The best traditional saunas, and the circuit they all need

A stove and stones, and the fact that you can throw water on them. A traditional sauna heats the air in a room and lets you control the humidity; an infrared cabin heats you directly with radiant panels and cannot produce steam at all. Every unit on this page is an electric stove-heated room. That is a different appliance from an infrared cabin, not a better grade of one, which is why they are compared here separately rather than ranked against each other on price.

Every one on this page does - all seven publish 240V, with stoves from 3 kW to 6 kW. That is the practical difference between this category and infrared: a 240V appliance is wired, not plugged, so an electrician and a dedicated circuit come before the delivery date rather than after it. The computed row on each card shows the NEC continuous-load breaker size derived from the listing's own kilowatts and volts, because not one listing here publishes an amperage.

On the published numbers, yes - and the arithmetic is worth doing yourself. On the sizing basis this site uses throughout, 50 cubic feet per kilowatt, a 6 kW stove is rated for about 300 cubic feet. The barrels here that publish an exterior footprint come in under that figure for their whole outside envelope, and the interior is always smaller than the exterior, so the stove has headroom. The honest caveat is that four of these seven listings publish no dimensions at all, so for those you cannot check this at home.

Because this page ranks what the listing lets you plan, and the cube publishes the most: exterior dimensions, stove rating, voltage, temperature range, shipping weight, wood species and support terms. If you need six seats that ranking does not help you, which is why every row states who the unit is for. Read down to the barrels - they cost less per seat than anything else on the page, and the per-seat column above computes it from today's live price.

It means the bench perimeter can take that many people sitting upright, shoulder to shoulder, and nothing more. Nobody on this page publishes an interior volume and nobody publishes a bench length, so a seat count is the softest number on the listing. One cedar barrel here publishes a room size in its own copy that works out tight for the six it claims, and its own listing says to plan around four - which is unusually honest for the category and worth more than a bigger number would be.

Across these seven rooms: seven publish a stove rating, all seven publish a voltage, three publish an exterior footprint, three name the wood, three publish a maximum temperature and two publish a warranty term, the longest of them 84 months. Interior volume: none. A listing that will not name its wood is selling you "solid wood", which in this category is a word rather than a specification.

Decide on humidity and on wiring, in that order. If the ritual you want involves water on stones and a room that smells of hot cedar, only a traditional sauna does it and you are committing to an electrician. If you want to be in heat four times a week with the least friction and a standard outlet, an infrared cabin is the honest answer and this is not your page. Our infrared versus traditional guide works through the difference without pretending either one wins outright.

Because a score implies a measurement and we have measured nothing - we own none of these. Every figure above was read from the seller's own listing on the date printed on each card, every computed figure names the basis it was computed on, and every blank is a spec the seller does not publish.