The TOXIC Truth About Sauna Adhesives – High VOC Glues

Are sauna glues toxic and safe for your health?

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Transcript

Guys, let’s do a quick little overview about adhesives in saunas. I think people are confused about glues, resins, and various types of compounds that could be in a sauna. You see, when most people think glue, they’re thinking that the walls are glued together. And when they see me or someone else with a VOC meter running around saying, oh, something is high VOC or low VOC, the most important thing is that you consider the source, right?

And this isn’t talked about enough. I don’t know why more people aren’t pointing this out, but here’s the truth of it. If you use a food safe wood glue or a tight bond to wood glue in the wall construction of the sauna, and that cures for 48 hours, the set point to liquefy that, and I have a lot of woodworking experience if you don’t know, I used to work for an AV company in my early twenties, manufacturing different types of cabinetry with CNC machines.

I’m very, very, very familiar with woodworking, been doing construction my whole life. Grandfather was a stonemason for over 50 years. I’ve done more types of construction than you could possibly imagine. It doesn’t seem like it with me sitting in this chair, but if you look at the new office that we built from the ground up and you see me pouring concrete, literally running the pump truck and then framing the entire thing with the help of my uncle and friends and family and loved ones, you’ll understand exactly what I mean.

The reason that I point that out to you is because you have people with no construction experience that work for a sauna company that say, Oh, you shouldn’t buy this, or you shouldn’t buy that because it has glue in it. Well, what kind of glue and in what, where, like just because something has glue in it doesn’t make it inherently bad.

I actually prefer saunas that have glue built into the rib construction walls, because if you move them across country, like I have, uh, in a U-Haul, they won’t come apart. Right? So it’s, it’s not to throw shade on any one specific company, but I think there’s some misinformation out there, right?

When it comes.

to um how do you evaluate these things and then you might see a clip right people clip out my live streams and say oh matt says these saunas with glue in them are bad well yes but i wasn’t talking about the wood glue that’s used in the walls right i was talking about the 3m double contact spray adhesive used in an aerosol gun right hooked up to an air compressor that is mounting felt to the back of a metal heater guard where that particular emitter has a surface temperature of over 400 degrees right and you put a piece of metal in front of it with a piece of felt glued to that well why do you think you smell something when you turn the sauna on right because every single time you heat that up that particular situation does have a surface temperature or produce enough heat to reactivate that glue well past the set point of when it cured okay that is very very very very different than some sauna having tight bond to wood glue which is what i use for myself i mean you could give it to kids and they can eat it it’s like a food safe wood glue they have an exterior version and stuff like that you wouldn’t want to eat but even still once it cures nothing in any of these saunas even if it was a traditional sauna and you had 200 degree air with water and steam and everything else nothing in those is going to get hot enough to reactivate that glue once it’s cured plus it’s in it’s sandwiched in a joint inside the wall or at a corner or something like that right it’s a lamination process during the manufacturing of laying out wall ribs putting a veneer skin on it gluing those and then brad nailing that and once it cures now you have a rock solid assembly now you have a unit that you know can take some moving across country or some damage or you could drop it down the stairs and it’s not going to crumble right so the cheap saunas the amazon stuff the wayfair stuff anything that

has MDF in it. If you get any moisture on that stuff at all, this is why I don’t like, I don’t mind some of the plywoods as long as it’s not, uh, like super, super cheap where you’re actually going to be breathing stuff in on the inside. Like I don’t care if there’s a plywood skin on the roof.

I do kind of care if there’s MDF in any of the construction of these because MDF is basically a type of particle board that has a denser, finer dust that uses a lot of compressed resin. And I’ve worked with this for years and years and years. I used to do CNC millings and assembly for cabinet construction with these.

And if you get any moisture into that, it swells like crazy and it’s going to wreck everything. Not a great construction material for sauna. I don’t care where it is. Aside from that breathing in that type of dust or getting things like that hot is really not the smartest choice when you have all these other options that really only cost a couple of bucks more.

So please understand, I’m not in the camp where I think all glue and all stuff like this is bad in saunas. I’m the opposite. I think wood glue is appropriate for sauna construction. Being a cabinet maker or cabinet builder for many years, most, and I’m not a fine finished cabinet maker or carpenter either.

Anyone who’s an actual carpenter or owns a wood shop or does any type of fine woodworking is going to look at one of these things and be like, that’s it, right? They’re not going to be impressed with the build quality, but you have to remember it’s two different things.

You’re not just sticking this in your enclosed trailer and taking it to your client across town and installing it either. These things are shipped across the country. They’re trying to make them as light as possible so they can fit them all on the trucks, deliver them where a guy can show up with a pallet jack and wheel it into your garage or in your driveway or whatever.

It’s a very different application. The heavier you make it, the more things in that supply or that distribution chain break. So for the sauna company, they’re trying to have a blend of how can we make this a little bit lighter so that we can actually ship it to you and it not cost $20,000, right?

But at the same time, have good enough build quality, have good enough installation quality.

and have good enough aesthetic appeal to where it actually works well for the application. And so these are the things that you see suffering in the cheaper Saunas. I mean, they have these spray-on solutions. I don’t know what it is.

Instead of having the outside wall, like have a veneer on it, like these guys, they’ll take a plain old plywood and they’ll spray like a mixed up, you know, some type of varnish solution. It actually doesn’t look bad. I just don’t know how it wears. I don’t think it’s going to wear well.

Like you could just scratch it right off and there’s nothing to it. At the same time, anybody who puts something like that on the inside of the sauna is just asking for trouble. You’re in a closed air environment. You do not want to be breathing in things like that.

But these examples are very different than a company using wood glue to assemble their walls and make sure they have structural integrity. I actually prefer that, right? Me, if I were building it myself, I would 100% use wood glue. What I would not do is I wouldn’t put felt on heater guards, right?

Like when you see these silver or black heaters mounted inside a sauna, some of them are blue, some of them are red. If you look at some of my old videos, like the worst sauna I’ve ever tested, if you Google that, you can see how from the backside, you can see how these resins are attached to the metal, right?

That, in my opinion, is a bad example of you wouldn’t want to choose something like that, given the choice, because when that heats up, you will smell that glue. That glue will be reactivated. It’s very different than a food-safe wood glue used in the wood construction, right? And you have different materials that don’t mesh well.

You have a felt that’s overlaid on a piece of metal. The metal is going to retain and increase its surface temperature a lot, whereas the wood is a lot more insulative. The density of the two materials, the thickness of the two materials is very different. But we should talk about these things, because just because some sauna has an adhesive or a glue or something in it doesn’t inherently make it bad.

And then in other cases…

It absolutely destroys the experience. I would, the only time that I’ve ever told someone, get that sauna out of your house, burn it, set it on fire, lose the money, replace it with something else. You hardly ever hear me talk like that. The only time is when I’ve personally tested a sauna like that.

And it either has formaldehyde or it has some type of resin, or it has some type of fabric, a thick felt glued fabric, you know, on a ceramic sauna heater guard or something like that. Why do I say ceramic? I’m just saying that as a reference point, because you have to consider the type of emitter.

It’s not that big of a deal if there’s a fabric in front of a carbon emitter, because the surface temperature of the emitter itself is lower. It’s like half, right? So will it ever increase in temperature enough to go past the set point or the cure point of that glue and liquefy it again, thus creating an issue?

Probably not. It would be very, very difficult to do that. It just doesn’t possess the ability. But when you have an emitter that can do twice as much surface temperature and it’s at really close proximity and it’s mounted to metal, what do you think is going to happen when that gets gooey and starts sliding around again?

Plus you have fabric at twice the surface temperature. Bad idea. So that’s my take on it. We should talk about it more.

If you have questions, let me know in the comments and we’ll see you in tomorrow’s video.