What an Electric vs Infrared Sauna Cost Calculator Taught Me About Our Power Bill
Electric vs infrared sauna cost calculator: that's the tab that's been open on my phone all week, ever since our neighbor Rick saw our power bill and asked, dead serious, if we were mining bitcoin in the garage.
Nope, Rick. Just the sauna. But it got me curious, so I ran our setup through one of those calculators, and no joke, the numbers made me put my coffee down.
Our electric heater is a 6 kW kiuas, and I run it three, maybe four nights a week once the lakes freeze up. The calculator says a schedule like that burns about 857 kilowatt hours a year on a traditional electric heater. Roughly $128 a year at average rates. The infrared cabin on the same schedule? About 239 kWh, around $36.
I read that three times. Same sweat, roughly a quarter of the bill.
Fair warning, this isn't a perfect comparison. The infrared runs cooler, you don't get the same löyly, and my grandpa would've had opinions about calling it a sauna at all. He'd say the bench by the stove IS the sauna, and everything else is a warming closet. The man wasn't wrong.
But for the nights when I just want heat in my bones without firing up six kilowatts, I get the appeal. Seventy-two percent less energy. About 526 pounds less CO2 a year, which my daughter the environmental science major keeps pointing out at dinner.
If you're staring at your own power bill and wondering what your sauna is costing you, poke through the posts below. I dug into the numbers so you don't have to squint at your meter in the dark like I did. Well. Mostly so.
One last thing I checked while I had the calculator open: preheat. My old routine was 35 minutes of firing the kiuas before anyone got in. The infrared presets assume about 10. That's where a chunk of the difference hides, and it's also the part my wife cares about, because a 10 minute wait means the kids stick around for a round instead of wandering off to the lake.
Also posted on:
Comments
Post a Comment