Infrared saunas with fabric over the heaters do not work! Do not buy an infrared sauna with toxic bamboo heater covers, with tons of VOC’s!
Obviously I am being facetious in this video title and cover photo, as you can clearly see my body heating up in all types tested. Yes there are differences, but the difference is negligible. The first is carbon with cover, second is ceramic heaters, and third is carbon with no cover. There is a small preheat time difference which you can easily see, but after 3 minutes in things are pretty equal.
The sauna sales people telling people lies to buy their sauna brand, are ridiculous. We should build and island for all these folks, and introduce them to each other on the ship!
Video Transcript (AI Generated)
Hey guys, hope you’re doing well today.
I’ve got an interesting demonstration, little test, whatever you want to call it.
I’ve been getting so many questions lately about, you know, do infrared saunas that have quote toxic bamboo fabric covering the heaters, do they really work or does that block the infrared and make the heater, or make the entire sauna worthless or not work or you not get a good detoxing sweat or you can’t sweat out heavy metals if this fabric is in front of this.
Now for a long, long time people were forwarding me emails that other sauna companies would respond during the customer sales process.
And I always thought that it was either people messing with me or I just thought it was funny because I really thought the proof was in the pudding, right?
If you see me making videos inside of a sauna, whether it has the fabric or not, I always thought the deciding factor was, do you see me sweating?
If you see me sweating profusely, that’s really the real test.
Like it doesn’t matter if there’s fabric or metal or whatever in there.
If you don’t see me sweating or you don’t see somebody sweating, then there’s definitely an issue.
But, you know, to me, I never really responded to stuff like that because I always thought it was either comical or like I say, I really thought people were messing with me, forwarding me this stuff.
Until recently, I think there’s a sauna company or a marketing team or something doing some type of promotion to try to, you know, make their sauna seem better than the next or whatever because the amount of emails that I’ve gotten this weekend alone about this type of stuff or things that are related to this is just ridiculous.
Like I can’t even respond to them all.
So basically what I’m going to do is we’re going to do a little test and find out for sure.
I’ll tell you what my opinion is, but my opinion is really irrelevant.
We’re going to use a FLIR camera and we’re going to turn the sauna on.
I’ve made sure everything in the room, including the other saunas around this one, have been off for over 24 hours.
So there is no additional heat in the room.
There’s nothing that’s going to skew like a heat up time or, you know, I don’t have any heat lamps or any additional infrared gadgets that I’m testing in this particular sauna.
I took them out.
They were mounted in the ceiling.
I don’t know if you can see a couple of holes that I have cut there.
Those are just my personal experience.
They have nothing to do with any of the brand of sauna.
That kind of stuff is a customized thing that you would make.
No sauna company is going to condone doing things like that.
So I made sure to take anything like that out of the sauna so that it’s not skewing anything.
And, you know, some people say, well, what about the VOCs, even if it’s not blocking the infrared?
And so there’s so many parts to this equation and I’m getting inundated with this stuff.
Here’s my thoughts on it in a one, two, three bullet proof or a bullet point type way.
Number one, if thin, tiny, thin material blocked infrared, you wouldn’t be able to sweat in an infrared sauna with a shirt on.
You see people that can sweat in saunas all the time with shirts on.
So the fabric in front of the heater, that’s really nothing more than a child safety guard, isn’t stopping the infrared.
Now in their defense, we’re going to see on the camera, I’ve done this one or two times, but I’m really not experienced with this type of thing.
I just want to do it because I want to find out just like you guys are curious.
Obviously, I have seat of the pants experience, so I know that you can sweat in any kind of infrared sauna.
It doesn’t matter what is in front of the heaters, right?
Now there are some materials like wood that block it a lot more so than fabrics, but a lot of this stuff stems from, you know, a guy would send me an email and it said, oh, you know, don’t buy a radiant health, only buy a clear light because radiant health puts, you know, cloth in front of the heaters and it blocks the infrared.
They don’t work.
Guys, clear light has fabric in front of their heaters too.
So it’s like some asshole out there is convincing people of stuff that really isn’t even accurate.
And if they were buying and testing and using all the saunas, they would know that.
But you as a consumer, you know, if you don’t have access to this stuff, because if you know, you would never know unless you actually used it.
So that’s great.
Number one.
Number two is people talk about the VOCs, right?
You got to really pay attention.
Some companies have a VOC report where they just take a bottle of air from the sauna when they just turn it on and send it to a lab and say that it’s good or not.
Other people are actually testing all of the, you know, stuff.
And there’s things out there that say, oh, you know, the toxic bamboo, like they say about the Sunlighten people.
I don’t think Sunlighten puts toxic bamboo covers over their heaters.
And it’s just like this stuff goes on and on and on.
So okay, enough jibber jabber for me.
Let’s figure out how to work this thing.
I’ve had this for five or six months.
I’ve only used it a couple of times.
I never really thought to use it for this particular application, but you guys might find it pretty cool.
I think it’s a good idea.
Okay.
All right.
Now we have the footage right side up.
That should help quite a bit.
Okay.
So all I want to do is make sure that the FLIR camera picks up that everything in the sauna is cold, right?
And so you can see the heat from my feet.
You can see where I just stepped, right?
So if, because I think there’s people out there that are tricking people with stuff like this, I think they are preheating the sauna and you’d be able to see that because if I just stand or step in here for just a second and hold my foot for one, two, three, four, five, and then I get out, you’ll be able to see the heat mark there.
And so I think people are doing that in the tests, you know, so you would see the heaters in bright yellow if that was the case.
So let’s go ahead and turn the sauna on.
Let me turn the lights on so that one would be held.
Turn the temperature up and now let me get in.
Well, I guess I don’t have to get in there, but as you can see, so I’ve never done this like this before, but as you can see, the heaters are heating up immediately.
So that pretty much, I mean, that’s a good enough conclusion for me right there.
If the cloth was blocking the infrared, we wouldn’t see anything heating up.
So I don’t really think there’s too much more to show from this, but I just want to see if I can stay in here.
I wish I could see myself.
Maybe I could see myself like this.
It’s too far away.
But anyway, so if the infrared blocks the heat, my body will A, not heat up and I would never sweat and B, on the FLIR camera, you wouldn’t see any of this stuff, you know, heating up or changing color.
And if we hold my body right here, what I’d like to see is if there’s an increase in me and I can’t see that because obviously I’m filming both of these things and I can’t see the screen.
So you’ll have to tell me what it looks like right now, or I’ll review the footage when I upload this to YouTube.
But let me know what you guys think in the comments about this.
Is this a good idea?
What do you think of the validity of this?
Rather than me just telling you my opinion about the fabric stuff, now we can actually see with a tool and demonstrate what is actually happening.
What’s the change?
I hope I’m not just sitting here blabbing off at the mouth, holding the FLIR camera and there is no change.
Like I said, this isn’t really my opinion, it’s just a demonstration.
I have all the tools, I have the equipment, so we might as well.
So let me turn my arm over, right?
So there should be some type of change in the color of my arm if the heaters are actually getting through the fabric.
If they’re not and the infrared is being blocked, like a lot of people claim, then I would not be heating up and I will not be sweating.
And I can tell you just in the, I can’t tell how many minutes it is because I can’t see anything.
Just in the few minutes that I’ve been doing this, I’m already starting to feel hot.
Now I know that from tons of sauna experience.
We’re going to switch sides so now you can see this side.
There’s also, I don’t know if the camera will pick this up, but there’s the front heater in the, I’m in a radiant health right now, and then there’s also the calf and the floor heater.
I don’t know if it’ll pick up all this different stuff, but I thought this would be a cool idea to really get to the bottom of, you know, does the fabric block the infrared?
Does the sauna still work?
Like I said, I always thought it was funny and that people were messing with me because you know, clearly you see me sweating in the sauna when I’m in here making videos.
There’s no way to fake that.
So if the infrared was being blocked, therefore rendering the sauna useless by some tiny, really thin fabric, which is really just a child safety device, right?
To keep children from actually putting their hands in there.
It offers no other benefit.
What I might do is I might just ruin one of the heaters if this keeps happening and just cut the stuff out and show you guys the difference because there’s not going to be any difference.
This particular sauna, it’s not using a mesh to block electric fields.
So the electric fields and the body voltage aren’t going to change if I strip the felt out of there.
I think it looks a lot nicer with the felt in there or whatever.
I mean, I shouldn’t say felt.
I don’t know what the material is.
All I know is it’s clean.
It’s zero BOC.
There’s no off-gassing.
There’s never been a smell.
It’s never stopped me from getting a sauna experience or a good sweat.
There’s no blocking of infrared.
Now I think one of the things that I might be able to…
Oh, now I can see.
Okay, so I can see what you see now.
So okay, in the defense of all these crazy claims, maybe there’s a two or three minute period where it does take an extra two or three minutes for the infrared to heat up the entire heater assembly.
So it does look like that from there, but I would take…
I mean, two or three minutes is nothing.
I would take an additional two or three minutes of heater time for a low electric field, low body voltage, low magnetic field sauna any day.
I mean, that’s not really a selling point.
But anyway, I don’t know.
Cool test.
Let me know what you guys think.
Should I see more of this stuff?
Do you have an idea for another one?
Should I just sit in here and have the FLIR camera run the whole time?
I don’t know how long this thing will roll, but we should be able to see my actual body heat up over time if I would keep my arms and stuff…
My arms are out in the middle of the sauna, almost out the door at times to get the shot.
But I bet if I kept my hand here in front of the heaters, you would see it change color.
And hopefully I’m good enough to do this blind.
The screen’s on the other side, I can’t see.
To see what happens.
So this should be getting hotter.
And I want to get out now because I’m going to start sweating if I don’t.
Let me know what you guys think.
You know what I realized right before I was getting ready to upload this?
Why not go back in the sauna room and do the exact same thing in another sauna?
Because if I just do it on one, then I’m going to be like every other guy on the internet that says, you know, this sauna, this, that, and the other.
I’ve got a whole bunch of them.
So why don’t we repeat the test on another one?
Okay, so now I’m going to do the same thing in a high-tech health, just because I am curious.
Give me just a second, I gotta turn the temperature up.
This one’s a little slower than the others.
I’m probably wasting storage on this too.
I should have had this all set up.
But I didn’t want the sauna to be hot or preheated before I start this because that would kind of…
Oh crap.
There we go.
Okay, heaters are on.
Now we should be able to see…
Now we should…
I can’t see what it looks like anymore, but we should be able to see that the heaters are cold.
So you shouldn’t see anything right now.
I’m just curious how a metal grate with some felt fabric, how that responds to, I guess you could say, blocking the infrared.
I mean, I sweat like a banshee in this sauna too.
So I mean, you already know what I think about, you know.
I wish I could see that.
How wide is the…
Oh no.
Shit.
Plug it in.
It is plugged in, you idiot.
Okay, well, it was recording just fine.
I don’t really know what happened.
Maybe I hit a button.
This is very…
This is such a pain to do.
So I’d like to know if what’s within the realm of the screen there, what we can see.
It’s going to be…
This sauna doesn’t heat up quite as quickly as some of the other ones that I have.
So maybe it’s kind of a flawed…
Make sure it’s still on.
Maybe it’s kind of a flawed idea to think that I’m going to…
I hear it clicking.
Be able to just come in here with it cold and then get in within 30 seconds or 3 minutes or whatever.
I think the camera’s been on for 2-3 minutes.
You know, be able to see what happens.
I guess this would make for an interesting preheat time video or something because some saunas do preheat quicker than others.
It looks like saunas without the anything in front of the heaters are probably going to heat up 2-3 minutes quicker.
I really don’t know.
It seems negligible at best.
Do you really care if you turn the sauna on 10 minutes before you get in or 15 minutes before you get in?
I mean, 5 minutes of usage is not really a selling point for most people.
Most people are just happy that they don’t have a crappy sauna from Costco or Amazon that you preheat for an hour and then you still can’t sweat because it takes forever to heat up.
Anyway, let’s see what you guys are seeing.
So it looks like, you know, there is a little bit…
Oh, cool.
This is a really cool perspective.
I like this a lot.
I should have done this a long time ago.
So that’s interesting.
I would say that the metal grates are not blocking the infrared.
It seems to weave through them just fine.
You can see the bench where I was sitting, but you can also see the wood from the heater guard beginning to heat up out in front of the heaters themselves, which is kind of cool.
So now let’s go to the sauna room and do this again in another sauna.
All right, so here’s another one.
Let’s try this.
Start the video.
Should be rolling.
I hope.
All right.
Now, obviously, you know, this sauna, the heaters, it’s a different size sauna or different heater configuration.
So, you know, it’s not apples to apples comparison per se in all the other saunas.
Actually, no, not for this test.
Just the first sauna, the heater goes all the way to the front.
So this is a little bit different.
But still, this particular sauna doesn’t have any mesh, no materials, no nothing in front of the sauna at all.
So it’d be interesting to see if it lights up just like the others or if pretty much all variations of them work.
I’m probably of the camp that all of them do work.
Otherwise, the sauna companies would be out of business that had anything in their sauna.
But just to be fair, we’ve got a carbon sauna that was the number one test with the mesh or with fabric in front of the heaters.
Then we went to a ceramic with a metal grate in front.
And now we’re in another carbon that doesn’t have anything in front.
So you guys should be able to see the difference.
There are some differences like this one.
Let’s move the camera out here.
This one has floor heaters in it.
So some of the other ones don’t have floor heaters.
Some of them have heated tile.
It all just depends on the sauna configuration.
But that’s not really what this video is about.
It’s just do we get proper infrared coverage with or without fabric.
So it should be interesting to see.
I don’t know.
What do you guys think?
Should I keep doing these?
What would you like to see next?
You guys might have a better idea for a test than I have.
So let me know what you think. [beep] [beep] [beep]