Anyone built themselves an outdoor sauna

[Adsibob]

Looking at a Sauna that will need a 9kw power supply. This is more than I think my external 13A sockets will provide. I have a couple of external lighting circuits, but presumably they won’t be enough either?

[SteamyTea]

2 minutes ago, Adsibob said:

This is more than I think my external 13A sockets will provide

They can only supply, safely, a 10A continuous load.

 

9 kW is a big sauna stove for a domestic.

 

From the sizes you said earlier, a 6 kW at most.

[Adsibob]

15 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

From the sizes you said earlier, a 6 kW at most.

But even this couldn’t be done from a 13A socket, right?

[SteamyTea]

1 minute ago, Adsibob said:

But even this couldn’t be done from a 13A socket, right?

No.

And you would not want to either.

Get it wired up properly.

Naked people, a few sips of vodka, a bucket of water and an electrical stove.

Not a good mix.

 

(I had to deal with two fatalities when, after a catalogue of errors, caused one of our saunas to catch fire. Remember I said about the thermal fuse and the timer, that was brought in after the inquests)

[Pocster]

52 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

Naked people, a few slips , a (expletive deleted)et of water and an electrical toy.

 

[Adsibob]

I will get it wired properly by a professional spark, but I’m just not sure where he would run the electricity from. We have a power circuit and a lighting circuit in the garden, can one of those be extended to provide power to the sauna, or does it need its own dedicated supply from the CU? The difficulty I have is that the CU is right at the front of the house, and the location of the Sauna will be right at the back of the garden, some 50m away, with a whole house in the way. I don’t mind digging up a channel to install a conduit in the garden, but running cable in the house is going to be a PITA.

Edited May 4 by Adsibob

[SteamyTea]

6 minutes ago, Adsibob said:

We have a power circuit and a lighting circuit in the garden, can one of those be extended to provide power to the sauna,

Not sure now as the Electrical Regs are updated quite often.

There was a special section for 'hot boxes' in the 16^th edition (the red book), saunas came under those regs back in the 1990's early 2000's.

[Adsibob]

On 04/05/2024 at 19:33, Adsibob said:

I will get it wired properly by a professional spark, but I’m just not sure where he would run the electricity from. We have a power circuit and a lighting circuit in the garden, can one of those be extended to provide power to the sauna, or does it need its own dedicated supply from the CU? The difficulty I have is that the CU is right at the front of the house, and the location of the Sauna will be right at the back of the garden, some 50m away, with a whole house in the way. I don’t mind digging up a channel to install a conduit in the garden, but running cable in the house is going to be a PITA.

Just re-posting this in case any sparks can comment. I've already outlined the issue with running the Sauna's power supply from the consumer unit, there is a whole (recently finished) house in the way.

 

Other alternatives (to the extent permitted under the regs) might be:

1. to run it from the supply that powers the kitchen appliances, we have separate fuses with isolator switches for each appliance, including an induction hob, microwave and oven. Is that even feasible? The advantage of such a solution, if it were possible, is that the utility room where all those switches are, is about 30m from the site of the sauna, and there is much less house in the way, in fact just one wall.
2. to run from the external power supply at the front of the house, where we have in theory an outlet from which to connect a car charger. We don't yet have an electric car, so this was just future proofing for the "one day" scenario. I'd only want to do this if it still enabled us to use the car charger, but I guess worst case scenario you could have a switch which enabled only one of the two to be on (can't imagine I will Sauna for the entirety of the time it takes to charge a car).

Maybe I'll have to run it from the consumer unit after all and accept that there will be some disruption in the house. It's not as bad as I first feared, but it's far from ideal.

 

 

Edited September 24 by Adsibob