It is easy to heat a sauna with a wood stove quickly and if you heat the stove correctly, you can save a lot of time on the sauna preparation to enjoy the bath procedures longer.

Which wood is best for the sauna? The wood you use is very important for how long your sauna heats up. How it burns affects how soon you will heat up the steam room. It is important that the firewood is dry and medium-sized. You should divide ordinary logs, which are sold in nets, into 2–4 parts. The humidity of wood should not exceed 20%. Hardwood produces more heat when burned. Wood from oak, maple, birch and beech heats the sauna faster than wood from spruce, pine or alder.

What is also important is the air access to the firebox. To burn wood quickly, you need a constant flow of sufficient air. There are some simple rules to achieve this:

• Before putting logs in, clean the firebox, remove the ash and coals left in it after the last kindling.
• The firebox should be filled with wood for not more than 2/3 and not less than 1/2. Constantly check this amount and add wood timely, every 10–15 minutes as a rule.
• The firewood should be loosely spaced to each other. You can easily achieve this by putting the wood not in parallel but in different directions. Then it will be easier for the air to get into the burning area. You also should make sure that the coals do not cover the holes in the grate and do not interfere with the airflow from below.
• To heat the stove to maximum temperatures, the blower needs to be open. But you should remember that excessive heating of the stove reduces its service life and also increases the risk of fire.
  Adjust the burning intensity by the gap width of opening the ash pan. Do not let the metal of the stove heat up to red. At the same time, the stove should be hot enough to quickly heat the sauna.
• Do not let the ash pan be filled with ash so that the ash prevents the air supply.
• When you see the first red coals, you can stir the coals and firewood every 5–10 minutes – then the high-temperature area will be expanded, and the burning will be more intensive.

And the last tip: save the heat in the steam room, open and close the door as quickly as possible when you enter the steam room.

In the video, you can see how we, following these tips, could heat the sauna by 110 degrees in 1 hour for the Harvia M3 stove and by 104 degrees in 1 hour and 40 minutes for the Huum stove. The video is made to show you the maximum capabilities of the stove for rapid heating of the sauna. You may notice a typical hum during the burning of wood. This indicates a very strong draft, which means rapid heating and high temperature. But this also increases the wear of the stove and the risk of fire. It also increases the consumption of wood and the amount of dust and CO emissions to the environment.

Here, you need to find a middle ground between heating time and taking care of the stove and the environment.