Plug and Play Premium Infrared Personal Sauna: SaunaBox Solara Review

Hey guys, this is Michael with the JungleGerm Reviews. Today we're reviewing a home recovery product, the Saunabox Solara. This is their top of the line Saunabox offering in a Canadian hemlock wood construction at home, singular person, premium infrared sauna.

As you know, I specialize in home gym equipment and this is more focused towards general home slash health, which is something I'm really interested in. So as someone who is not super knowledgeable on all the different types of saunas and sauna technology, instead I'm just looking at this from a more pragmatic or practical perspective. The Solara is made to bridge the gap between the pop-up tent sauna options and the fully loaded you need professionals to install it in your basement option. This has a lot of premium features like low EMF infrared heating, Bluetooth speakers, NIR infrared and red light therapy. Obviously adjustable heat settings, adjustable timers, but best of all, it can be easily assembled with no drills, ain't gonna move to any room in your house and plugs into a standard house outlet. After using it for several months, I've been relatively happy, but there are a few things you should know before purchasing a sauna like this. So let's check it out. All right. So the sauna box Solara, as you can see here, it's about 63 inches tall and this is one of the main, I think, features is the compactness of this Solara. I believe it's 32 inches wide by 35 inches deep.

Just double check their website prospects. But again, I'm six foot two, so you can see I'm a little head and almost shoulders over this. But here's how the magic happens. Open the door, step right in, single person sauna. Yes, it is on. So yes, it is actually 134 degrees in here right now.

It goes up to 150 degrees and it feels excellent. So I will see you guys later. Just kidding. So it's actually heated by these, I'm going to sit in here for a second, these infrared panels. So these are the heating element. It goes up to 150 degrees Fahrenheit. Again, as I mentioned in the intro to this video, it's a 110 volt outlet, so it can't actually go pretty much higher than a certain wattage rating, which will be 1500 watts. But the 110 volt outlet is nice because that's how you plug it into your home. So that's any standard outlet.

And that's kind of the reason in general why you'd want exactly something like this. It's compact and it plugs into any standard outlet in your house. You don't have to get a 220 volt wiring. Although I will say now after using this for a few months, I personally run a bit cold, 150 degrees takes me about 10 minutes to start sweating.

I'm one of those people that when I get in the sauna, I really like it to kind of burn my skin. In order to do that, you'd need something probably bigger, a little more commercial, and then you'd have to hire an electrician to wire 220 volt dedicated circuit, blah, blah, blah, blah. All that to say, this is a great at home option exactly for my needs. And I think for most people, it's 29.99, which is not cheap by any stretch of the imagination. But how it all feels and is constructed and everything is actually pretty good high quality, considering the different options.

On the low end, there's like the pop up tent saunas, which cost somewhere in the realm of 300, 800, sometimes $1,000. This is going to be your like what I call medium duty construction. If you've ever assembled a piece of IKEA or Wayfair furniture, this kind of reminds me of that in the fact that it's lightweight and it's obviously not your grandmother's thick, super heavy cedar piece of furniture, but it's lighter. So it can be moved a little more easily when we move it a couple inches right, couple inches left.

You can do that. It's 170 ish pounds once it's fully assembled here. And as I mentioned, no drills or screws or anything needed for assembly, which we'll talk about in a second. But again, the overall quality is good. I would say it's not going to stand up to like a lot of long term abuse. The wood is Canadian hemlock. I'm not an expert on what that means, but smells good.

It smells like, you know, nice, clean sauna wood. But it is definitely a little more like hollower and light duty. Again, easier to ship, easier to move.

And then obviously keeps the price way down. It's all, like I said, it is all easy to put together on the sides here. You'll actually see there's these latches. So this is how it's assembled. There's latches, one, two, three on each side and then also in the back. So it comes into a few main pieces, the sides, the back, the front.

And it all comes separately, but packaged nicely. You will see some like little bit of dust, scuffs and scratches or some paint scratches. Again, I think just kind of nature of the game with this having to be shipped juggling around in the box. There's going to be some minor imperfections. You know, you'll see some, whether it's tape from how they had some of the packaging protective packaging kind of wrap on there. It's not something I took off because I also wanted to show exactly, you know, kind of how it came to me and what it looked like.

It is something I could just get Gugan or take my fingers and get the little tape adhesive off, but I personally do not have a problem with this at all. And I want to show people, hey, when you spend $300 on, let's say a more medium duty sauna, what can you expect? Things like the actual door though feel pretty heavy and it got a little magnet here. So you close this and this feels very like pleasing to open and close.

It feels exactly like, you know, you'd expect for a nice sauna. Handle on the inside, handle on the outside. The door has a nice thick hinge.

This does not feel flimsy whatsoever. I plan actually, as soon as I'm done with this, to take this from the studio here, put it up in my office for a bit. The downside to me personally is I would like it a little bit hotter, but it has a lot of other cool features.

that I know are going to be kind of hard to film, but we'll try to kind of quickly talk about them. And as I mentioned also, I am not a sauna expert. I am a guy who likes to work out. I have a home gym. I now do gym equipment reviews, but I am focused in things like this, which get me, let's say, about halfway there as far as value and functionality. With gym equipment in general, that's kind of what I focus on as well.

It's like, how can we provide the most value for the price without absolutely breaking the bank? Not everyone has $6,000 to spend on a sauna or more or a piece of equipment. And that's exactly where I think things like this come into play, which is it gives you the quality look aesthetic of a nice sauna. If you put this, you know, in your nice million dollar home or $400,000 home or even studio apartment, it looks kind of nice and upscale. Yes, it's not going to be able to be like beat on long term, but it looks very nice and it works exactly as intended. That's probably the best compliment I can give most things that are in this more like, you know, higher end, but still a little bit budget-conscious type machines, equipment, in this case, home recovery. Coming to the inside, as I mentioned, all the black is basically the infrared heating elements.

I'm not going to pretend to know exactly what that means, but that's how it gets hot. On the front here comes included, which is for red light and near infrared. So those are from what I understand, not from just this, just in general, both different type of, let's say recovery tools or modalities and the fact that these have physiological benefits from a cellular level, from a skin level, you know, et cetera, et cetera. If you want to go online and go down the rabbit hole of how red light and near infrared can help you, that's great. Just know they carefully curated this kind of red light near infrared light to be the specific wavelengths and everything that are quote scientifically beneficial for you.

So feel free to check that out. For me, I put on the red light. One thing you have to be careful of practically is just staring at it in the face. They have little goggles you can put on that look like the old deal with it meme. So I tend not to wear those because then it just can't see anything at all. But I turned that on for a few minutes when I'm in there. Can't really tell you if that's a benefit or not that I've noticed. But the heat for sure works for sure is up here in the corner is the control panel for the unit. I would say it's pretty basic.

It's all touch slash tap. So you can put it up to the max of 149 150 degrees and the time up to a max of 90 degrees. One thing about this though that you need to know is it takes about 30 minutes to heat up fully. So whenever you want to come in, you kind of preemptively come in, pit power, it stays on the setting from last time.

So I just keep it at, you know, 149 at the highest, the time will start at 90 and I just leave it in there. And only it takes about a half hour, 45 minutes to warm up. Right now, as you see, we're actually in a garage slash studio, which the ambient temperature outside is a little closer to 40, a 50 degrees means it's colder in here.

So it takes closer to that 45 minutes. This though is only supposed to be for indoor residential use. I'm assuming due to the construction and or potential like legal fire hazard warning. So just know this is supposed to be used inside your house, not technically in a garage. But when it's inside your house, my point being an ambient temperature is 65 and 70 degrees, it'll be closer to a half hour. So just know expect somewhere on a half hour ish 45 minutes for it to warm up. And then you just get in and whatever you want to do, red light near infrared, just want to sit there. And you can actually see if you want to hypothetically try to fit two people in here, you could definitely do it. I'm six foot two.

It is a single person sauna. I could definitely fit two of me in here. Our shoulders would be a little tight. But like my wife who's petite 58, like we could definitely sit in here a little bit cramped. I would say the thing you have to be careful of is then like your arms up against the heating elements here. But otherwise, I mean, literally for the price, there's not too many other options that I'm aware of that provide, let's say some of the quality of features and look like they should be, you know, full on professional sauna, but aren't some astronomically expensive amount that requires dedicated install, dedicated electrical panel, all that stuff.

So this is perfect for me and my needs right now. As far as improvements wise, there's not really a whole lot that I can think of. There is only one issue that I've had, which is there's a vent panel. All right, we're going to try to get in here and show you here. You're going to have to squat down. There's a vent panel here on the top. And as you see, this little piece is to close the vent. It doesn't actually fit in here. So I contacted their support team.

Basically, the long story short is they don't sell just this part and that probably means when it was manufactured, this vent was a little bit too big. So this doesn't ever fully really sit in there unless I'm like super precise or go get some cape. But in like two seconds, it'll fall out again.

So then that lets the warm air out a bit. Long story short, they're going to send me a whole new top panel to this and they're going to take care of it, but I still have to pay $79 for the shipping of that. So yes, they resolved it, but there was, at least on mine, a little bit of a quality issue. But otherwise, everything was pretty much exactly as intended and exactly as expected. And when you're spending $3,000, or depending on if you can get a 10% off, 20% off, depending on the time of year, I think this overall provides a good value.

The instructions setup was easy. It works as intended and it smells good and gets hot. I mean, what more can you ask for? So guys, I think that's about it with today's review of the Sonabox Salara at-home sauna. As always, if you have any questions or comments, please leave them down below.

I'll be happy to answer at least try. Thanks for tuning in to the Jungle Gym Reviews. We'll see you next time. Take it easy. Peace.