Outdoor Sauna Wiring in Washougal, WA: 50-Amp Huum Heater Circuit

A sauna is really two electrical jobs: a big, simple heater circuit and a small, detailed one for everything else. On this Washougal, WA property, the sauna is a freestanding outdoor unit on gravel a few feet from the house. We did both, from the panel out to the heater, the lights and the controls inside.

Why the heater gets its own 50-amp circuit

The Huum Drop in this sauna is an electric heater, so it pulls close to its full rating the whole time the sauna’s heating up. That’s very different from an outlet circuit that only gets used in short bursts.

So it gets its own circuit:

• A dedicated 50-amp circuit sized for the heater, with nothing else on it
• A disconnect at the sauna, so you can shut it off without walking back to the house
• Wire sized for the distance, not just the breaker, because the sauna’s away from the house

Same reason we run dedicated 240-volt circuits for a range, a hot tub or a car charger. If it pulls hard for a long time, it doesn’t share.

Lights on their own circuit

The lights, LED strips and controls went on a separate 15-amp circuit instead of being tapped off the heater.

Here’s why. The heater circuit is the one most likely to get shut off, at the disconnect or the breaker. With the lights on their own circuit, you can still see inside the sauna with the heater off, which matters in a dark, wet room full of hot rocks.

Making room in the panel

Panels fill up. This one was an Eaton with no space left, so we did two things before either new circuit could go in:

1. Took out an unused RV circuit. It had been dead for a while and was taking up two spaces.
2. Put in a slim breaker where the panel allowed it, to get back the space the new circuits needed.

Taking out a dead circuit is the cheapest way to free up panel space, and most homes have at least one. It also means the panel labels are accurate again, so we rewrote the label card before we left.

Permit and inspection

We pulled the permit through L&I and set up the inspection as part of the job. Washougal is in Clark County but outside the City of Vancouver, so permits there go through Labor and Industries. Our breakdown of how electrical permits work in Clark County covers who handles what, and why an unpermitted sauna circuit becomes your problem when you sell.

Putting in a sauna, cold plunge or hot tub around Washougal or Camas? Call 360-828-7143 or get your sauna circuit quoted, and we’ll scope the heater and lights together.