Richard Perkins traded four chickens for a used caravan and converted it into a mobile sauna using recycled materials and scrap timber. The build includes a Finnish 20 kW stove, double-tier seating, and can fit 14 to 15 people comfortably, with capacity for up to 18.
Questions this video answers
Three to four broiler chickens (barter with neighbours).
About 4.0 m long × 2.2 m wide × 2.0 m high.
Target: 14–15 people comfortably; up to about 18 at a squeeze.
Earlier stove bought for about €100; new Finnish 20 kW stove with 20 L water tank, stones, insulated chimney and flashing costs about €800–€900 (including necessary parts).
Alder or aspen (chosen for staying cooler to the touch).
Chapters
There's nothing like ending a long, hard day's work in a really hot sauna. And there's nothing better than a sauna, than a mobile sauna that you can take to the local lake. Behind me is our trusty caravan sauna, and we owe a big thank you to Daniel from Australia, one of our original core team, who spent pretty much three days transforming it as quick as he could to help out our initial interns. The first week, we came to the farm and we planted out all of the beautiful agroforestry systems on their keyline layout. It was still raining and sleeting and it was freezing cold. We had no running water at that time. Around the farm, we had very basic infrastructure and we had no way to get warm at the end of the day. And Daniel put his heart and love into this so we could have a nice warm space to be able to get warm at the end of the day. If you followed our Facebook page or our videos, then you'll get the understanding that we like to do things at low cost. We love intercepting local waste streams and building stuff up cheaply. This sauna cost us a couple of hundred euros. We bought this stove for, like, a hundred euros. This is Lisa. Anyone that's been to the farm knows Lisa quite well, but she's warped and falling apart. The water tanks expanded off the side of the stove now, and we use free wood from the local timber yard, because all the big timber mills here are run by machines, huge machines that pick up industrial pallets of sawn timber and sometimes they knock them over, and when they do, they can't pick them up because they don't have enough people. So we come along and we pick it up. So that's how we've built so much of our infrastructure at the farm. All our egg mobiles, chicken pens, etcetera, and converting buildings, all with this free timber. And we basically haven't had to chop any of our trees down yet because we've got so much timber still packed in the barn. And this served us really well. We've had maybe 5, 600 saunas in this over the last three summers. And it's lit every single day. It's a very efficient way to clean a lot of people. And it's a really special sort of time in the evening at the end of a long day to come in here and get really warm, really clean before going to bed. But it's time now for a bit of an upgrade. Now, this one was mobile slightly. It was a perfectly good caravan. At one point, but it lost a lot of its integrity in the removing of the inner furniture. The way they're constructed, it means that they are taking a lot of the support from the built in furniture. I was telling you about picking up waste resources. Have a look. In here we get all kinds of timber. Timber that you can build yurts with, timber that you can build eggmobiles. We've used. We've got a whole nutter stash elsewhere. But all this dimensional timber, six meter lengths, we pick up probably about eight times this amount of timber every season. To build all our infrastructure up with. It allows us to build up things like our approved poultry processing unit. This is one of the cheapest slaughteries in Europe and it was built out of this wagon that we got for €200. I think I could do a whole farm tour just showing you all the things we picked up for free. But this one was awesome. We swapped this wagon with our lovely neighbours for three, four broiler chickens. Four broiler chickens for a mobile soon to be sauna. It's an awesome little mobile. It's the sort of thing they put up in the woods for people doing timber work in the winter. So they've got some base to go make a cup of tea. And we've used this one for accommodation for a couple of the interns last year and it's been an office over the winter. But now it's going to quickly turn into a sauna, I believe. So I've been in here today. It's about 4 meters long and 2.2 wide and 2 meters high. I've got a few ideas now. There's always a few things with these kind of builds because the windows are put in in places that perhaps aren't convenient. Same with the doors even, or the vents in the roof, etc. But the important thing with a sauna is to have venting near the stove. Currently I'm thinking of putting the stove down here and putting a vent in the floor there. And then it's good to have a vent down low at the opposite end. So I think this door is going to get closed permanently. The goal of this sauna is to be able to get it to the lake just because it's fun. And another goal is to be able to fit 14, 15 people comfortably and possibly 18 at a squish. You never know. We get quite friendly with each other here. So people do tend to squish in. I think we've had 15 in the other caravans. So what I like to do. I've lived in boats and tree houses and buses and things, so I love working in small spaces. And I'm just hashing out the design on the floor a bit with tape. I played with five different layouts today just to try and work out how to maintain some of the view of the farm while we're saunaing, which windows to block out. Because I want to have double layered seating. That's what these marks are on the floor down here. I think I'm going to leave these two windows there. All these vents on the ceiling are going to get closed up, so it'll get a lot darker in here. And I will totally close this wall up. But I'll put tongue and groove in because it expands and contracts a lot in the sauna and the fluctuation of temperature. So I want it to stay looking good. And then for all this seating down here, I'm going to use probably alder or aspen, something that stays a bit cooler on the butt cheeks. So you can see a view here where the seats will end. So you've got a nice curving pathway around the stove here. And we'll probably install a little tap above the stove there so we can fill up the stove. And we like to have bucket showers. We'll have some wooden grating on the floor here and have the floor leaning to a central drain. And you can throw fill buckets of cold water and mix them with hot water off the stove here and then have a bucket shower. It's a really nice complement to the sauna, being able to get really scrubbed clean, almost like a hammam. So you have two tiers of seating and a higher warmer seating that arcs around the back here, but also along the side. And then it's got single layer flooring down on the bottom and it comes round and down and it will curve around to here. So seating is about 45 off the ground and then 40 wide on the single benches. But where you have someone sitting above you, you want to allow about 60, so there's room for feet. So these benches here will be 60 wide. The top benches 40 wide. That door is all going to be cleared up. So it's got some insulation, but I'm going to add. It's got a couple of inches, maybe 3 inches of insulation, but I'm going to add a couple more, put a lot of wood structure in to both support the structure and hold the insulation and then be able to clad on top. And then I've got some old scrap vinyl that I'll put On the floor to have a draining floor. And then I think I'll build it all up with scrap wood. We spend a bit of money on a nice stove that I can show you. Stoves have got to be a certain distance from the wall. So I'm going to put in a division wall here and it's going to have a nice glass door and that will lead to this little room where you can hang up your shoes and coats, etc. That's a bit worrying. Says Maximum load 250 kilos. We'll have to do something about that. But the beauty of this one is that we'll just be able to take it down to the local lake, which is just 500 meters that way. Here's my new stove. You can't really see it in this light. It's got a lovely 20 liter water tank on the side of it. So there's a tap down here. So you've got a glass front and wood stove with a tap. And these are quite nice stoves. They come from Finland and they come with nice insulated chimneys that you see here. It's about 8, €900 with all the stones and the chimney and the flashing for the ceiling and all the bits you need to just install it, basically. So pretty good deal for any new stove. It's 20 kilowatt stove, so it should heat that space, no problem. It's the time of year that I like to actually get out and start building stuff. I usually build eggmobiles and boiler pens and all kinds of stuff at this time of year. So I'm excited about this one. Not bad for four chickens. He.
