Author Archives: karlis

A 10-minute shower, at 5 gallons per minute, will use around 22,000 btu of energy (about 6 kilowatts) for the hot water. If you’re using a low-flow showerhead you might reduce that to 2.5 gallons per minute using 11,000 btu (3 kilowatts). After the shower you’ll have cleaned up the surface of your skin, but I find even a 10 minute shower doesn’t get me that warmed up and I start to feel cold as soon as I get out of the water. You can have two or more people shower together and save on hot water, but except in sexy movie scenes, most people shower alone most of the time.

A typical sauna session for us will last about 4 hours and use 200,000 btu of propane. During and after a sweat we’ll have cold showers. Typically we can sweat up 10 or more people in an hour so in those 4 hours we can get 40 people cleaned up. That works out to about 5000 btu per person (about 1.5 kilowatts). It’s a nice deep clean from the inside out, and since the sauna builds up your internal heat, even with a post sauna cold shower you will be hot and likely still sweating for 10 minutes to an hour after you finish the sauna.

Now if you are one of those people who goes home and has a long hot shower after a long hot sauna you’re throwing off this whole calculation. Our numbers show you can get deep clean by having a sweat with 10 of your friends and feel toasty and relaxed for 1-2 hours for the low cost of 5000 btu per person, or lightly rinse your skin in 10 minute hot shower, all alone, while burning 20,000 btu. Saunas use one quarter of the energy of that personal shower while rewarding you socially, cleaning you better, relaxing you deeper and it’s way more fun.

Depending on where you shower, and what kind of sauna you have, the energy you use might come from wood, coal or gas, or maybe from hydroelectric or nuclear power. Your choice: pollute the air, destroy the ground, disrupt ecosystems, destabilize countries. Regardless of the source, more energy use is inherently more destructive and ultimately releases more pollutants into the atmosphere. Make the efficient choice and sauna with your friends. For your health. For your community. For national security. For humanity. For the planet.

This dilemma I’ve presented is admittedly reductionistic; you do have more choices. A 5-minute shower with a low-flow shower head will equalize the shower side of the equation; better yet the same 5-minute shower with a friend and you’re winning the green ribbon. But who wants to spend 5 minutes trading places under a warm sprinkle in a cold room, when you could be relaxing on a hot bench in good company? We think the choice is clear.

I just finished our yearly BCMSS Winter 2014/2015 Newsletter, download it while it’s hot. We’ll be sending out the link to our maillist. It has some edited versions of our recent blog posts and short editorial, all in a pretty pdf package.
Maybe just a photo of the cover is your interest.

It’s been such a busy year it’s almost hard to remember all the great sauna sessions we’ve had.

We started the year with the Saunatruck in residence backing onto Falaise park near Rupert skytrain station in deep east Vancouver. Our enthusiastic hosts kept the sauna hot every Sunday, with special sessions like a steamy sledding night on the hill behind the house after an uncommonly large snowfall. In January our friend Jen came by for a visit to produce a video segment on the sauna society for Shaw TV.

2013 saw premature ends to two amazing sauna residencies, so we came up with a design that could solve some of the problems we’d been having with saunatruck access and bylaw issues. Our new tent sauna design could be set up in a carport, on a deck, or in a 10’x10′ popup, and it’s modular structure could be transported in a cargo van and set up in a few hours. Construction was started in George Rahi’s shop, and after a very cold month we had our first test sweat in February in time for our book launch event for our publication, “Mobile Saunas”. Karlis gave a small talk and presented a slideshow about the book and about various mobile saunas around the world. The book can be ordered online from Amazon and our website. George and Robyn have continued to host weekly sauna sessions from their studio/shop near commercial drive.

Meanwhile, we were introduced to Blake McAndless who had been hosting epic sauna-less sauna sessions in Strathcona (one block from our original location). Everything else was in place: a backyard campfire, urban oasis backyard, fenced in parking, acoustic jams, wood fired bathtub, and an amazing hosting talent. We moved the saunatruck behind his house, set up the shower, and since then he’s been hosting 2 sessions a week, on sundays and wednesdays. It’s amazing how this location combines the best elements of our last few years of residencies. Blake and his roommates are thoroughly enjoying the hosting experience, crafting their own tradition while at the same time the vibe will feel completely familiar to long time sauna regulars. Blake recently hosted a (hot) Boxing Day sweat and a New Years session to sweat in the new year and the BCMSS’s 14 year anniversary.

That original sauna is still heating up on Gabriola Island, where host Megan and the local crew enjoy sweats in the forest every Sunday. This year we replaced the cast iron burner which finally retired after burning through an estimated 4000 lbs of propane over the years. We’re happy to know the saunavan is still going strong.

As we were getting ready for the summer, BCMSS vice-president Adrian Sinclair and Andrea Curtis bought George Rahi’s old camperized schoolbus for their event production business, and the decided it would be great to turn 8′ of the 40′ bus into a sauna. We got to work on a horsefarm out in Tswwassen in May, and in June took the completed sauna with a crew of people up to Hollyhock on Cortes Island. The inaugural sweat was followed by a bunch of sauna missions during the rest of the year, including an installation at the dragonboat festival, an epic weekend at Basscoast in Merritt, an private 2-night event in Manning Park, another trip to Cortes, and a sweat on Burnaby mountain in support of the Enbridge pipeline protests. Transformation Projects continues to rent out their new bus and recently hosted an all-day sweat at Spanish Banks for the January 1 polar bear swim.

In June our enthusiastic Funkoree sauna crew built another “dirt sauna” this year. It’s a dome of canvas over cedar and willow branches erected on the banks of the Elaho river outside of Squamish. I’m always a little surprised how much people enjoy rolling around in the sand and jumping in the river after a long night of dancing under the stars. Even with our comfortable saunas in the city, the dirt sauna experience is a tradition many have come look forward to every year.

Our friend Ryan commissioned a custom sauna bus from us this fall. We first sweat with Ryan back in 2006, and have been bringing saunas to his summer staff events for the last few years. This year his winter staff afterparty featured his new bussauna next to a cozy spa zone in the company parking garage, and we set up the new sauna tent as well. The success of this 2-sauna indoor spa is inspiring us to work on new installation ideas for similar events next year.

With such an eventful and successful year, we’ve been planning lots of new projects and new missions, and we’re all very excited about the year to come.

We built 3 new sauna stoves this year and did some work on two original stoves, so we’ve been thinking a lot about stove design. Since we run our mobile saunas in the city where wood fires are prohibited, propane gas is our fuel of choice. It’s readily available, burns clean (no smoke in the neighbourhood), and a 20lb tank will last for about 12 hours of sauna time with no refuelling.

Our original stove design from 2000 was a steel box with an old driveshaft for a chimney, powered by a 50k btu 2-ring cast-iron banjo burner inside. We later added a stainless steel heat shield to soften the radiant heat the leg level and this essential feature considerably improved the feel of the sauna. The original burner finally rusted out completely this year, but we managed to find a used burner at the local recycling depot that’s smaller but sufficient to get the sauna as hot as we need.

Our next stove built in 2005 was built with some improvements. A exhaust manifold attempts to capture more heat energy before the fumes go out the chimney. The fire box has more flame “headroom” to allow for better combustion. The stove was also originally intended to be used with gas or wood fuel, but it’s only been used for gas. As with the first stove, the heat shield was also added later. This one was improvised with corrugated aluminum. It’s definitely better than no heat shield, but stainless steel (or even painted mild steel) would be safer in the event that someone accidentally touched the hot stove.

The only other similar gas stove on the market we’ve seen is the Vico Scandia Ultra Sauna heater (and used in the mobile Surf Sauna out in New Hampshire), and from what we’ve seen it’s a very nice stove. All stainless steel, 2 sizes, and automatic burner control options. It’s more expensive than we can afford, but we looked closely at their design as we began building our new stoves.

Our new stove designs have a similar size but incorporate a manifold before the chimney to keep as much heat inside the sauna as possible. The stoves are made with 1/8″ steel and painted with high-heat enamel. The stainless heat shield is wrapped around and attached with brackets to the stove body. A separate door/wall interface module can be built to accommodate different burners, vehicle bodies, and installation options. When installed the stove vents through the roof or wall through a 4″ stovepipe chimney. Additional steel flashing covers the walls around the stove and chimney. As in previous designs we use a 50kbtu high-pressure cast iron propane burner; the burner must be selected with a neck length appropriate to the size of the stove. These stoves still use manual controls for lighting and flame control that we can upgrade in the future to a more automated system.

The design continues to evolve with each stove. The manifold is now easier to construct, and our most recent model incorporated a new mesh shield that can be filled with additional rocks (similar to the IKI sauna heaters) so the stove body is surrounded by rocks and has an amazing stone wall appearance. We also reduced the stove size to fit better in smaller mobile saunas. In a future post we’ll cover the stove design in more detail. If you’re interested in our stove design or would like to share your stove design experiences we’d like to hear from you.

Our friends at the Lookout Arts Quarry in Bellingham completed a new mobile sauna in time for their annual homegrown festival Sh’Bang this September. The sauna is constructed in an old horse trailer and uses an innovative woodburning stove design. We’re looking forward to a full review (and hopefully a sweat) soon.