It’s important to clean your sauna rocks regularly. For commercial use, it is necessary to clean your sauna rocks every 2-3 months. For your home, you should clean it at least once a year.

WHY CLEAN YOUR SAUNA ROCKS

Cleaning your sauna rocks is important to maintain the airflow of your sauna, as well as lowering the maintenance costs over time. If you don’t clean your sauna’s heater and the rocks in them, it could eventually lead to decreased airflow for less heat distribution in your sauna, or even damage of the stainless steel from the heater. 

This easy six-step process is the same whether you have an electric sauna, interior wood burning sauna, or exterior wood burning sauna.

How to clean your sauna rocks:

1. Make sure your sauna rocks are not hot!! This seems pretty obvious, but we have to tell you!
2. Soak your sauna rocks in warm water with soap for at least 5 minutes.
3. While your stones are soaking, thoroughly clean the inside of your sauna heater with a cloth or paper towel. Try to remove any loose sauna stones at the bottom.
4. Lightly brush your sauna rocks after they have had time to soak. Then rinse them with clean water.
5. Wait for your sauna rocks to be dry before putting them back into the heater.
6. When you place the dry sauna stones back into the sauna’s heater, make sure to optimize the placement of stones for airflow. Try to add the biggest stones at the bottom and smaller stones as it gets to the top.

And you’re done! Now you’re ready for your next sauna. 

We try to do this every six months for our sauna at home. The whole process takes about 2 hours, but that’s mostly waiting for the rocks to dry. All-in-all, it takes about half an hour of work to make sure that you’re maintaining your sauna for an ideal experience.

Another tip: Make sure not to add too much water to the sauna stones at a time. A couple of ladles full of water from our bucket and ladle accessory will do the trick in steaming it up, any more than that and you could be at risk for damaging your heater! You can check out all of our sauna accessories here.