Radiant Health VS Clearlight For Cold Basement (50 F temperatures) Which Is Better?

f your basement stays around 50°F or colder, you’ll want to watch this before buying an infrared sauna. In this video, I answer a viewer’s question about whether the Radiant Health E2H, Clearlight Premier IS-2, or Clearlight Sanctuary 2 can handle that kind of environment — and why none of them are ideal for cold basements.

Infrared saunas work by directly heating your body, not the air — which means in very cold spaces, they’ll struggle to reach temperature and hold heat effectively. I break down:

✅ What happens when you try to run an infrared sauna in a 50°F room

✅ Why preheating time skyrockets and performance drops

✅ The difference between infrared-only and combination (infrared + traditional) saunas

✅ My recommendation: the Heavenly Heat combo sauna — a 240V unit that combines infrared panels and a traditional sauna heater. It’s powerful enough to “blow the doors off” smaller rooms and heat cold basements or cabins quickly and evenly.

If your sauna setup is going into a garage, basement, or cold climate, this video will save you a lot of frustration.

Read the transcript >

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Transcript

All right, so let’s tackle a common group member question for group member Kimberly. So GFCI and 68 degrees ambient, narrowed it down to clear light, E2H, clear light, premier, chose radiant health, not be in a room 68 degrees or warmer, not plug into a circuit, GFCI. So okay, let’s cover a couple different things here because there’s a few key things to consider.

When you say that the basement is 63 now and might be in the 50s during the winter time, that is going to be an issue. It doesn’t really matter which brand you selected. It’s just an issue in temperature swing. So if you have X amount of cubic footage and you have X amount of power or heat available and you want to go from 50 degrees to 160 degrees, it takes a certain amount of power and time in order to complete that temperature swing, right?

And one of the things that doesn’t work well, like most of the time, infrared saunas are working off of radiant heat. Yes, there is some convection inside the sauna, but really depending on a lot of ambient air temperature in order to stabilize convection, meaning start from a temperature that’s not as much of a large temperature swing to have to fill because it requires more energy or more time in order to do that.

So number one, if you’re in a sauna or I’m sorry, if you’re in an environment, if you have a basement that’s going to be high 40s, low 50s, I don’t think any of these are a great fit for you. I think you should reconsider your configuration altogether. It sounds like the basement is either unheated altogether. Hopefully it’s somewhat insulated. It sounds like it is, or it’d be even colder. You obviously have frost protection or it would dip into the low 30s.

So the issue that I’m having is it depends on your unique situation and also the other people that have the same questions. What kind of power do you have available in your basement? Is it going to be super expensive for an electrician to run a 240 volt service for you? Because I would recommend doing something different. Nothing wrong with the saunas you’ve picked out. Nothing wrong with those brands. They’re fantastic. I love them both.

Yeah. Any sauna cannot play nice with an arc breaker. Usually the issue with GFCI is that you’ve got a GFCI outlet behind a 48 by 48 inch sauna that you put together that does not slide out from the wall very easy. So it’s a non-wet environment for you to put a GFCI outlet behind the sauna only for it to phantom trip or something, or in order to reset that, you’ve got to pull the whole thing out in order to, it’s just common practices to not do it. You take those out. These are not wet saunas. It’s not like you’re bringing in five gallon buckets of water.

A lot of electricians are kind of not up to snuff on application. They’re just going on basic code in the area, which is fine, but can be extremely troublesome for you down the road. So I take them out. I don’t put in GFCI outlets behind the sauna because I’m not about to spend an hour disassembling the damn thing just to press a reset button. And you really don’t, I mean, it’s not like you’re sticking your hands in the bathroom sink with a hairdryer or something. It’s not really necessary.

So what I would recommend in this case is if you can run a 240 volt service, I wouldn’t buy either one of these saunas. I would go look at something like a Heavenly Heat Combo Hybrid, where it’s going to have a traditional sauna heater, and it’s also going to be outfitted with full infrared heaters. The reason why is because you can double up on your heat output. The saunas aren’t relatively huge compared to how much cubic footage and the wattage that they have available. So you’ll experience better performance in the fifties.

Pretty much any strict infrared sauna that you put in there without supplemental heat, meaning supplemental heater inside the sauna or supplemental heat, like heating the space, is going to suffer in that cold of temperatures. Doesn’t matter what brand it is, doesn’t matter what type. Now secondary to this, the one thing that you could do is pick anything you want and slightly heat the space. If you would just bring the temperature up a little bit, it wouldn’t struggle as much. I don’t know if those are options.

That’s kind of like, you know, why I sort of say, hey, let’s cover some bases here. See where you’re at. Give you a chance to, you know, inspect your options. And then maybe we’ll do a part two. For other people that are in the same, you know, situation, you, it’s kind of like you’ve got to be able to fight the cold with either something that’s tipped in your favor. So it’s either got to be a small sauna with lots of power so that you’re not waiting two hours for the stupid thing to heat up. Because if that happens with a busy schedule or like, you know, just normal everyday life, you’re not going to use it. You’re going to, you’re going to be upset. You’re going to be like, well, the hell with this thing. You know, it takes too long. It’s cumbersome to do. And you know, if it has a reservation mode, it’s just kind of, it’s more of an annoyance. It’s better to get the best equipment that you possibly can suited for your needs and your application.

And the thing that is difficult about this is because the next person will come along and say, Hey Matt, I saw your video about putting the sauna in the basement. You said it needed to be this temperature, dah, dah, dah, dah. But either they can’t get 240 or maybe they have a heated basement. And you know, their criteria is different or something. So a different, you know, model or brand or whatever would be a better fit for them. But for this particular case, for Kimberly here specifically, I think you might want to look at a hybrid sauna. I’ll post this as a follow-up comment to your post. And if you see it, if you want to comment on whether or not you could do 240 on whether or not you may potentially heat the basement or anything else that comes to mind, you know, I think we could come up with the best option for you. But as of right now, I would look into a combo, you know, hybrid. I think you’d be a lot happier with that.