Authentic Sauna, Brought to the United States.
With Love, from Finland.
I’m Janni Jalo, the founder of Home Is Where The Sauna Is. This website began as a passion project and a one-woman production in January 2024 and expanded to include an online store in August 2026.
Since I’m a bilingual language professional and have over 40 years of sauna experience, my goal with this website was always clear and has remained the same: I offer 100% human-written articles and authentic sauna expertise that is relatively rare in the English-speaking world.
A store compliments this setup, as you can now actually get some of the sauna equipment I have introduced previously and continue to write about. We sell several Finnish sauna heater brands that virtually none of our competitors do, and ship them directly to your US address.
(For more detailed store information, please see our Why Buy from Us page.)
Below, I’ll jump into my personal history with saunas and why I love writing about them.
Why Saunas & Who Am I to Write about Them?
These are the questions you should ask every person/company giving you sauna information, especially in the United States where saunas are poorly understood and especially nowadays when fewer and fewer people write themselves, depending on AI-generated text instead.
If you did ask these questions, you’d most likely be very disappointed with the answers, at least if the parties involved replied honesty:
🔶 They sell saunas/sauna heaters because they’re big and expensive. This means fewer sales but higher profits and less time spent packing and shipping orders because you don’t get dozens, let alone hundreds, of them a day.
🔶 Not that most of these parties pack and ship sauna products themselves anyway. They are dropshippers, which means they act as a middleman between the manufacturer and the customer. The manufacturer is the one carrying stock and shipping the products.
🔶 What that unfortunately translates to is that many sellers never even see and much less handle any sauna equipment themselves. Many have never tested most or any saunas or heaters they sell, and even fewer have their own saunas, have built saunas, or otherwise use them regularly.
🔶 Obviously this leaves the sellers clueless. How could they have anything useful to say about saunas when they have absolutely no sauna experience and knowledge?
🔶 Then AI enters the picture. Outsourcing all content creation to artificial intelligence that relies on probabilities and guesses, making things up about 50% of the time, possibly reaching an inaccuracy rate of up to 79% (!), can’t be a good idea, but what else would an ignorant seller do who’s in it just for the money?
🔶 As the final kiss of death, these parties start using AI chatbots as their customer service agents, spewing even more nonsense at you.
So yeah, that reality explains why there’s so much sauna misinformation online.
Now that you have this very needed background info, let’s see how I compare to these other parties and sellers.
Saunas and sauna-going is in my blood. I was born to a saunaing family and raised Finnish.
Already decades before I was born, my Finnish grandmother worked as a saunottaja in Finland, which meant she washed people in public saunas and spanked them with a sauna whisk (a legitimate profession at the time, particularly in cities where few people could have their own saunas).
In Finland, most women go to sauna during their entire pregnancy, and babies are also taken to sauna starting from a very young age (at four and a half months, on average), so that’s how my sauna journey started as well, already in the womb.
When my mom was pregnant with me, my parents moved to a newly built home that had an indoor sauna with an electric sauna heater. It looked like this:
I have the greatest memories from that sauna. Kids sit on the lower sauna bench where it’s cooler, so that’s where my sister and I always sat too. And when we weren’t sitting, we were lying on the sauna floor, bouncing Super Balls off the tiled back wall upstand.
We lived in that home for seven years, and our next home also had an indoor sauna. That ended up being my family’s forever home, which means my dad still lives there and that I have previously featured our/his old Helo sauna heater.
(That heater was recently replaced with a new one.)
When I reached adulthood and moved out, my first apartment didn’t have a sauna, but when I bought a house (that didn’t come with an indoor sauna), my dad and I built an outdoor sauna on my property (that already had two old saunas, but I’ll save that story for later).
Back then, I decided to salvage an old sauna heater and gave it a makeover I was really pleased with, using heat resistant spray paint after removing all the rust. It served us, and later tenants, for around six years before it couldn’t be salvaged anymore, at least not without new steel and some serious welding.
That heater was replaced in early 2024 with a new Harvia wood-burning stove that I still use and that we modified to include a water tank as well. We also painted the sauna building.
Nowadays I live in two places and have two actively used saunas, the outdoor one I just wrote about and an indoor sauna with an electric heater in the suburbs.
It’s that lifelong sauna experience that makes one a sauna expert and equipped to give sauna information to others. It’s also exactly what most sauna sources and stores lack.
Far too often, I come across American influencers, with absolutely no sauna experience, “educating” others about saunas when they are in no position to be giving that advice.
Almost always they also misinterpret the sauna studies they reference, once again because their sauna understanding is so poor.
Although it’s impossible to compensate for the lack of real sauna experience by reading scientific sauna studies, it doesn’t hurt to acquaint yourself with studies too. As the best sauna studies come from Finland, it helps to know Finnish (that I’m fully fluent in), since local news sources often interview the researchers.
This very recent study examined how important humidity (i.e., löyly = pouring water on the hot sauna rocks) is in a sauna for health benefits, something that millions of Finns have known for centuries, but now it’s been scientifically proven as well.
I’m sure it won’t stop dry sauna clowns from spreading misinformation and new companies launching fake saunas, but at least you now know better.
I want to conclude with what English and writing mean to me.
I was 14 years old when it struck me what I wanted to do in life: nothing lit me up like the English language did, so I knew that whatever the future had in store for me, English would be at the core of it.
The way English sparked joy and brought purpose to my life felt almost other-worldly. To this day, English feeds my soul in a way nothing else can.
In my 20s, that love of English embodied into a Master’s degree after five years of university studies. It’s only natural that I became a writer.
Nowadays, all that matters more than ever, as most people are not willing and soon not even capable of writing anything of substance themselves. Human-written content is getting rarer every single day, with AI slop creeping in from every crevasse.
That’s why I love the combination that I have to offer to the world: over four decades of authentic sauna experience paired with the skill and will to write about it.
