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Home Saunas In Finland
All About Home Saunas in Finland
Home saunas in Finland are part of everyday life
considering that the
average Finn has been to a sauna before the age of one. In the olden days,
before indoor plumbing, the Finns used saunas for cleaning themselves and
children were born in its warm sanctuary. There are millions of saunas in
use (one for every three inhabitants) and the Finns have become recognized
experts in sauna design and construction, exporting their knowledge all over
the world.
The smoke sauna (savusauna) is one of the oldest authentic Finnish home sauna designs and still
found in some parts of Finland. A hearth of rocks is heated for hours by a
belching, smoky fire vented through an opening in the wall or door. Once the
fire dies, the smoke is cleared out and the sauna closed. The residual heat
from the heated rocks raises the temperature for the traditional smoke sweat
bath. Modern home sauna designs are based on heaters vented through a stove
pipe. Outdoor family saunas still use wood-burning stoves, but planners for
residential indoor saunas increasingly incorporate electric heaters into
their designs.
A very important design aspect of Finnish type
sauna room heaters is the addition of
a tray to hold the sauna rocks. A wood-burning or electric heater can hold
more than a hundred pounds of igneous rocks to store the heat. Bathers then
dowse the heated rocks with water (a process called löyly in Finnish) to
produce steam, a feature that sets Finnish designs apart from the dry air
home saunas of neighboring Sweden.
When designing your own home sauna, keep in mind that the traditional
Finnish design requires a wood-burning stove. Modern wood-fired stoves
designed specifically for home saunas are very energy efficient. They burn
less wood than their predecessors and heat up the room more quickly. A
typical Finnish type wood burner heats rooms sized 280 – 1000 sq. ft. and
can hold from 70 – 130 lbs. of rocks.
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