88% of saunas are sold under a different name at every store
One Harvia heater is listed under six different product titles by six US retailers. Comparison shopping by name does not work, and here is exactly how badly it fails.
By David Robison ·
Builds SchvitzHub. Tracks sauna pricing across every US retailer that publishes a catalog.
Try to price a sauna heater across a few retailers and you run into a problem before you get to the prices: you cannot tell whether you are looking at the same heater.
We can put a number on how bad this is. Across 1,007 products carried by more than one US retailer, 882 — 88% — are listed under a different product title by different stores. Only 125 are described consistently.
Six retailers, six names, one heater
The worst case in our catalog is Harvia part number HPCS6U1H. Six retailers carry it, and it has six distinct titles:
| Title as listed | Retailer |
|---|---|
| Harvia Cilindro Half Series 240V Electric Sauna Heater 6/8/9/10.5kW | Haven of Heat |
| Harvia Cilindro Half Steel Electric Sauna Heater | Northern Saunas |
| Harvia Cilindro 6kW Electric Sauna Heater PC60E | Sauna Kit Co |
| Harvia Cilindro PC60E 6kW Sauna Heater | SaunaKits |
| Harvia Cilindro PC60E 6 kW Electric Sauna Heater | Select Saunas |
| Harvia Cilindro Half Series Electric Sauna Heater (6kW/ 8kW/ 9kW/10.5kW) | Topture |
Every one of those is the same physical unit. Note what varies: whether the model code PC60E appears at all, whether the wattage is "6kW" or "6 kW", whether the listing names one size or the whole 6/8/9/10.5 kW family, and whether "Half" — which distinguishes this from the full-height Cilindro — is in the title.
Two of those six titles do not contain the wattage of the unit being sold at all. Search for "Harvia Cilindro 6kW" and you will miss them.
The brand names are not stable either
The same inconsistency runs through the manufacturer field. Across the seven catalogs we read, single brands appear under multiple spellings:
| Brand | Spellings in use |
|---|---|
| ProSaunas | "Prosaunas", "ProSaunas" |
| SaunaLife | "SaunaLife", "Sauna Life", "Saunalife" |
| Dundalk Leisurecraft | "Dundalk Leisurecraft", "Dundalk Leisure Craft" |
| ThermaSol | "ThermaSol", "Thermasol" |
| HUUM | "HUUM", "Huum" |
| Mr. Steam | "Mr. Steam", "Mr Steam" |
Filter a retailer's site by brand and you may be filtering out half of what it carries.
Why it happens, and why nobody fixes it
None of this is deception. Retailers write their own product titles, usually from a manufacturer's spec sheet, sometimes optimised for whatever they think people search for, sometimes covering a whole product family with one listing that has a size dropdown. There is no shared product catalog in this industry and no standards body making one.
The brands themselves are the ones with the most to lose and the least visibility. Harvia sells through dealers rather than direct, so the way its Cilindro Half is presented to a US buyer is decided by six different merchandising teams, none of whom see the other five.
What to do instead
Ignore titles and match on the part number. Every retailer publishes it,
usually as "SKU", "MPN" or "Model" somewhere on the product page or in the
specifications tab. HPCS6U1H is a Harvia Cilindro Half PC60E at every store
that sells it, whatever the listing calls it.
This is also why our price comparisons are worth reading: we join catalogs on the manufacturer's part number, so when we say two retailers sell the same heater at different prices, it is the same heater. The Cilindro pricing breakdown is a good demonstration — the 6 kW is $1,181 at all six of the retailers above, despite being called six different things.
Not a paid link — we earn nothing if you buy through it.
Harvia Cilindro PC60E, 6 kW — $1,181 at Sauna Kit Co
One thing to watch when you do this. A single listing that covers a family — "6/8/9/10.5kW" — will have a different part number per size in its variant dropdown. Read the SKU of the variant you have actually selected, not the one shown by default, or you will compare a 6 kW price against a 9 kW one.
How we know
We read each retailer's own published product catalog and match on manufacturer part numbers. Titles and brand spellings above are as published on 29 July 2026. More on our methodology.