5 tips to make a sauna for less than £10K

This is a basic checklist you should have before embarking on your sauna

£10,000. Seem like a lot right? Well if you are serious about building a sauna either in your garden or for a business and you want to build it for yourself, I would recommend a budget of £10,000. There are very easy ways to get a sauna for less than £10,000 if you don’t want to build your own Polhus and Ocean Sauna both offer pre made kits which are under £10,000. But if you are keen to make your own and want to know everything you want to look out for you’re in the right place. If you want a cheat sheet take a look at the materials listed below, and the guide above and you’ll be 60% of the way there already.

This is for a 8 to 10 person commercially sized sauna at 15ft by 8 ft.

For an in-depth construction plan I would recommend looking on Youtube for sauna heater, the Sauna Skool and Ocean Sauna who all have step by step tutorials if you are looking for installation help. For the design and best experience I would recommend looking out for these key things:

Thermowood- whatever your budget for your sauna project it is so important to use thermally treated wood. This is wood which has been heated up to over 200 Celsius and is therefore heat resistant, pesticide resistant and rot resistant. Even though Saunas produce a ‘dry heat’ there’s still plenty of moisture in the air. Normal wood will rot incredibly quickly, but even Thermally treated wood will not last the full 30 years without proper ventilation.

Ventilation- Sounds counter intuitive right? Don’t you want to keep the heat in? Well yes, but if you have no ventilation at all for hot air this will do 2 catastrophic things to your sauna. 1.) you’ll feel like your suffocating after 5 minutes during a normal session 2.) Your wood will rot 10x times faster. It is so important to have 2 small holes in your sauna to allow hot air out and cool air in, which will produce the perfect Löyly

Seating- Seating has a few key factors to consider: height, view and socialization. For the height it’s important to leave at least 1ft of height between your head when seated on the top seat of the sauna and the ceiling; this ensures you’ll get sufficient heat without over cooking. It’s also important your feet are situated above the heater otherwise you’ll find you just can’t get your feet warm enough. Finally, you just need to think about conversation, do you want to chat to your fellow sauna goers? And what do you want to look at every time you come to the sauna? Great options are on landscapes that changes due to time or the season- mountains, beaches or streams but even a sauna positioned looking at your plants as they grow can be deeply satisfying.

Heater- There’s 1 beginners mistake you don’t want to make on the heater: capacity. Every sauna heater should give a guide on how many metres cubed (or cm³) they usually heat to. Ensure you get one appropriate for the size you want.

Construction- Construction is a bit of a double edged sword and one of the key reasons I recommend having a starting budget at 10K. You can absolutely build a sauna yourself without a sauna hit and potentially do it for less than 7K, however it quickly becomes your full time job or a personal project that can take 6 to 7 months. If you want a sauna built in 1 month, I would highly recommend spending a bit of money (500 to 2K) to hire a build for a couple of weeks to help you out. If you want to build it completely yourself you absolutely can, but before you do take a look at the online community Sauna Skool, where you’ll start to get an idea that a 7 month Sauna project built for 7K to 10K is not that unusual..

This Sauna is a great example of these concepts:- feet above the heater, great view, plenty of headspace.