Sun Home Tries Traditional Sauna; Plunge's Infrared Pitch Has a Research Problem

On August 7, a new URL appeared in Plunge's sitemap: “Plunge vs Sun Home Infrared Sauna.” Plunge put its $8,490 Infrared Pro beside Sun Home's $9,999 Eclipse 2, compared its own specifications with its competitor's and declared itself the hotter buy.

Follow the page toward checkout and a stranger comparison appears. Plunge uses mortality and dementia figures from studies of traditional Finnish sauna bathing to help sell its new infrared cabin.

Meanwhile, Sun Home is walking the other way. The brand known for polished infrared rooms has introduced the Nova, its first indoor traditional sauna: stones, water, a HUUM heater and two bench levels.

The companies have not traded businesses. Sun Home still sells infrared; Plunge still sells traditional electric saunas.

Sun Home gets closer. The price does not.

The useful parts of Nova are the least photogenic: a six-kilowatt HUUM DROP heater, water on the stones, mechanical ventilation and a second bench. Sun Home's product page spends more time on black privacy glass, RGB lighting and a carbonized hexagonal tile wall. The heater, ventilation and bench layout will determine whether it works.

Sun Home lists the benches at 17 and 34 inches above the floor. Its published dimensions imply roughly 43 inches from the upper bench to the ceiling. That still does not establish the height of the stone mass, temperature stratification or actual readings from head to foot. SaunaNews has not tested the cabin.

The three-person model costs $11,999 before the electrician arrives and requires a dedicated 240V/30A circuit. The six-person version is $15,799 and requires 240V/40A. Sun Home advertises a 230°F maximum. Peak temperature is the showroom number; warm-up time, upper-bench temperature and heat variation are the numbers a bather will feel.

There is sloppiness on the sales page. The larger Nova is titled and specified as a six-person cabin, while its comparison copy repeatedly calls it a five-person model. The warranty headline also needs translation. Sun Home calls its cabinetry coverage “limited lifetime.” In the terms, lifetime becomes seven years. After 90 days, Sun Home supplies replacement parts but excludes labor and freight.

Nova is interesting, expensive and still untested. On paper, it has the expected components for löyly. We need to sit in one before calling it good.

Plunge makes the wiring easier and everything else louder

Plunge's useful argument fits in one sentence: a dedicated 120V/20A circuit is a smaller hurdle than wiring a traditional 240V sauna. The $7,690 Standard is advertised to reach 160°F. It ships flat-packed, weighs roughly 540 pounds and carries a manufacturer assembly estimate of about one hour. “Easy install” does not mean any outlet in any room.

Then come the app, Nakamichi speakers, chromotherapy and “near-zero” electromagnetic-field copy. Reaching Plunge's 175°F headline requires the 240V Pro. Its optional $1,490 red-light panel takes that package to $9,980.

That last number makes the Sun Home comparison less dramatic. Plunge's chart leads with $8,490 for the Pro and $9,999 for the Eclipse 2. In the same price cell, it acknowledges that a Pro with the red-light panel costs $9,980. Once Plunge adds that option, the price gap shown in its chart falls to $19; that does not make the two systems otherwise equivalent. The $1,509 gap exists only when Plunge's panel is left off.

This is a sales page grading its own exam. The two cabins were not placed in the same room and measured under the same conditions. There is no shared heat-distribution test, long-term reliability record or ownership-cost comparison. At publication, the consumer product page's displayed five-star rating rested on one review.

Plunge says it ran prototypes for more than a year at two Reboot studios and went through roughly six revisions before launch. Its launch account does not publish usage totals, failure rates or the underlying test data.

The health numbers belong to another sauna

Plunge labels the section “Proven benefits for your body and mind.” Beneath it are three large figures: 63% lower risk of sudden cardiac death, 40% lower all-cause mortality risk and 66% lower dementia risk among frequent sauna users. Plunge uses the word “associated,” not “caused.” It then says the referenced studies used sauna exposure around 175°F, “consistent with” Plunge Infrared's operating temperature.

The 63% and 40% figures come from a study of 2,315 middle-aged men in eastern Finland using traditional Finnish sauna. The dementia analysis used the same male Finnish cohort. These were observational associations, not randomized trials. The mortality paper warns about residual confounding and says its findings cannot be applied directly to sauna types that operate at lower temperatures.

Plunge's third citation, a 2018 systematic review of 40 studies, did include infrared research—25 of the included studies used infrared interventions. The review also described the evidence as small and heterogeneous and found it insufficient to recommend a particular sauna type for a particular clinical condition. It did not test or validate Plunge's cabin.

A shared temperature number does not turn infrared into Finnish sauna. Traditional sauna heats the room; infrared panels deliver more radiant heat to the body in cooler air. Plunge's own product page explains the difference. Putting “approximately 175°F” between them does not establish that an infrared cabin produces the outcomes observed in traditional-sauna users.

Sun Home has built a room we would like to test. Plunge has built a product page we already can.

Nova may disappoint once measured. At $11,999, with inconsistent capacity copy and a seven-year “lifetime” warranty, it has plenty to prove. Its specification at least makes a plausible case for traditional bathing. Plunge makes a real case for simpler installation. Its mortality and dementia numbers still come from another kind of sauna.

SaunaNews has not tested either cabin and has no commercial relationship with either company. Prices, specifications, product-page claims and review counts were checked August 9, 2026.

Correction, August 9, 2026: An earlier version misstated one figure on Plunge's page as 50% lower cardiovascular mortality. The page reports a 63% lower risk of sudden cardiac death. It also described all of Plunge's cited evidence as traditional-sauna research; Plunge's third citation is a systematic review that included infrared studies. Both points have been corrected.