The idea was already two years old, and we finally did it when we built new toilets by the entrance to our restaurant.
We are the first in the world to create a combination of a pizza oven and a sauna. For that reason, we have the copyright to ‘Pizzasauna’. Why not re-use the heat of baking pizza for a sauna? There is no reason not to. It is perfect! Also the event of taking a sauna together and making pizza is the perfect combination. Not only that, we also use it to make hot water for taking hot showers.
We need wood to make a sauna. A huge candlenut tree happened to fall down. Normally, nobody here wants to use the wood of the candlenut tree. When it is wet, it is very heavy and has a terrible smell, and planks made from it warp out of shape very quickly making it useless.
However, when the planks are put in water with bamboo stapled in between them and weighed down with heavy stones, they become nicely carbonized. After 6 months in the water, we stapled them under the roof of our old Batak house for more than a year. Then, the 4-5 cm thick planks stay straight, remain soft, don’t smell and become very light. Ideal for the construction and insulation of a sauna.
For the foundation, we used bricks which we set in place with clay on the roof of our toilet, which was made out of concrete. The pizza oven was set up on a layer of bricks and held in place by clay. To make the shape of the oven, we used wet sand. We covered the sand with newspaper, and on top of this we added clay mixed with sand. As fibers in between, we used the hairy skin of the sugar palm.
In between the layers of clay, we integrated a copper spiral to produce hot water.
We built the chimney out of a piece of stainless steel.
The walls and roof were built out of tongue and groove pieces of plywood. This provides perfect insulation.
Welcome to our sauna!