There’s a lot of debate when it comes to home saunas: Should you go with infrared or a traditional setup like dry electric, steam, or Finnish hot rock? In this video, I break down the two main heat delivery methods and explain how each one affects your body. From heating the air to directly heating your core, I’ll share why I prefer infrared for home use, including ease of installation and faster results. I’ll also clear up some misleading marketing claims about sauna materials and explain what you really need to know for your setup.
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Video Transcript (AI Generated)
Traditional dry electric, you have wood burning, you have steam, there’s a bunch of different variations.
There’s four main types.
So I like the infrared, but there’s really two camps on how the home saunas work.
It’s two mechanisms of heat delivery.
So a traditional sauna, whether it’s wood burning, dry electric, steam, you know, finish hot rock, it doesn’t matter what it is.
It’s working off the principle, it’s in one camp where it’s working off the principle of heating the air.
So all it’s doing is heating the air inside the cabin and that in turn increases your core temperature.
It increases your respiratory rate, your breathing, all that kind of stuff.
The other camp is anything that works off of an infrared principle, which is low air temperature, direct heat to the body, exciting the body from within.
So you’re heating from the inside out instead of the outside in.
So it’s a different mechanism of heat delivery.
I gravitate towards the infrared for a bunch of different reasons.
I think that the detox is better.
There’s a lot of people that say you can’t make heat shock proteins because it’s a lower temperature.
I don’t find that to be the case because if you measure your internal core temperature, you’re still getting the internal core temperature increase no matter which type you use.
The infrared is a little bit, in my experience, quicker on the delivery.
And then you can also usually stay in longer because you’re not breathing superheated air.
Is there a benefit to breathing superheated air for the lungs and stuff like that?
Maybe.
Is it scientifically proven either way, one way or the other?
No.
The major metric is are you increasing core temperature?
How quickly can you do that and how long can that sustain?
And so for what you’re asking about for home saunas, like in a residential application building or something, for a steam sauna in the southeast, in a house, to not put in a ventilation system, to not have to run 220, to not have to worry about mold, I think infrared or dry electric is the way to go just because ease of installation and you also don’t have to worry about those other complications.
Now a lot of infrared companies take this and use that material for their sales people and their marketing in a wrong way.
So they’ll scare people.
They’ll say, “Oh, you have to have this wood right here because if that wood gets wet, it’s prone to mold.”
Well, there’s no moisture in an infrared sauna.
So eliminate all that from your vocabulary.
It’s a fear-based, it’s a poor ethical way to try to convince someone on a particular product when the very basis of what they’re using for that is null and void.
The only moisture in an infrared sauna is the sweat that’s coming out of your body.
So if there’s something that you like from today’s video or you’re looking for more resources, at certifiedsaunas.com on the homepage there’s recommended sauna resources if you’re looking for a brand, a size, a model, reviews, installation videos on how to put them together.
We have step-by-step tutorials that show you how to receive a sauna, how to prep your house for it.
We’re trying to make it as easy as possible for you so you don’t have to wade through four hours of YouTube video to find the exact thing that you’re looking for.
But a lot of times in these episodes I’ll mention sauna hats, sauna accessories, different types of electrolyte supplements.
If you want to put an infrared sauna in a cold basement or unheated garage, there’s accessories or additional supplemental heat that you can add to it.
If you continue down you’ll find everything that you’re looking for that we’ve mentioned today.
In addition to certifiedsaunas.com you can go to the Facebook group, which is the Certified Sauna Community on Facebook.
It’s our sauna group, there’s no hardcore pitching, there’s thousands of members in there that offer really, really, really good advice.
I learn from them every day.
I’m also contributing and answering questions in there every day.
In addition to that you can go to the Amazon store.
A lot of people have requested on where to buy sauna towels, sauna hats, different various supplements, minerals, electrolytes.
Now we have all this in one place on various lists on this Amazon store.
So you can go to this one link and everything will be right there for you.