by Procraft
Work it out with one simple sum: heater kilowatts times hours of use times what you pay per kilowatt hour. A 6kW heater running a full hour at 100 percent would use 6 kWh. In practice it uses less, because once the room is hot the thermostat cycles the elements on and off. Take the rate off your own hydro bill and you will have a real number in a minute.
Electricity is billed per kilowatt hour. A heater rated in kilowatts running for one hour at full draw uses that many kilowatt hours.
Multiply that by your rate per kWh. If your bill says 15 cents per kWh, a 6kW heater at full draw for an hour is 6 times 0.15, which is 90 cents. Use your own rate, because it varies by province, by supplier and, in Ontario, by time of day.
The sum above assumes the elements run flat out the whole time. They do not. The heater pulls full power during the warm-up, then the thermostat starts cycling it to hold the temperature, so it draws power only part of the time. A typical session is a harder warm-up followed by a much lighter hold. Treat the full-draw number as your ceiling, not your average.
For most households a home sauna is a modest line on the hydro bill, closer to running an oven for a while than anything dramatic. Do the sum with your own rate and your own heater size and you will know exactly where you stand. There is more detail in how much electricity an electric sauna uses.
Procraft builds Western red cedar saunas and makes four CSA-approved electric sauna heaters from 4.5kW to 9kW. See the heaters, read about Western red cedar, or see how installation works.