14-03-2025
Sun Home Luminar Sauna Review: No Steam
For the past few weeks, my 10-year-old daughter has had a little ritual. Once she gets home from school, she grabs her library book and disappears into the backyard. She turns on the backyard Sun Home Luminar sauna, sets the temperature to 120 degrees, and sits in the room reading, fully clothed. I once went outside to find five neighborhood kids sitting there, chatting and warming up.
I live in Portland, Oregon, which has a healthy sauna culture—probably because in an area that's so gray and rainy, saunas have become an important tool to fight seasonal depression. Not only do I have a standing account at a local wellness center, I also joined a gym near my house to sit in the sauna. When I was offered the opportunity to test a widely available at-home sauna, I jumped at the chance.
McDreamy, Not McSteamy
There are a few things you need to keep in mind if you're looking at this particular sauna from Sun Home. The first is that this is an infrared sauna, not a traditional sauna with löyly—that is, the steam that comes when you pour water on the heating elements.
Photograph: Adrienne So
There are devotees of both traditional and infrared saunas, and they can argue back and forth basically forever (and do). Traditional saunas are more likely to catch on fire. Infrared saunas are drier and thus more sanitary and easier to maintain. The health benefits of traditional saunas have been far more widely studied, and so on. For my purposes, the two main differences are that traditional saunas tend to be more expensive (indeed, Sun Home offers one for a cool $15,000), and in an IR sauna, you need to be dry when you sit in it so you don't electrocute yourself on the heating panels.
