Sauna Electricity Costs: What Size Saves the Most Money?

A lot of people wonder if buying a smaller sauna will save them money on their electric bill — but is that really true? In this video, I break down the actual numbers using an electricity calculator and past power draw tests.

The truth is, the difference in monthly cost between a 1-person and a 2- or 3-person sauna is usually only a few dollars. What matters more is comfort and whether you’ll actually want to use your sauna consistently for years to come.

Read the transcript >

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Transcript

All right, so I see some bad information being posted in the Facebook group, and I want to give you a little clarification on exactly what the differences are and what the right info is. Okay, so I’m going to record you a quick video using an electricity calculator. So in the Facebook group we have some people saying that it doesn’t make a difference which sauna you have, and other people say if you buy a smaller sauna you can save a bunch of money.

Well, this is not actually true. I’m going to show you why. So if you have a little tiny sauna, right, that has a 1250 watt power supply, you’d have to select the energy price per kilowatt for your area, but this is a little bit overinflated, so we’ll just use one dollar as a representation.

If your area is two dollars, you know, or what have you, it’s going to be different depending on which state, which part of the country you live in. If you use the sauna three times a week, we’ll just say that you do three hours. Obviously if you botch your session, preheat the sauna, shuts off after an hour, and you never use it, that’s on you, but you are paying for that consumption.

It’ll show you the power consumed. If you go on YouTube and you look at a video I did four or five years ago for a lady, we actually put a kilowatt meter on a sauna and watched the draw over several hour period of time, and these calculators are a little bit skewed from that, but if you go watch that video, it’ll have a lot of great details in there for you.

So basically, let’s go to the price per month so that you can see how this, how do you get rid of these stupid things anyway? It’s just craziness. Okay, so let’s say you have a small one-person sauna that, I’m just making this up, but it has a 1250 watt power supply.

Your price per kilowatt is a dollar. Your usage time is three times a week at an hour. Your power consumed is 0.5, and your cost is 1631. Now, you have people running around telling you that if you

buy this smaller sauna instead of a one or a two-person sauna that has a 1,750-watt power supply. Energy price is not going to change. Usage price is not going to change. Power consumed will change and the cost will change.

But we’re talking about a $6 change, right? So anyone that’s posting in the Facebook group saying that you should buy a smaller sauna because you’re going to save a lot more money, that’s not necessarily the case. And I bring this up because you can get a tiny sauna from Amazon or whatever, or one of those half saunas that you barely fit in if you want to.

I’m not here to tell you what to buy, but I am here to show you that if the sauna is uncomfortable and you’re only doing that or you’re only buying that because you think you’re going to save a bunch of money, pay attention. Because you could have a three-person sauna that has a 2,200-watt power supply, and you’re only talking about saving $12 a month or something.

And if you can afford a several thousand dollar sauna, I really don’t think the $12 a month is going to make a huge difference for you. Some people would argue with me and say, Matt, that’s like $150 plus a year that you would save, which I can’t argue with. But I’ll tell you this, after using these things for so many years, most people go with a two-person sauna that plugs into a 15-amp outlet, which is around 1,800-watt, 1,700-watt draw, right?

Energy price. But what I want to bring to your attention is you can play with a calculator like this and see that the change in energy consumption, you know, there is a variable there. But being comfortable in the sauna, actually wanting to use it because you fit in it well, or you’re doing this or you’re doing that, drives up the chances that you’ll actually use it more often, right?

It’s not going to be the $6 a month that you save from having, you know, a one-person sauna versus…

as a two-person sauna or something like that, right? It’s going to be, you know, you sticking to your regimen, you being comfortable in there. It’s something, if you’re just buying something to save money on a consumption basis and you’re not paying attention to like, is it actually functional for me?

I think you’re really missing the boat. And I think by sharing that opinion and not adding in, hey, you know, this might not really be for everyone. You know, it’s not worth it to save six bucks a month, 12 bucks a month for something that makes you not want to use it inherently just because of the size.

And so for those of you in the Facebook group that have that opinion, I understand where you’re coming from, but I would just, you know, I would urge you to consider that there’s other factors besides how much power does something consume, right? Like, have you ever used a bad hairdryer and it just either doesn’t get hot or it doesn’t have a blower motor that has any strength to it and it takes you forever to dry your hair?

It’s kind of the same thing, right? You could have a great sauna from Amazon or wherever and it has a tiny power supply and it’s cheap to run. But if you don’t fit in it well, it’s not comfortable and it doesn’t have great heater coverage, you’re actually gonna stay in there longer, right?

To get the same sweat as you would with something that works a little better and maybe is a little bigger. Right? Yeah, you use a little bit more energy to preheat it because it has a larger cubic footage or a larger footprint, as I like to say. At the same time, there’s a lot more that goes into you using this thing for the next 10, 15 years than saving $6 a month.

So just wanted to throw that out there with some context because if I just do a one word reply, you know, it doesn’t really make sense. But yeah, that’s just my take on it.