Infrared or traditional sauna: which should you buy?

They are two different appliances, not two grades of the same one. A traditional sauna heats the air to 80 to 100°C with a stone filled heater you can pour water over. An infrared cabin warms you directly at 45 to 60°C using radiators, and it has no stones and no steam. In practical terms that is a 13 amp socket against a dedicated 35 amp circuit, and roughly 36p a session against £1.84 to £2.37. Price is no longer the tiebreaker, so the decision comes down to what you want the room to do.

Is an infrared cabin actually a sauna?

It is a separate appliance with its own rules. The safety standard that governs both, EN/IEC 60335-2-53, is titled “Particular requirements for sauna heating appliances and infrared cabins”. It names them separately because they are engineered to do different things.

The difference is in how the heat reaches you. Harvia, which makes both, puts it this way: “In a conventional sauna, the heat is transferred to the human body by air. In an infrared cabin, however, the infrared directly warms the tissues of the body.” Harvia also states that the long wave heat from an infrared radiator “goes approximately four centimetres deep, causing perspiration from deep within the tissues”. Those are the manufacturer's statements about its own products rather than independent findings, and they are worth reading as such.

The systematic review most often cited on sauna bathing describes traditional practice as “short exposures (5–20 minutes) at temperatures of 80°C–100°C with dry air (relative humidity of 10% to 20%)”, and notes that infrared cabins “generally run at lower temperatures (45–60°C) than Finnish saunas with similar exposure times”.

	Infrared cabin	Traditional sauna
How you are heated	Radiant heat onto the body	Hot air around the body
Air temperature	45 to 60°C	80 to 100°C
Stones and steam	None	Yes, water on stones
Lowest price in our range	£1,907	£1,802 indoor, £3,495 outdoor
Highest price in our range	£5,495	£9,195 indoor, £11,150 outdoor

Prices are ours as listed on 19 October 2026 and they move. The two hybrid cabins, which carry both kinds of heat, are left out of the table and covered further down. The row that never moves is the third one. An infrared cabin has radiators rather than a stone filled heater, so there is nothing to pour water onto. No löyly, no burst of steam, and no amount of money spent on infrared buys it back.

What does each one ask of your electrics?

This is the difference that changes what the project costs, and it is usually decided before anyone thinks about it.

A 6 kW traditional heater at 230 volts draws about 26 amps. A 13 amp socket at 230 volts carries under 3 kW, so a traditional heater cannot run from one. Harvia publishes a 35 amp fuse for its 6 kW Vega and a 50 amp fuse for the 9 kW, both on a single phase supply, which is what almost every British house has. That means a dedicated hard wired circuit.

It also means paperwork. Under Approved Document P, a room containing a sauna heater is a special location, so not only new circuits but any addition or alteration to an existing circuit in that room is notifiable building work. A registered electrician does it and issues an Electrical Installation Certificate or Minor Works Certificate plus a Building Regulations Compliance Certificate.

An infrared cabin usually sidesteps all of that. The Harvia Onni in our range is rated at 1,400 W or 1,800 W and draws about 7.8 amps at 230 volts, so it runs from an ordinary socket. Plugging an appliance into an existing socket is not electrical installation work, so the Part P question does not arise at all. It arises only if you need a new socket put in.

We do not publish a figure for that electrical work, because it depends entirely on the cable run and what your consumer unit can spare. Get a rough number from an electrician before you commit to either type. On a long garden run it can be a meaningful share of the budget, and it is the cost most often discovered late.

What does each cost per session?

For a traditional sauna the manufacturer publishes a figure. Harvia gives approximately 7 to 9 kWh for a two hour session on a 6 kW family sauna, counting the heat up hour and the hour of use. Under the Ofgem price cap in force from 1 October to 31 December 2026, at 26.32p per kWh with no VAT charged on household electricity between 1 October 2026 and 31 March 2027, that is £1.84 to £2.37 a session. The cap to 30 September 2026 was 26.11p per kWh including VAT, which gave £1.83 to £2.35 for the same session, so the change barely registers on a single sitting.

For infrared there is no equivalent published per session figure, so what follows is arithmetic rather than a citation. An 1,800 W cabin held at full output for a 45 minute session uses 1.8 × 0.75 = 1.35 kWh, about 36p at the same cap. That is an upper bound, because the radiators are dimmable and cycle rather than running flat out throughout.

So an infrared session costs roughly a fifth to a seventh of a traditional one, and it is worth being clear about why. It is not a cleverer machine. It is a smaller box, held at half the temperature, with no stone mass to bring up to heat. You pay less because you are buying less heat, which is exactly the point if lower heat is what you want.

Does the sauna research apply to both?

Mostly not, and this matters because the evidence people have usually read before they start shopping is traditional sauna evidence.

The strongest association on record comes from a Finnish cohort of 2,315 men followed for a median of 20.7 years at a mean sauna temperature of 78.9°C. Against one session a week, four to seven sessions a week showed a hazard ratio of 0.37 for sudden cardiac death (95% CI 0.18 to 0.75) and 0.60 for all cause mortality (95% CI 0.46 to 0.80). It is observational, so it cannot show cause, and at 78.9°C those men were in traditional saunas. It says nothing about a 45 to 60°C infrared cabin.

The infrared literature is much thinner. The clearest study put 17 people with rheumatoid arthritis and 17 with ankylosing spondylitis in an infrared cabin at an ambient 55°C, 30 minutes twice a week for four weeks. Pain fell during a session by roughly 40 per cent in the rheumatoid group and 60 per cent in the spondylitis group, both statistically significant. Across the four weeks the improvements did not reach significance, and there was no control or sham group. The reasonable reading is relief while you are warm, well tolerated, on a small uncontrolled sample.

The limitation that covers the whole field is worth stating once. The 2018 review found 40 clinical studies and 3,855 participants, of which “only 13 studies were randomized controlled trials and most studies were small (n < 40)”. We go through what the evidence does and does not support in are saunas good for you. If you have a heart condition, or you are pregnant, speak to your GP before using either type.

So which one suits your reason for wanting one?

Work backwards from why you want it rather than forwards from the specification.

• You want the Finnish thing. Steam, heat you feel land on your skin, a session shared with someone, a garden building you walk out to. That is a traditional sauna and infrared will not substitute for it at any price.
• You want warmth after work, indoors, with no building work. A spare room, a garage corner, twenty minutes, no electrician, no planning question. That is an infrared cabin, and it is the shorter route by a distance.
• You genuinely cannot choose, and you have space indoors. A hybrid does both. The Holl's Combi 2 is a two person cabin, 1,400 by 1,300mm, with a 3.5 kW Harvia heater and stones alongside 2,200 W of infrared emitters, at £3,795. The Harvia Family Hybrid Small does the same in a larger 1.66 by 1.59m cabin with a 3.6 kW heater and a 350 W infrared radiator. Because each carries a stone heater, each needs the traditional sauna's dedicated circuit: Harvia specify 16 amps for both. A hybrid removes the decision, at a higher price than a single type cabin of the same size.

One piece of advice before you spend anything. Sit in both. A leisure centre session or a spa day costs under £30 and settles this question faster than any specification sheet will. The people who most often tell us afterwards that they bought the wrong type are the ones who chose infrared because it plugged in, having never actually felt löyly.

What this means when choosing

At the entry level the two types now cost about the same. Our cheapest infrared cabin and our cheapest indoor traditional cabin sit within roughly £100 of each other, so the old shorthand that infrared is the budget option no longer describes our range. That is good news, because it frees you to choose on what you want rather than on what you can afford.

Once the appliance type is settled, the decisions diverge. If you have chosen infrared, the remaining questions are size, where it goes indoors and whether the socket you intend to use is suitable, and the infrared saunas collection is the place to compare. If you have chosen traditional, the next decisions are format, size, heater and siting, taken in that order in our outdoor sauna buying guide, and the kilowatt arithmetic is worked through in what size sauna heater do I need. None of that arithmetic applies to an infrared cabin, which is the quickest check that you are reading the right guide for the appliance you have chosen.

Either type going in the house rather than the garden raises the same practical question, and it is worth settling before you choose a model: the room has to take the cabin, and the ceiling has to give you room to build it. Our guide to how much space an indoor sauna needs sets out the floor areas, finished heights and assembly headroom across the indoor range, and the point most people are surprised by is that the ceiling binds before the floor does.

Size is the first of those infrared questions, and grouped by the number of people each maker states, the live infrared range looks like this:

• One person: the Holl's Moon 1.
• One or two: the Harvia Onni.
• Two: the France Sauna Apollon 2, the Holl's Moon 2 and the Holl's Canopée 2.
• Three: the France Sauna Apollon 3.
• Three to four, built for a corner: the France Sauna Apollon 3C and the Holl's Canopée 3C.
• Four: the Holl's Moon 4.
• Six: the Holl's Canopée 6.

A corner model is worth a look if the space you have in mind is the end of a room rather than its middle, because it puts the cabin's widest face across the corner instead of along one wall.

Sources

• Appliance standard covering both types: EN/IEC 60335-2-53, Particular requirements for sauna heating appliances and infrared cabins. ansi.org
• How infrared heat reaches the body, and the four centimetre depth: Harvia support. support.harvia.com
• Temperature and humidity ranges for traditional and infrared, and the size of the evidence base: Hussain and Cohen, Clinical Effects of Regular Dry Sauna Bathing: A Systematic Review, Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine, 2018. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
• Heater power, published volume ranges, fuse ratings and session energy: Harvia. support.harvia.com and harvia.com
• Notifiable electrical work and special locations: Approved Document P, 2013 edition. gov.uk
• Electricity price cap unit rates, with the period stated beside each figure: Ofgem, 1 October to 31 December 2026 rates read 1 October 2026. ofgem.gov.uk
• Sauna frequency and mortality in the Finnish cohort: Laukkanen et al, JAMA Internal Medicine, 2015. jamanetwork.com
• Infrared sauna in rheumatoid arthritis and ankylosing spondylitis: Oosterveld et al, Clinical Rheumatology, 2009. link.springer.com