We Tested the Costco Sauna vs a $6,000 Premium Sauna — Here’s What We Found

In this video we’re breaking down the real difference between cheap infrared saunas and the premium units you see recommended on the channel. A lot of people think it’s just brand names or price tags, but the truth is it comes down to heater layout, coverage, design, airflow, and whether the sauna can actually produce a balanced sweat session. Some of the cheap stuff looks fine on the outside, but once you sit in it you realize half your body isn’t heating at all.

I go through examples of what you’ll see in a Costco or budget sauna, what corners get cut, why EMF claims under two grand almost never pan out, and why a premium sauna performs the way it does. It’s not about hype. It’s about whether the design actually works for real sauna use. If the layout is wrong, even an expensive sauna can perform terribly. So this video is just to help you understand what’s really under the hood before you buy something that looks like a great deal but leaves you cold on half your body.

Read the transcript >

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Transcript

All right, let’s get to the premium versus the cheap. Damn it. The outside is like a Kia. What do you want? The goes together backwards. You put the front wall together and then you build everything towards the wall that you’re going to slide it toward. Geniuses.

All right, maybe we’re getting a little aggressive. It’s fine. I mean, it’s not great. Go watch the individual review videos. You know. It has some things that I’m not particularly fond of. I could probably say that about some other cheap stuff too.

I got tired of it being crooked. Yeah, we’ll just take all these off and it’ll just, it’ll look better. Be black heaters. So build quality, I’m going to. This is what happens when I have a cold and I’m cranky and you make me film anyway. Maybe I didn’t need to rip it off.

Obviously I’ve had some bad experience with some of these things, but for most people that have never had a sauna before, they’re not going to be like super upset about the things that drive me crazy. You know, some of this stuff really does bother me.

Like this is like the cheapest, crappiest light, you know, or single speaker. You know what I mean? Like, I don’t know, it’s just hard. But for most people, they’d probably be okay with this.

I just don’t like the heating performance. I’d say buy the LifePro instead of this thing. It’s the same damn price. It was actually cheaper on Black Friday. And I keep telling, full disclosure, when I make a recommendation like that, there’s issues with that thing that I don’t think are perfect too.

I mean, I’d about the, you know, the cloth showing on top of the heaters. The Costco, the heaters are capped off and trimmed out better than the LifePro. But when I get out of the LifePro, I feel like I had a sauna session.

When I get out of this Costco, I’m like, how come my feet are cold and dry? Why are my legs and calves and stuff not sweating? I turn around, I’m like, well, where’s half my sauna session?

That’s my major gripe. And if they make other units that have floor heaters and they work better, great, excellent. I personally haven’t had that experience. So I don’t know, you know, what to tell you. I just like stuff that gives me better sweat.

All the saunas under $2,000, none of them are truly low EMF. I don’t even know why we bother testing that or talking about it anymore. Because every single time that we think we found one, I stick meters in it. My group members stick meters in it.

I mean, even the ones that are posting in the group and saying, oh, look how low it is. The screens are red on all of them. They’re blue when it doesn’t detect high levels of EMF.

I like the honesty of some of the product owners, like some of the manufacturers. They just say, look, we tried to build a low EMF sauna and price it under, you know, $18.99, we just can’t. It drives the cost up too much and we’re unable to deliver on that.

So I appreciate that honesty because it kind of saves us the hassle from having false expectations, number one. And then it’s one of the big, you know, the build quality, the safety, everything, the heating performance. It is one of the biggest things that you notice jumping from a cheap sauna to an expensive one.

Come with me in something else. This is not something that you guys ever see on the channel. That’s why I want to show it to you. A lot of you think that when we talk about cheap versus expensive, that it’s about one brand versus another brand.

It’s not really that. It’s about the design of the thing.

This is not a brand that you hear about often, but I’ve used them a bunch and I have not had good success with them. Why? It’s not because they’re not a premium brand. It’s not because the build quality is not great.

This wood is superb. The sanding is phenomenal. It’s clean. It’s one of the cleanest that I’ve ever been in, right? It’s just nice, right? It doesn’t work very well.

So regardless of what you think about the brand, the sauna experience itself is absolute crap. This thing has yellow heaters in it. Where do you see yellow? There’s a little bit behind me and there’s a little bit underneath me, but look elsewhere.

I mean, this is a one person sauna. There’s no emitters in the front wall, nothing on the side, nothing in the floor. Look how far the floor heaters are behind my legs. That’s way over 12 inches. That’s way over a foot, right?

So what happens in this thing? Number one, I never share this with you guys because I don’t even want you to get wrapped up into this crap. It has nothing to do with the brand, right?

I actually love the heaters that this brand builds. I like these concave ceramic heaters. I always have. If you go look at my videos from six and a half years ago, you’ll hear me say, hey, I really like the narrow band heat that you get from those.

The problem with them is they don’t have a wide disbursement, meaning the heat is very focused. So wherever you see yellow in this thing is where I’m getting heat. Everywhere you don’t see yellow, I’m not getting heat.

It’s completely unbalanced in the sauna. My back’s scalding hot, I’m cold on the front. I’m sweating on my low back. I’m not sweating on my torso or my chest. That’s not a sauna session.

This sauna is not designed in a way to where I could turn around and face the front and actually get a complete sauna session on my whole body. It doesn’t have coverage on the sides. It doesn’t have coverage on the floor.

The leg heaters are way, way, way too far from my body to really induce hyperthermic response.

So regardless of my feelings about the brand, regardless of how I like the build quality or not, regardless of the EMF, this sauna says it’s low EMF. It’s not. It’s got a decent amount of magnetic fields.

One thing that they do do is they ground the heat shields that are in front of them so it knocks the electric fields down. That’s something cheap that any sauna company can do. And this is a classic example, a really good example, of something that they’ve done well that doesn’t cost a lot of money that other companies could emulate.

But my point is, and this sauna, it has the worst control panel in the entire planet. This is awful. In order for you to go up in temperature, you have to cycle down one by one by one by one and go all the way. It’s almost unusable.

Aside from all, these are things that I could be saying, like, oh, this brand sucks, and da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. At the end of the day, this is not a cheap brand.

What I’m trying to convey to you is that, yeah, we answer your questions on what’s the difference between a cheap versus expensive brand. And we can just sit here and do brand comparisons all day.

But I think the part that you guys are missing that I try to hammer home in the Facebook group for the group members is that it’s not really about the brand, and it’s not really about the price. It’s about the design. And is it going to actually work for you?

We do videos, yes, on cheap versus expensive, because that’s what you guys asked for. But the real truth is that I can show you plenty of examples where expensive versus expensive is hugely different. I mean, like, monumentally, fundamentally different in your actual sweat experience.

Now, is social media gonna reflect that? Are these idiots running around in board shorts and bikinis that are paid to post in these things to show their abs and their tits, to make you want to be like them and buy this shit, gonna reflect that? Absolutely not.

The companies don’t want you to know. What they want you to think about is, is it a good brand or a bad brand?

What I’m suggesting to you is that what’s going on under the hood is often more important than the actual brand.

If you need more examples, I could pretty much do this all day. We have tons of examples of things that I don’t like or have worked subpar that I don’t show. Most of the reason that we do that is because I don’t want anybody to be misled.

Here’s another example of a high-end sauna that’s not cheap. Same bad heater layout. You know, no heaters on the sides, no heaters in the floor. This one does have heaters in the front, so it’s a little better.

But if you have questions, put them in the Facebook group.

We’ll see you in tomorrow’s video.