The Best Outdoor Sauna for Extreme Weather Conditions

If you live somewhere that gets real winters — snow, wind, and freezing rain — most “outdoor” infrared saunas simply aren’t built for that kind of punishment. In this video, I break down what actually happens when you put one of these things through subzero conditions and what to look for if you want a sauna that truly lasts.

After testing more than 40 saunas from Florida to Maine, I’ve seen which models crumble after a single winter and which ones can take years of abuse. I’ll covers the construction details that matter — insulation, roof design, door placement, heater power — and how to avoid getting stuck with a sauna that can’t even heat up once the temperature drops below zero.

This isn’t a sales pitch, it’s a reality check. If you want your outdoor sauna to actually survive the snow and still heat up fast, these are the key features to watch for.

Read the transcript >

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Transcript

If you live somewhere that gets real winters, snow, wind, freezing rains, most infrared saunas really just aren’t built for that kind of punishment. Don’t buy based on a brochure or some fancy listing. Read the fine print. Look around. Look at user reviews. Choose a model that can handle that type of environment, not just the marketing. The right sauna can absolutely handle snow and ice and subzero temps. You just have to pick one that’s built for the job.

They live in a harsh climate, and they’re asking about the best outdoor infrared sauna for the harsh climate. Being that you have a house in Maine and that you’re up there really often, and you intend to put an outdoor sauna there, you probably have a lot of expertise in this, and I’m excited to kind of dive into this topic because there’s a lot of people asking this question online, and it doesn’t seem like there’s a very clear answer, so let’s try to clear this up today.

I’ve tested over 40 saunas across different environments from Florida to Maine, and from hot, humid Florida to freezing cold Maine, I’ve seen what survives out in the cold long-term and what starts falling apart after the first winter. The number one problem with most outdoor saunas, especially stuff that you see on Wayfair, Amazon, big box stores, is they’re not really outdoor saunas. I know they say outdoor, and they have all the labels on them and everything else, but if you look at the way that they’re constructed, you’ve got an indoor uninsulated wall with a Lexan roof, ice, snow, negative 20 degree temperatures, moisture, sun. It’s just not going to work.

I mean, look at these things after two years. We have pictures in the Facebook group of people who have bought some of these things. They’re just junk. They’re basically an indoor sauna with a different roof, and it’s not even a true weatherproof roof. It should have shingles. It should have metal. It should have some type of a brow. It’s got to be protected somehow. And then you’re talking about the harshest winter climates that you could possibly stick one of these in right now. The damn thing’s not going to heat up worth a shit. It’s going to sit there and suffer. To go from 10 below zero to 150, 160, 170 degrees is a massive temperature swing. If you have a place that you winterize and you’ve ever shown up there and you haven’t had the heat on or something, you know how long it takes to heat that up. I know this is a smaller version, a lot less cubic footage, much easier to heat up the walls and the bench and everything else quicker time, but it’s the same principle. So you’re, you can’t expect, you want something that’s overpowered basically. And most infrared saunas aren’t really set up for this.

If it were in your basement or inside your house, that ambient temperature is not going to be as low as what it’s going to be when it’s sitting outside covered in snow. So you’re saying that it’s having to fight double as much against the outside temperature. So you would recommend like a way, way beefier setup than normal. Yeah. I mean, you’re not just going to get some, you know, cheap out outdoor infrared sauna from Amazon and think that it’s going to work well in the middle of winter, negative 20 below zero. It’s just the temperature swing and the amount of power that it takes to create that kind of heat is just not adequate for that environment.

And you know, everyone thinks that we’re biased against, you know, Finnish saunas and all that stuff. What nobody knows is where my grandmother’s cabin, since I was a kid for the last 30 years, I’ve been burning wood. I cut and harvest wood. I split wood. We heat with wood. I know what it’s like to have a wood fired anything. There’s so much that goes into that. I love the purist, um, the, the pure aspect of having a wood burner, but most people want to flip a switch or turn on a button. They’re not, you know, people aren’t running chainsaws and, you know, harvesting firewood stacking core, you know, 10 cords of wood for the season. That’s, that’s not what they’re looking for.

So these infrared things, um, basically spell convenience for most folks. And the marketing is, is very, you know, seductive. It’s like, oh, well this will work and it has this and dah, dah, dah, dah. But then you go through the effort of running a two 20 line, you do your conduit, you stick it out there. You set a sub panel, you pour a pad or use pavers or do whatever. And then you’re left with, you know, crumbling crap after two years because the walls, you know, aren’t designed for this. The damn thing won’t heat up. You can only use it six months a year, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

All this to say, look at something like a hybrid sauna. We should have just said that in the very beginning. Look at a hybrid sauna. Yes, go infrared, but add a traditional sauna heater too. So you have two types of heat that will do the best in the harsh winter. For any outdoor sauna to not only survive the weather, but actually be able to be used in the weather. What are some things that actually matter for that? Well, construction number one. So it’s gotta be, you know, strong frame gotta be able to handle a snow load. I mean, if we leave you, you’ve seen it, we go to the cabin for snowmobiling or during skiing season. If nobody’s been there for two months, how much ice and snow do you think can be on the roof? No one’s been shoveling it. So, you know, construction forced first and foremost, you got to have treated wood on the outside. Wouldn’t recommend treating treated wood on the inside, obviously, because you’d be breathing it in. You know, weatherproof seals, good joinery. Um, obviously the roof design, the roof design is number one. It’s either got to have a shingle roof on it, some type of standing seam or screw down metal, any, anything, something like that. Um, that’s going to stand the test of time.

You know, it’s been a while since we’ve done outdoor videos, but if you go back two years ago, we made some videos on the Costco barrel saunas. Those are good outdoor units. I believe they’re made by almost heaven. They seemed great on the surface, but without a shingle brow, most people don’t even know what that is without half of the barrel being covered, and we’ve talked about this at length, the tongue and groove pieces after about 15 months on those start to leak, don’t believe me. Go search, Google, go to Google images and type in barrel sauna, leaking picture after picture after picture. It’s like, it’s raining inside. People are like, well, what happened? I bought an outdoor sauna. It’s supposed to be, you know, fit for all climates. It’s tongue and groove, tight construction, dah, dah, dah, dah. You have to have a supplemental roof structure on those because the expanding and contraction over the years, the tongue and groove leaks. It’s, it’s not adequate, but the people who sell these things, they don’t care. They just want you to buy them. And then, you know, three years from now, you have a pile of crap and you’re turning around and wondering what happened.

Let’s move on to requirements that you’re going to need to have and things that you should do to make sure if you do get an outdoor sauna, that it, you know, continues working and you’re able to use it. Yeah. I mean, you’re either going to need to pour a concrete pad, have a wood deck or a paver patio. I mean, you got to have some type of flat support. These things are heavy, 800 to a thousand pounds. Usually when they’re all done, you got to have dedicated electrical that you’re just not going to get around that. It’s probably got to be on its own circuit. There’s probably got to be some ground fault protection, uh, depending on which type, you know, the electrician classifies it, you know, they may consider it a wet environment that is raining outside. So you’re gonna have to have a sub panel set usually for that to be directly hardwired and then whatever code is in your area, this is not a case where you can just use an extension cord and plug something in and bury it and think that you’re going to be, you know, great for the next 10 years and be really careful and make sure you have a quality setup.

Yeah. And with any outdoor siding and stuff, there’s going to be regular maintenance every couple of years. You probably have to reseal the exterior skin. Um, you know, all, all the stuff that goes along with just like you’d take care of a house in a snow climate, the same thing applies to these. There’s a ton of options online. And it’s honestly extremely confusing because they all look really similar. What are some main things that people should be looking for that their sauna like absolutely has to include in order to survive outdoors or in order to be able to be effective outdoors? The biggest thing is going to be heater performance and insulation. So you can get installation value a couple of different ways. You can get really thick, tight construction that it’s super airtight. That’s not really going to control the ambient temperature too much, but what it will do is allow the sauna to heat up adequately.

Um, and heater performance is going to be number one because your temperature swing from zero degrees to 160 or whatever. That’s a lot. You’re at, you’re asking for a lot of performance. Um, and just like a wood burner, you know, it’s not instantly hot. You start a fire and you leave and you come back, you have to wait. Well, you know, dry electric or combo infrared. They’re all going to be similar. You got to allow some time for that, but the better the performance, the better the heater layout, the more power you have on tap, the quicker that process will be. If you’re looking for infrared, check out the heavenly heat stuff. The walls aren’t necessarily insulated like a home. Uh, you don’t have like stick frame two by four, two by six construction with, you know, general bat insulation in between, but what you do have is a double wall construction that’s super solid. That’s not cheap at least. And it’s tight. So you got door seals, you know, when you’re in that thing, it actually holds the heat. It’s not going to be, you know, junk. It’ll have a real weatherproof roof.

If you’re looking for, you know, an infrared, I would check out one of the combo units. You get a traditional sauna heater in there along with the infrared. And unlike some other companies online, you can run those simultaneously. Other companies make outdoor saunas that look amazing. I would personally own one, except for one thing. You can only choose the infrared heat or the traditional heat. When you do your daily session, I would want to use both so that you can overcome those temperature swings in a quicker fashion. So, and the other thing is, you know, we kind of talk about this as smart airflow, but it’s a couple of different.

One is being able to have some type of venting that doesn’t necessarily work through the roof because you could have thick, you know, coming from the indoor sauna world, most saunas have roof vents. Well, that doesn’t work for outdoor saunas. So it needs to be vented under the eaves. I would personally prefer they model the traditional, um, finished sauna venting, which is left or right, low, left or right high. So you get like this, uh, basically cross breeze in there.

Interesting thing about that though, whether you’re getting, you decide to get an infrared, a combo, a finished sauna, a wood burnings. It doesn’t matter. I would pay attention to the door opening. This goes along with smart venting and smart airflow. Some recent companies that I’ve seen on the market, they’re engineering their saunas to where they put the door on the high side of the slope roof. So if you have a shed style roof, they put the door here or they put the door here. When you do that, if you have injury and entry and exit during a session, you just let all the heat from your sauna escape.

Not the wisest idea in a snow climate, uh, you’re going to take that accumulating heat value where it took, you know, 45 minutes for the thing to come to temperature. And you just lost it all. If they would design the sauna to have, you know, the door on the low side, or they were to put in a reduced height door and have a header over it so that some of the heat was trapped inside, you wouldn’t just start over on your preheat.

So when I see doors on the front of a, of a shed style roof on the high side, when I see them towards the front on the high side of a sidewall, I immediately noticed that the heat accumulation is basically gone. And obviously this makes a difference on what size you’re talking about. If you, you’ve got a five person sauna and there’s a little door, you know, that’s 20 inches wide and somebody opens it, not a huge deal when the entire thing is glass and the whole glass opens, you’re screwed.

We’re driving this home because unless you see this and know what to look for, you’re probably not going to catch it. You look at something, it looks stylish. You’re like, oh, wow, that’s amazing. Da da da da. But once you feel it for the first time, you’re like, holy, I opened the door and now we just lost all our heat. This is stuff that I look for personally, if I’m putting in an outdoor sauna for myself, so for some people, you know, this is too much, you know, way too nitpicky and stuff, but for me, this is what I would go for people ask all the time.

If I have specific brand recommendations. Yes, I do. I can also tell you, you know, what we’re using and what I’m testing for myself, but I don’t have long-term data on anything specific, meaning we haven’t had any one brand outside for five plus years where I can come to you and be like, look, this thing really holds up. It’s to the test of time. Check out these videos.

Every time we go to Maine, every winter to go snowmobiling, you can see that the paneling is holding up. You can see that, you know, this is, we don’t have that data yet. So I hesitate to tell you that anything is going to be a hundred percent perfect when we, you know, haven’t currently experienced that for ourselves, uh, but we’re working on it. And as time passes, we’ll have those reviews that come out over time.

So if you’re in a place like Northern Utah or anywhere that gets serious winters, like we have don’t buy based on a brochure or some fancy listing. Read the fine print, look around, look at user reviews, uh, look for real outdoor quality construction, choose a model that can handle that type of environment, not just the marketing. Uh, the right sauna can absolutely handle snow and ice and subzero temps. You just have to pick one that’s built for the job.