What Emissivity and Micron Range Should an Infrared Sauna Have?

Most infrared sauna companies love throwing around terms like micron range and emissivity, but hardly anyone explains what they really mean — or why they actually change during use.

In this video, Matt Justice breaks down how emissivity and micron range are tested, what the numbers truly represent, and why those shiny marketing charts often mislead buyers. After testing over 40 saunas in the last seven years, he’s seen how heater layout, coverage, and real-world performance matter far more than any number printed in a brochure.

Read the transcript >

---

---

Transcript

This is the most important thing that I’ve ever said. If you’re not paying attention to anything else, pay attention to this.

I started doing this because I was you. I was a guy who landed in a functional medicine doctor’s office and she said, Matt, you need to be in a sauna. Like yesterday, your hair mineral analysis, your blood work, all your labs look terrible. You need a detox. And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatever. I’m not paying for all that. I didn’t believe in it.

Part of the reason that it was so difficult for me to believe in sauna and detox is because seven, eight years ago, people and companies were doing things like this to me. I’ve used all of these things. Every single one of them that you guys are asking about the brands, the models, the different style heaters. I know what they feel like. And I know when you look at a report and there’s a three to 6% difference in emissivity or micron range, you’re not going to feel it. It’s because emissivity in micron range, ready? Drum roll.

And you see all these things and it sounds good. It sounds fancy. It sounds better, doesn’t it? And you’re confused and you can’t make sense of it. So it must be good, right? Not always.

Ladies and gentlemen, for the first time ever in the last seven years, class is in session. I can’t see you guys struggle with this anymore. So we’ve got infrared sauna micron ranges and emissivity, right? In an infrared sauna, there’s generally different types of heaters. This is one of the things that you guys have posted about most recently. And it seems that you’re having the wool pulled over your eyes and there’s nothing for sale in this video. I don’t want anything out of this other than to help you and continue, uh, to see you thrive, not struggle because you have analysis paralysis, and you’re looking at fancy graphs and fancy marketing reports and fancy things from sauna companies.

And you don’t really understand what you’re looking at and neither do the salespeople that are talking to you. And I’m going to explain to you why you look at these fancy reports, right? And it’ll have a micron range report or an emissivity report with different values on it. Yes. Then you look at a brochure from a sauna company, right? It’ll have a fancy picture, some stuff, a couple bullet points, a link to some graphs here. See our third party test results, this, that, and the other.

And you see all these things and it sounds good. It sounds fancy. It sounds better, doesn’t it? And you’re confused and you can’t make sense of it. So it must be good, right? Not always.

There’s a few things here that we need to establish. Uh, for one, no one knows what the CMR is or how it’s calculated. So everyone wants to have a fancy marketing report that has a micron range listed. Oh, our, our sauna has between a seven and 10 MR, right? 9.4, eight point, whatever. Just pick a number out of a hat. Usually what they use is between seven and 10. That’s the micron range that their heaters emit. That’s better than the competitors. No one has it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I’m not talking about just one company. Bunch of companies do this.

Maybe Aaron can help fix these lights. Cause this looks bad, but I don’t care. The information that you’re going to get from this, you won’t find anywhere else. Okay. Just because I like to make layman term videos so that we don’t contribute to your confusion doesn’t mean that I don’t have a deeper understanding of what’s going on. I may not speak in scientific language, but I’ve used all of these things. Every single one of them that you guys are asking about the brands, the models, the different style heaters. I know what they feel like. And I know when you look at a report and there’s a three to 6% difference in emissivity or micron range, you’re not going to feel it right.

But you think you and your kids are somehow getting some magical benefit from one brand over another brand. Meanwhile, you don’t understand what I’m about to show you. Okay. So you read this report and you listen to the salespeople. The salespeople also are spoonfed this stuff. They don’t even understand. If you ever asked them for a CMR, what’s the CMR? They’re going to look at you with deer in the headlights. They will have no idea what you’re talking. You’re talking about, right? They, they get real, real, real squeamish and squirm. If you push back on any of this stuff, you start asking technical questions. They have zero, zero, zero response. They try to get off the phone.

Yet they scare you and say that if you buy such and such as company sauna, it’s not going to have the right emissivity. It’s not going to have the right micron range output. You won’t get the benefits. Maybe it’ll heat you up and feel nice, but you won’t actually get the detox or you won’t actually get the sauna benefits like in the PubMed studies or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Just replace this with whatever narrative of the week they come up with. Right?

Okay. Now they’ll say 9.4 or 8.7 or 7.6 whatever. Every sauna company has a number that they choose. It’s always between seven and 10 the resonant frequencies of the body. The heaters are a match for blah, blah, blah, blah. You heard all these pitches.

Here’s where it gets really interesting though. The marketing material and the sauna salespeople will say you must have whatever this micron range is that they tell is amazing, right? Or else you don’t get the benefits. But, but if you look at their third party report, what’s happening, what’s happening throughout the entire thing? Why do you see different levels on here that aren’t static? Why do you see different metrics? Why do you see a rating for this one and a rating for this one and a rating for this one? And they’re not the same. It’s because emissivity and micron range ready drum roll, change with temperature and duration of time.

Okay. So we also have TNT. Actually we should separate those. You shouldn’t put them together because that will confuse you even more. So we’ll just do temperature and time. Now you can exchange temperature for a power current draw. There’s a number of ways that you could monitor or represent this metric. I’m using the end result, which is temperature, temperature of the heater based on power consumed based on duration of time that it’s been running.

Okay. So not to make this super complicated for you because already the report is complicated for you, but basically no sauna emits seven to 10 micron all the time. Even if it’s one I like, even if it’s one I don’t like, even if it’s the best one on the planet or it’s the one that so-and-so said you have to have, it doesn’t work like that.

Okay. That’s the whole reason to do this. I don’t want to go out and buy a whiteboard, but I’m tired of seeing you guys struggle. Like I’m tired of seeing you guys manipulated. All right. So what happens? Let’s get rid of some of this stuff or actually how low can you see? Okay.

So a different style graph when it tests emissivity in micron range will look like this. Okay. What is that? You have your metrics just like the other test, but what you’re seeing in the marketing report is between here and here. You guys see that this is your touted MR or your CMR, your charted micron range. CMR stands for charted micron range. You won’t find this in any reports. It’s just a part of the scientific method. If you were doing controlled testing in a lab and none of the salespeople are going to know what this is. So don’t bother asking them because they’ll look at you like deer in the headlights or just run for the Hills.

So you’re seeing CMR charted micron range or charted emissivity range. CER they’re interchangeable because we’re just talking about the method of testing, right? We’re just talking about, Hey, here’s an infrared heater that emits waves when connected to, you know, power, right? And in order for it to do its job, it has to consume enough power for a set duration of time in order to emit heat up and emit said range, right? So that’s what this curve looks like.

So when you see seven to 10, you’re just looking at the CMR, the charted micron range in the marketing report, you’re not looking at this is when they turn it on. This is when it cools down. This is when it’s been on for 15 minutes. My writing is terrible too. So I don’t do these types of things, but my intention is good, right? I want to help you. I don’t want anything except for you to be able to be informed and make really good decisions for you and your family and not get taken for a ride.

If you don’t know, I started doing this because I was you, right? I was a guy who landed in a functional medicine doctor’s office and she said, Matt, you need to be in a sauna. Like yesterday, your hair mineral analysis, your blood work, all your labs look terrible. You need a detox. And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatever. I’m not paying for all that. I didn’t believe in it.

Part of the reason that it was so difficult for me to believe in sauna and detox is because Seven eight years ago people and companies were doing things like this to me Here they are continuing to do the same thing. They’ve had seven or eight years to do anything else This is bullshit, right? But why would they it works right? It sounds plausible. It keeps you in confusion It keeps you in analysis paralysis. It gives another opportunity for you know, somebody to talk you into some nonsense, right?

So at the 15-minute mark You’re at said CMR or CER Said emissivity range said micron range. We’re not trying to point out a specific value we’re just trying to point out a testing method on how you would evaluate something like this so that you can understand where the flaws Are in the information and what you’re missing? Right. Well, I’m making this up. It’s gonna vary from sauna to sauna. Let’s say at the 25 minute mark Starts the CMR Starts the charted micron range the charted emissivity range CER Looks like a B. It’s not And let’s say that runs to 55 Right Then what happens? Well, the sauna is approaching an hour or hopefully if it’s a well-designed sauna, it’s approaching the thermostat limit So the thermostat will be hit the heaters will kick off and the sauna will what begin to cool down? What happens when the sauna cools down? It’s no longer operating at the same temperature same power consumption same duration and Same power output, right? So if any of those variables change so does Say with me micron range and emissivity doesn’t matter which one you’re testing These are not static values Everyone presents it a certain way in a marketing report where if you buy our brand of sauna You’re going to get 7 to 10 mr. And if you buy someone else’s you’re not that is a flawed concept That is actually misinformation It’s not their fault because they were spoon-fed

breaking this down into smaller paragraphs will make it easier to follow and understand.

Even the best saunas on the planet, even the saunas that do produce the right wavelengths for you, do not emit these 100% of the time. I don’t care who tells you what, whether it’s a sauna company that I recommend or someone else. If anyone tells you anything other than that, they are wrong. They’re either intentionally lying to you or accidentally misrepresenting something. So a lot of the time, you can just throw this out. You can throw the how does it go? Something out with the bathwater. My point is when you look at these graphs, you’ll also notice that here is Competitor right here is our entry line, and here’s our premium line. I’m not gonna say any brands throughout this video, but if you can read between the lines on the companies, they’re all kind of guilty of the same thing. There is a differentiation, but it’s so minute it doesn’t have the gravity that you guys are making it out to be.

There’s 30,000 people in my Facebook group. Every single week, the amount of you guys that ask about this and have very convincing testimony or copy and paste messages from sauna people that have emailed or said this or done that. It sounds very plausible, right? Well, how come if I was evaluating the information that you’re putting in there and you’re sending me, the competitor over here is only rated at 0.92 Emissivity or micron range, right? These are arbitrary numbers. I’m making them up. They would change a little bit whether you’re talking about micron range or emissivity. But for the purposes of this, evaluating the graph of the third-party reports is much the same. A competitor’s is only 0.92, and our entry level is guaranteed to be more emissive than a competitor with a 0.95 rating. It is in fact better than 0.92, but how much better you say? Well, that’d be about a 0.3% difference.

So a sauna salesperson will take this material that they’re given in the brochure in the marketing, not understanding what they’re saying, and come to you saying ours is better. By your own admission, I’m gonna get 3% more from you, but you’re gonna charge me $2,800 more for the 3% that I’m never gonna feel. It’s never gonna make a difference in my life. Pretty sleazy, huh? Let’s just say one of these is 0.97 to 0.99, almost 100% emissive now. Our product is almost 99% emissive, so all the power that goes to those heaters is coming out and going to your body. No other company can give you that. No other company can give you a 5% difference. Yet we’re gonna charge you $3,600 this time because I said it was 20 something hundred different before. But that was from our entry level to the competition. Now you’ve got to step up to our premium model in order to get from 0.95 to 0.97, a 2% difference.

Is this technically better than the entry-level line? Well, according to them. But if you look at my other videos that I’ve done on emissivity, especially certain brands where they have this is one of their back heaters, right? There’s one on the left, one on the right, or one in the middle depending on how wide the sauna or what model you got. But they put LED red lights in the center. This entire area is missing far infrared coverage. So, how can you say that an average emissivity in a sauna cabin matches the report when you have no evidence of how the report was taken other than knowing that there’s a heater hanging in a lab with a probe in front taking the measurement. More important than micron range and emissivity is heater layout. I stress this a lot in a lot of videos. People don’t understand me though. They think that I’m just saying you have to buy one sauna because I have some vested interest. But it’s a media business, right? We monetize it every way we can. But it’s about reach and engagement. It’s not necessarily about brand. That’s why we use the certified sauna list criteria so that no one can just sneak on by. It’s a fail-safe and an integrity-based thing. I’m not making any recommendations in this video. I just want you to have understanding. This is our sauna. We typically have heaters on the sidewalls, at the back walls, and a bench across. Heater placement in relation to the seated body position is crucial for radiant heat penetration. An infrared sauna helps remove things sequestered in your adipose tissue, aiding detoxification. What you feel when you use a sauna is not based on brand or fancy reports, but on heater placement and heat coverage for effective therapy.

An infrared sauna and getting radiant heat on the tissues a la heater layout matters more than micron range and emissivity, which is why I try. I know I don’t do a great job. I’m not like a camera guy. I try to show you FLIR footage of these things because when you have a sauna that doesn’t have a calf heater, doesn’t have sidewall heaters, doesn’t have a floor heater, right? You start taking things away. You start taking heat coverage away from the body.

Like I’ve had saunas in the graveyard that just had heaters across the back. What do you think happens to the body in your sweat session and your ability to support detox if you have inadequate heat coverage? It’s not gonna make a damn bit of difference what micron range, CMR, fancy graph. You could spend $20,000 on this stupid thing. And it’s not gonna make a damn bit of difference at all, at all, at all. Why? Because you’re unevenly heating the tissues. You’re unevenly contributing to basal dilation. You’re unevenly able to stimulate the body with a hyperthermic response, okay?

Which means if you cannot get hyperthermic response from radiant heat to the tissues, this is the most important thing that I’ve ever said. If you’re not paying attention to anything else, pay attention to this. If you’re unable to get radiant heat to the tissues, you will still drive hyperthermic response, but you will be dependent on convection. You will then be dependent on air temp.

It will then be a situation of what you happen to deal with in a traditional sauna. What is that? You can only have air temp at your disposal. Unless you have a wood burner that’s been heating up for an hour and a half and the wood and steel and everything else emits infrared. People don’t understand this. The whole point of infrared is to elicit this response evenly over the body. Heat coverage is what does that, right?

So I’m a proponent of loving saunas that have great heat coverage. Just two months ago, we tested a Costco sauna. I sat in it, my legs don’t sweat from the knee down, right? Just three months ago, we tested an Amazon sauna. Same damn price, same shitty build quality, same things I don’t like, same this, same that, yet I’m sweating in a 65 degree room in that sucker. Is it low EMF, low VOC? No.

Are there threads hanging out of it and some furring strips on the walls and some other stupid shit that looks terrible? Absolutely. Yep. It’s not something I would pick if I had my choice, but I tell you what, nothing on this planet, no micron range, no emissivity, no amount of price, no amount of me liking it, hating it, doesn’t make a difference. No amount of anything will make the Costco sauna compete with that. It can’t, right? It absolutely cannot, okay?

Missing this bottom half, not having heat coverage here, is doing what? Is doing what, right? You are limited to convection in order to heat this portion of the body. You’re not able to deliver radiant heat to this portion of the body because why? You have inadequate heat coverage. I don’t give a shit if you have the best emissivity rating on the planet from these heaters.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a $15,000 sauna. You are not actually transmitting the energy, the far infrared energy to the body in the appropriate places, in the right doses, for the right amount of time. So what? That portion of the body is being left out. That portion of the body then can only experience hyperthermic response, aka sweating, heat therapy, right? Doesn’t matter what it is.

It can only experience that if the sauna heats up enough in order to drive heat to that area via convection because there’s no exposure, right? There’s none, nothing that’s not there. So it’s not possible. So all these other things go out the window. Why? Because they just don’t matter. They can’t. You’ll never make up for the body lacking in heat coverage. It’s one of the most important things ever. There’s no marketing report for it. There’s no, you know, no this, no that, whatever, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Last thing I’m gonna leave you with. There’s a bench in here. There’s a heater on the calf thing. There’s a heater in the floor. There’s little side heaters here. There’s a heater in the sidewall. Hell, some of the saunas even have a heater in the bench. Right? I’ll just do this so you see infrared wavelengths coming, you know, like you get the idea. Everywhere there’s a squiggly line is infrared emitter, right? And then you’ll have some heaters across the back. You’ll have people that say, oh, they shouldn’t go up above the head.

Some other people will say, oh, you have to have it above the head, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. They both work. I like above the head because it soothes tight neck and muscles a little better heat, but it doesn’t really matter. It’s not that detrimental of a thing. What is detrimental though? If you look at something like this on one of my FLIR gun videos, right? It comes over the screen and it shows you, let me just make it so we can see this real quick.

What you’re going to see is the throat, right? You’re going to see an even throat from all these heaters projecting radiant heat out into what? The seated body position. So we’re wrapping the entire body in infrared, right? If you do a good job at that, you absolutely will get the benefits from using the sauna. You can have a cheap sauna. It can be the wrong emissivity. You can be the wrong micron range. It can be less than ideal this, less than ideal that.

The only thing that you can’t do is switch from far infrared to submit infrared. I see people out there with some patio heater saunas. Patio heaters are a wonderful tool to assist in preheating a sauna or getting the convection a lot hotter, but it’s not, I repeat, it is not a replacement for far infrared coverage. Why? Because underneath your skin, the way your cells and tissues, the way they vibrate doesn’t react the same if you change the wavelength.

So you need far infrared for a certain depth of penetration and a certain excitability in this particular instance. So you have a far infrared heater that’s penetrating. If you change the wavelength on these, that goes away. I shouldn’t say it goes away. You’re altering it in a way that’s less than ideal, right? Now you’re talking about, hey, we’re losing benefits. Now, you know, different types of frequencies matter.

But as long as we’re talking about far infrared, heat coverage is ultimately going to determine the outcome and experience of your sauna session. So I’m going to stop that here. I think that’s been way too much, but I want to know if you have any questions. Hopefully Aaron can help me make these videos so they’re a little easier to see. Hopefully this can be zoomed in on and you guys can really understand, you know, what’s lacking in the marketing reports, what’s lacking in the information, and you can make informed decisions. So we’ll see you in the next one.