How To: Look After and Maintain Your Sauna

Now you’ve got your sauna, how do you look after it?

Cleaning Your Sauna

Tools required for cleaning a sauna

• Stiff bristle brush for scrubbing the benches 
• Lightly soaped water using a mild soap like Ecover. There are sauna cleaners available, but a mild soap is perfectly adequate for the job 
• Broom
• Dustpan and brush
• A hose or watering can

General cleaning advice

Scrub your benches with a stiff brush and warm soapy water, rinsing thoroughly with a hose or watering can filled with clean water afterwards. Ensure you have access to fully clean beneath the sauna benches. This is essential because any mould and bacteria will circulate in the air around the room, possibly ending up in your respiratory system during your next session. 

If you use leaf whisks, we recommend allowing the leaves on the ground and benches to dry before sweeping them up — it’s much easier to sweep dry leaves than soggy ones!

Commercial use: Clean your sauna after each session, especially if there are any Covid-19 regulations you may need to observe.

Personal use: Cleaning your sauna once or twice a week will be sufficient. 

Best Sauna Practice

At the start of each sauna session

It’s important to first enter your sauna clean – always shower before you enter! This helps remove dirt and bacteria, making it easier for the space to remain sanitary and leaving you feeling cleaner than when you first entered! We also always recommend you sit on a fresh towel as this helps keep the benches clean and hygienic.

At the end of a session

1. When you’ve finished your sauna session, if you use a wood burning stove place a few more logs into the stove. If you use an electric heater, set it to run for an extra hour 
2. Open the sauna vents and doors to allow the sauna to fully ventilate
3. At this point, whilst the sauna is still hot, scrub down the benches with a stiff bristled brush and lightly soaped warm water
4. Rinse the brushed benches with clean water to remove the dirty liquid; if you have good drainage, you can rinse the walls and benches down with a hose
5. Allow the sauna to remain hot so it dries out, and leave the doors and vents open
6. Always ventilate your sauna after use, whether or not you’re scrubbing the benches

General Maintenance For Conserving Your Sauna And Accessories

Preserving Stove Rocks

Sauna rocks, whether used commercially or domestically, have a limited lifespan. 

The rocks will slightly expand and contract as they warm up and cool down, resulting in them gradually breaking apart. This usually occurs every two to five years with domestic stoves and on average, every six to twelve months for commercial stoves. 

Every now and then with electrical heaters, you should remove the stove rocks and then loosely pack them back in again — as the rocks expand and contract, they begin to lock themselves together tighter and tighter, which can damage the elements. Packing them loosely allows for air flow and less risk of damage to the electrical elements.

Rocks and Essential oils

Many people enjoy using essential oils, and often directly drip these straight onto the rock and stove. Please don’t! As the oils come into contact with heat, the molecules change their structure and can form carcinogenic compounds. It is also common practice to drop the oils into the water and then ladle the infused water directly onto the rocks; we would also advise against this. The oil will still stain the rocks and leave a residue build-up, causing a similar issue.

Instead, we recommend placing a few drops of essential oil with water into a metal container. Simply place the container onto the rocks, or above the stove, so the water evaporates into the air and doesn’t damage either your health or the rocks. Alternatively, if you’re looking for pleasant sauna smells, instead of using essential oils pick fresh herbs such as lavender branches and weave them into your whisk to create a subtle, natural aroma.

1. Periodically check if your stones are crumbling and cracking 
2. If you see they’re starting to disintegrate, remove them and replace with new rocks as they will no longer be capable of holding heat or producing decent quantities of steam 
3. The rocks cool slightly each time water is splashed on to them making them contract.  The more steam you create, the shorter the lifespan of the rocks. Do not feel tempted to tip buckets of water on to the rocks, this can result in damaging the stove and unnecessarily shortening the lifespan of your rock. 

Commercial Saunas 

If you have an uninsulated cladded commercial sauna, we highly recommend you look to remedy this, especially the ceiling. Uninsulated commercial saunas will lose heat, causing the stove to work harder than necessary and drastically shorten its lifespan. Replacing multiple heaters a year will of course be far more expensive than simply insulating the sauna properly to begin with.

Stove maintenance 

Wood Burning Stoves

Burning the right type of wood is essential: 

• Do not burn treated, oiled or painted timbers; these all release chemicals which can be hazardous to your health.
• Do not use DEFRA approved logs as they burn too hot and could melt the stove
• We recommend using thinly chopped hard or soft-woods to start the fire, as they quickly reach the desired temperature, preventing particle build-up in the chimney flue 
• Kiln-dried wood is critical for sauna performance, as wet timber will not reach the temperature your sauna requires to function. We suggest using kiln-dried birch for the major burning period.  Other timber such as Alder can also be used

Cleaning your stove or heater

At the end of your sauna session, place another log into the stove. You don’t need to worry about cleaning the stove just yet, let everything burn down to ash — you don’t want to be playing with hot embers!

At the start of your next session, simply scrape out the ash into a pan and throw it out before building your next fire.

For an electric heater, there’s even less to worry about – simply turn it off when you’re finished!