Best Full Spectrum Sauna With Red Light Therapy 2025 ? (Clearlight vs Heavenly Heat vs Sunlighten)

A lot of people get misled when shopping for full spectrum saunas with red light therapy. I’ve been through it myself. In this video, I’ll break down what’s actually effective when it comes to photobiomodulation — and what’s just clever marketing. I’ll walk through the differences between Heavenly Heat, Clearlight, and Sunlighten, and share which ones actually deliver the benefits they promise.

Whether you’re looking for the aesthetic glass look, the best heat performance, or true red light therapy integration, I’ll help you make a smarter decision so you don’t waste your money.

Read the transcript >

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Transcript

What’s the best full-spectrum sauna, or infrared sauna, with red light therapy built in? There’s a little bit of a stretch between what sauna companies want you to think is like the latest, greatest thing since sliced bread, and what actually works. And I don’t want you to buy something and not get the benefit that you expected, and you end up wasting your money like I did.

So let’s do one more question from the Certified Sauna Community before we sign off today. I’m going to do this combined because we’re kind of short on time, so YouTube I have you pulled up here, Facebook I have you here, and Facebook group here, so we’re going to do this all together.

The question from the group is, what’s the best full-spectrum sauna, or infrared sauna, with red light therapy built in? This can be a little bit complicated, right? I talk about full-spectrum kind of not being the end-all be-all, but when you add in red light therapy, you’re kind of adding another dimension that really requires a lot of care and assessment.

Why? Because you have cheap, like, wayfair companies who are taking red light therapy panels, I don’t know if you can see them, the camera probably won’t focus, but like the ones behind me hanging from the ceiling, we’re doing a DIY red light therapy bed where there’s four panels completely surrounding the body, you stand in the center naked or at least topless.

With a DIY setup, you’d mimic having a $30,000 red light therapy bed. Why do I bring this up, and how is this related to all this stuff? Well, just like the lady’s question here, and this gentleman’s question here, you guys are getting a little bit confused between chromotherapy, right?

Red light therapy, full-spectrum, photobiomodulation, right, requires a certain amount of output, requires a certain amount of absorption, requires that the body not be superheated in order for that conversion to take place regularly and effectively. If you look at the PubMed research, how do you see that?

this nicely. There’s a little bit of a stretch between what sauna companies want you to think is like the latest greatest thing since sliced bread and what actually works. If you look at the research you really don’t need more than about 38, 28 milliwatts a centimeter square for a reasonable time frame at a reasonable distance without being sweaty in order to get true photobiomodulation.

The wind is really kicking up, I don’t know if you guys can hear the howling but if you do that’s what it is. So how does this get like confused when you talk about full spectrum, red light therapy, chromotherapy, what is real photobiomodulation and how do you get it?

Well the real truth is that a lot of times you’re not getting it from the devices you think you are. The advertised wavelengths or the positioning of the equipment to deliver said wavelength does not match the research correlated benefit because you have the cheap wayfarer saunas they’re on one end of the spectrum they have a real good pbmt panel in there they have red light therapy in there and i do like it and i do think that it’s adequate in the 600 and 800 nanometer wavelengths but the placement is all wrong like if i were to try to do red light therapy with those panels back there how’s that going to help me like really let’s critically think about this for a second how is that going to help me it’s not so for me to go spend crazy money on such a thing would be pretty dumb right so i think people are being miseducated when they go buy these saunas that have a panel mounted in the back of it behind where you sit on a 45 degree angle it’s just insane the next thing is people think that photobiomodulation or the 600 nanometer wavelength or the 800 nanometer wavelength which are the two most common in most of the pub med for tbi you’ve got 1050 in there too but 600 800 is like tried and true og wavelengths right you’ve got companies saying oh we’ll just get our full spectrum sauna and you don’t have to worry

about the red light therapy because it’s built in. It’s got near infrared in it. No, it doesn’t. No, it doesn’t.

It puts out some type of a wavelength around the 1,500, 1,600 nanometer wavelength and peak charted on a graph, right? So if you were to chart that on a graph, it would peak out at about 1,500, 1,600 nanometers. You’re gonna get some bleed through below 1,000, but not much. So you’re missing the entire wavelength when you look at that on a graph.

This is why I say full spectrum saunas are not red light therapy saunas, even though people are calling them that. So what do you look for? How do you determine all this stuff? How do you decipher this?

It’s probably too long for a four or five minute video, but keep watching. We have 700 videos on the YouTube channel. You’ll wanna check out my videos that have spectrometers in them, where I go and show you the output from a red light therapy device like that. And then we go compare that to a full spectrum sauna.

And keep in mind, guys, some of these saunas and some of these companies and some of these brands are things that I recommend, but you’ll see in the videos where it sounds like I’m either bad-mouthing them or don’t approve or find some issue with things. This is all true, right?

The equipment is great. The way that it’s presented or a sales agent taking something out of context or misrepresenting the product is rampant. So you’ll find both and be aware of that. It sounds like I’m hating on them one second and then the next second, it sounds like I’m glorifying them or promoting them or endorsing them.

Both are true. I don’t like people being misled and I don’t want you to buy something and not get the benefit that you expected and you end up wasting your money like I did, right? It just doesn’t make sense. It’s a little bit of education.

It’s being honest with people. There’s no need for all this deceptiveness. You know, in the sauna marketing world, it’s pretty crazy that it’s kind of like that. There’s a couple of brands that I would encourage you to check out if this is what you’re looking for.

If you’re looking for an infrared sauna with red light therapy, two come to mind. And that would be Clearlight and Heavenly Heat. The Heavenly Heat model is behind me. I have it.

It’s got a red light therapy panel in it. You can take the window out, replace it if you don’t want to use it in the sauna. I really like that.

I think a lot of people will really enjoy that the Sonos themselves far infrared coverage is fantastic. They work really well Clear light gonna have an all glass front. You might like the look of that, too But you have to add the red light therapy to the full spectrum clear light model So if you get a clear light sanctuary Just because it has the the quartz halogen heaters in the front on the back of the glass That is not going to give you red light therapy But they do have an accessory where you can add that so those would be two that I would look into I would probably choose the clear light over the heavenly heat if you’re a person that really just Wants that aesthetic and are willing to give up some heat performance in exchange for the way it looks And then if you’re just all-out performance, you want the best bang for the money And something that heats up quicker and is more insulative, right?

I’d probably go with the heavenly heat So if it were me, I’d probably take the heavenly heat a lot of people ask about sunlight You know Matt why don’t you talk about sunlight and you can go back six seven years guys? Sunlight and impulse was the first sauna that I ever rented sessions in very very very good build quality The cabinet quality is probably the best in the industry with the sunlight and half-inch glass three-corner inch planking You know fancy features this that and the other but there are some things that I don’t like about them with the impulse Specifically why you wouldn’t see it on this list is because there’s low wattage output LED arrays on Three walls of the sauna behind a mesh grill cycling on and off on a mode So while I think the build quality and some other things about the sunlight and saunas are great and I have used them myself I question whether or not you’re really getting enough red light therapy through the mesh grill Because the panels themselves aren’t high output to start with you’re never gonna get adequate photo by modulation on your torso Like I would want right So I feel even if I use the sauna to its maximum case Capability or even if it performed better than expected, right?

I would still feel like there’s something lacking with that and I would still want to go out and buy an additional red light therapy Panel and either use it outside of the sauna

or hanging inside. For me that’s not ideal. I want to do all my red light therapy when my body is clean and dry, not a lot of sweat on the skin. I want to have a low body temperature.

I don’t like core temperature to be elevated when I’m doing my red light therapy. If you look at the PubMed research there’s a correlation with increased core temp and down regulating the photobiomodulation effect or conversion that you get from red light therapy at a specific wavelength in the 600 nanometer wavelength, 800 specifically.

Like I said before some in the 1050 but if you look at the low-level laser therapy studies and if you look at the TBI improvements, traumatic brain injury improvements, there’s very specific requirements needed for enough saturation in order to achieve those benefits and I hesitate on agreeing with the sonic companies saying that you’re gonna get them by using their product.

I don’t think that you will and for me personally I wouldn’t take a chance on counting on it. I would go above and beyond like I said and get an extra red light therapy panel for something like that but for me personally I’d probably choose one of the other two and there’s a lot of new things coming out on the market so hopefully in another six or eight months there’ll be other options and we’ll review those as well.

So we’ll wrap this one up and we’ll see in the next one hopefully you guys got all your questions answers answered this week in the Facebook group and we’ll see you in tomorrow’s video.