INDOOR SAUNA KITS

The indoor sauna kit is a comparatively recent innovation that allows a fully functional stove heated or infrared sauna to be housed and used within a room in a regular home. The sauna may occupy the entire room, or only a part of it.

Indoor sauna kits take the form of a wooden lining that is usually fixed to the existing walls within a room to create a sauna environment. The kit includes all of the wall and ceiling panels, the materials for the benching, any necessary coving, and usually the selected heater or stove, plus a stove guard. The kit arrives in pieces and is assembled and fitted in its finished location.

Typical rooms that can be used for internal home sauna conversions include, upstairs and downstairs rooms, lofts, cellars, dorma conversions, garages and even old out buildings.

The only requirements for an internal sauna kit are a basic level of ventilation (e.g. an opening window) and self supporting walls and a ceiling onto which the lining can be fitted.

What are the room requirements for a sauna kit

Naturally the room that will hold the sauna needs some natural ventilation like a window (or failing that an extractor), but the general guide is that the working sauna will require no more ventilation than a typical bathroom.

In fact, a sauna will generally produce less steam and vapour than most hot showers, so if the room in question has a window and an internal door it will almost certainly suffice.

Sauna kits can be customized to fit just about any room's geometry, but the closer that the room shape is to a regular rectangular box, the less challenging the fitting project will be.

What is an indoor sauna kit and how does it work

The kind of sauna kit used to create a sauna room in a house is often referred to as a material sauna kit. (This kind of kit can be used in any room, or even a cabin or shed, so long as there are walls that can be used for the fixing of the sauna panels.)

This kind of kit contains all of the materials necessary to line the sauna room and will include the wall and ceiling panels, the benches, any necessary coving and normally the heater (stove), along with a stove guard. Nails and screws plus an instruction manual (and possibly a video or DVD) will also be included in the sauna kit. All components from the tongue and groove panels to the benches will need to be assembled by the purchaser.

It is very important with these sauna kits to be aware of, not only what is included in the kit, but also what is not.

Some sauna kits include vapour barriers, or the materials from which you can produce them, and all kits should have pre-treated timber (normally cedar) that requires no painting or varnishing.

What these kits do not include is the structural frame of the sauna room. They are in essence an internal lining. This means that if any additional free standing walls are required, other than those of the room in which the sauna is being housed, they will need to be constructed separately and independently of the sauna kit.

As an example, many sauna kits are fitted against two or possibly three existing walls within a room, however, if it is necessary to close the sauna room off with a fourth wall, then this stud wall or frame will not be included in the sauna kit materials.

Internal sauna kits typically take two to three days to assemble and require a basic level of DIY competence and a standard tool kit.

Pre-fab saunas

There are varying levels of pre-fab saunas where the bulk of the assembly has been factory completed.

With theses sauna kits the walls and ceiling are delivered in a completed state and the lining is already attached to the freestanding structural walls. In the case of these sauna kits, no additional materials are required and the pre-fab sauna will be inclusive of all components, i.e. internal, external and structurally supporting.

This type of sauna kit takes only a few hours to install and does not normally require any special tools (e.g. saws, drills etc.)