Ahiruneko’s single-guy sauna days are done, but this gadget promises to bring the steam right into his home.
Back in his bachelor days, our Japanese-language reporter Ahiruneko used to go to a sauna once or twice a week. Now, though, he’s got a wife and kid, plus an apartment out in the suburbs that’s closer to the mountains than the office, and thus a long commute, leaving him with only enough time for one or two sauna days in an entire year.
So in his quest for the optimal sauna/life balance, he decided to purchase a home sauna.
Converting an entire room of his home into a sauna facility would be excessive in terms of cost and floorspace, so instead of doing that he went looking for a home sauna kit on Rakuten, where he found an assemble-it-yourself steam sauna kit for 17,780 yen (US$112). All of the components shipped together in a large cardboard box, and Ahiruneko laid them out to see what he’d be working with.
Folded up inside that cloth pouch is the material for the sides of the sauna tent, pictured with it in the above photo are a floor mat, piping for the tent’s frame, one device for producing steam, another for dispersing it inside the tent, and a hose to connect them.
Also included in the set were a folding chair and one of those rollers that are supposed to stimulate the pressure points on the bottom of your feet to provide various vague wellness benefits.
The included instructions were written in less-than-fluent Japanese, but between them and the photos on the Rakuten product page here, Ahiruneko could figure out what he needed to do. He started by removing the tent material from its pouch and assembling the pipe frame.
This was a pretty quick and simple process, and before long the tent was standing in the middle of his living room.
It almost looks like a giant down vest, with a slot for your neck and also two little slits that you can open if you want to reach your hands outside the tent.
There’s also an exterior pocket where you can keep the remote control to turn the steam generator on and off or adjust the temperature.
Speaking of the steam generator, it resembles a rice cooker.
You fill it with water, and once the liquid gets hot enough to start turning into steam, it gets channeled through the side of the tent by the connecting tube…
…and dispersed by the steam box, which you place inside the sauna with yourself.
The dimensions of the tent are cozy, but there’s room to spare in which to fit the chair, and laying down the mat before your steam session will help keep your floor from getting damp.
OK, with everything assembled, it was time to turn ono the steam generator! Ahiruneko hit the power button…and had no idea what the display said.
That blurriness isn’t from Ahiruneko’s camera. His brand-new home sauna’s display was foggy and indistinct, almost like it was censoring itself with a mosaic. Luckily, the control buttons all had legible labels, and the printed instructions had told Ahiruneko that once steam started coming out of the top of the sauna tent, it was ready for him to step in.
It took about 20 minutes for the steam to heat up, but when it did, entering the tent turned out to be surprisingly tricky, since the frame has a pair of connected pipes running horizontally across the front. Ahiruneko ended up having to temporarily pull them apart, step inside the tent, and then put them back together.
Now that he was finally inside, all he needed to do was zip the front back up…
…and settle in for a steam session.
If you’re setting one of these up for yourself, you’ll definitely want to give your housemates a heads up beforehand, so that they don’t wander into the room and think you’ve been decapitated, or maybe had your body from the neck down converted into machinery in order to become a sauna cyborg.
But as startling as this setup looks when viewed from the outside, it was extremely relaxing for Ahiruneko on the inside. He’d purposely kept his expectations low about how high the temperature could get, but it turned out that the steam filling his home sauna was surprisingly hot. It wasn’t long until his body was sweating steadily, but his head being exposed kept the environment from feeling stifling or even stuffy.
In time, though, Ahiruneko started to sweat from his face too, so he unzipped one of the arm holes so he could grab the remote control and turn down the temperature just a bit.
He’d actually put a second remote control in the pocket too, the one for his TV, since having his own personal sauna means he can watch whatever he wants while staming.
As for negatives, the device that emits steam inside the tent does, understandably, get very hot, so you do need to be conscious of where it’s placed and make sure not to step on it. You also need to wipe down the tent and let it dry before you fold it back up, which adds a little time and hassle to the start-to-finish process.
Still, even with some cleaning up to do, Ahiruneko is still coming out ahead, time-wise, by being able to have a sauna session without having to leave his home. He thinks he’ll still probably look for opportunities to treat himself to a trip to a professional sauna when he has the chance, but for those times when his schedule or budget is tight, he’ll be very happy to use this at-home version again.
Photos ©SoraNews24
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