastic housing because it allows heat to escape out the back which then heats that extender up. So we used to have, I don’t know if I have them in here, but we used to have some silver metal extenders with a little plastic white loop on the end and those notoriously melted if you didn’t use a higher end bulb.

Why? It’s not that the higher end bulb is any better or worse it’s that it has a shielded neck. This has a clear neck right before the E26 connector. So when that’s screwed into the thing what’s happening?

It’s allowing extra light and heat to escape and heat up the actual connector. So yes you get more heat output. I think it’s a better value on the face of it but it depends on how you’re going to use them. If you also shove it in a corner of a DIY sauna tent without using a reflector you’re also putting that heat not only on whatever mount you’re using but also on the fabric of the tent.

Not advisable right? Same thing for sauna wood. If you shove it up into a corner like I do to create space and distance between myself and the bulb because I really don’t want to be that close to it right? I don’t want my knees to be scorched.

I don’t want my shoulders to be scorched. I don’t want you know the ideal location most saunas aren’t tall enough for this but the ideal location is

over the head where it’s not in your face, right? It’s coming down. The problem with that is you basically, actually, I could show you. Let’s go to, what do you call that?

It is a, I think it’s a can light housing. I’m not seeing it though. Let’s go bathroom fan heat lamp. Spelled that wrong.

Okay. It will be one of these, right? This is something that I have done, okay? This is like the ultimate way to mount these things.

You get a UL certified, you know, electrical box. You cut a hole in the ceiling of the sauna. Whoops. And you have everything that you need, right?

The problem with these is they’re super deep. Not all sauna roofs will allow you to move the electronics and put one of these things in. If you were building something custom, this is absolutely the way to go. Everyone gets tripped up because they force you to have a fan in them.

They weren’t always like this. They used to sell the enclosure without the fan. You just don’t hook the fan up, right? You just don’t need it.

You’re not trying to put a ventilation pipe on the thing. If anything, you could plug it if you wanted to. You don’t need extra heat to escape, right? But this is a great way to get extra heat or building a custom DIY sauna.

This is absolutely something that you should look at. And it’s an awesome way to not rely on these extenders or E26 housings or this, that, and the other, or these clamp on reflectors and taking the actual clamp off the housing and using like a rubber pole mount that has either a bushing or some type of a bolt and a nut to where you can actually thread them on.

As you can see in the DIY course, we use Velcro.

zip ties a lot of the time to get these clamp bulbs, you know, to mount around one of the pipe rings or something like that. Not ideal, but it does work. You know, it’s, it’s trying to help people on a budget. Obviously I don’t continue to use stuff like this if I have other things at my disposal, but it’s gotten me out of a pinch many times when I just wanted sauna in my life, didn’t want to spend a bunch of money or I was in a place where I couldn’t have a sauna delivered.

Another option is to find housings like this. I specifically chose these because they have a porcelain insert inside the metal E 26 housing. That’s what I was looking for. The only issue with these that I don’t like and I hesitate to recommend them is these wires are ridiculously thin, right?

Technically by electrical recommendations, I looked it up myself. Technically they are thick enough for it to be a lamp cord that it’s rated at 600 plus Watts, which seems like a lot to me. Obviously they’re going to be on a 10 amp, 15 amp max, you know, circuit and they’re super short, no more than like six, seven inches.

At the same time, it’s so thin, it’s almost delicate to use wire nuts or make some type of connection. I wrapped them in electrical tape and looped it over so that if anybody tugged on it, it wouldn’t break the leads off. Even though the connection was good. These are just details that I throw out there.

I mean, this is stuff that I cover, you know, or that I want to cover in more detail in the updated version of the course. You can get different colors of these, which I think is cool. It’s a, it’s the housing itself is fantastic for holding a heat lamp pole because it’s all metal and it’s porcelain.

I just wish the wires were a little bit thicker gauge. It would make me more comfortable. It would make me feel like I wasn’t going to break them off just doing a wire nut connection. And I would feel a lot more comfortable recommending it to you just because, you know, a lot of times I don’t, I’m not there.

So something goes, Hey wire, I don’t know, but they’re still on.

page. These are still great options for you to get heat lamp bulbs either in the DIY sauna, in a poor performing sauna. Like if you bought a sauna and it’s not working good, you don’t have to get rid of it. Just do some of these modifications, right?

When you see me show you the Costco mods that we did that actually work, it took us a few times to get it right because some of those saunas, you have like a little glass window on one side and the door is offset to the other. So in order to do something like I like to do, I like to make the heat equal on both sides of the body.

So usually a two-person sauna or bigger works best for this because one, there’s enough distance for you to get, you know, I don’t know, 30 to 40 inches between you and the patio heater or 30 or 40 inches between you and your face and wherever the front or the grill of the guard is, right?

You don’t want to be scorching your skin. You want to have flexibility. If you want to make something hotter or fix something that’s poor performing, you want to be able to add heat where it’s actually needed. A lot of the saunas work okay on the upper half of the body, they’re just, you know, really poorly laid out on the bottom half and there’s things that you can do to fix this, but it depends on the model.

And so one set of modifications that work great for one, you know, somebody’s situation aren’t great for the next one because it has an offset door, has a small window, you can put something on one side, it’s not really enough to, not really enough width to do a patio heater and you’re way too close to it because the sauna cabin is not big enough for you to get far enough away from it to where it’s comfortable or usable.

Yes, you could do these hacks that I see people talk about on social media where you turn it on just to preheat the sauna and get it hot and then shut it off, which I think is ridiculous. I want it to run the entire time because my intention is to cut down on the heat time, right?

A lot of this stuff, the reason I use it is so that I don’t have to preheat my sauna for an hour. I turn the thing on for 10-12 minutes, I make my electrolyte drink or I do whatever I need to do or I go for a walk for 22 minutes, I come back and the thing is scorching, right?

It’s all I need, right?

And so even better in the North, you don’t have to spend so much money on heating the place. You don’t have to do this or do that or whatever. So that’s my take on it. I’m gonna update some of these lists.

I will put this link in the description and hopefully we’ll get an updated tutorial video coming really soon. As soon as Aaron and I get done filming them, I’ll have updated tutorial videos from the one from six years ago. Everything has changed. The evolution is completely different.

The version three, version four, version five in the DIY Sonic course is gonna blow your socks off. If you want infrared and traditional, you wanna build a hybrid, you wanna do anything, it’s all available to you now. I show you exactly how to do it. It’s not complicated.

We’ve torture tested it. We’ve gotten rid of a lot of this stuff. Now, keep in mind, people are still using plastic mounts with clear neck heat lamp bulbs and melting them. So you can be a hazard.

You are doing this at your own risk. This is not like some kit that’s sold and guaranteed to do this or with that. If you don’t know what you’re doing, please make a post in the Facebook group and ask. I’d be happy to help you.

There’s tons of people that have implemented this successfully and I want you to be one of them too. And I absolutely don’t want you to have any type of fire hazard or any trouble like that. So please be careful when doing these modifications. But that said, they work exceptionally well.

I’ve been using them for years. I’ve only broken one bulb one time and it was my own fault. I had one other one kind of shatter for no reason. I don’t know if it was damaged in shipping or this, that, and the other, but I wasn’t even doing anything with it.

Other than that, I’ve never had any issues other than melting a housing. And you know, we just get rid of those things and make it better and move on. So if you have any questions, let me know in the comments and a link to this list will be in the description of the video.

Make sure you click the button that expands the list so you can actually see the links. People that can’t find them usually aren’t doing that. We’ll see you in the next one.