How to Heat Your Hot Yoga Studio by Absolute Venture PTE LTD

How to Heat Your Hot Yoga Studio Transcripts of a Live Class with Lucas Rockwood & Chad Clark

2 Lucas: So hello and welcome, everybody, this is Lucas Rockwood with Absolute Yoga, and thanks so much for joining us today for another installment of our professional training series. And today I’m very happy to be joined by Chad Clark, and Chad has been teaching hot yoga for the past 10 years, and he’s become very well known for helping hot yoga studios set up their heating systems, which is always a big question and a big area of interest for new teachers and new studio owners.

Now, Chad lives in the United States but he works with studios all over the world, and you can check out his website where he has a great eBook and a lot of great information about specific heaters and supplies that you can actually order, and his site is at www.HotYogaStudioSupply.com

So thanks so much for joining us, Chad, is it okay if we just kind of jump right in with some questions?

Chad:

Absolutely, and it’s great to be here.

Lucas:

Well good. For yoga teachers interested in setting up a hot yoga studio in an average-sized room, let’s say 1,000 square feet or 90 square meters for people in different countries, before they start buying heaters, what kind of things do they need to consider in terms of ceiling height, ventilation, insulation, there’s just so many things. Can you give us a bird’s eye view of what they should be looking at before they even get started?

Chad:

Well before they even decide on a space, they should know what kind of utilities are often necessary for 1,000 square feet or 90 square meters. Typically, you’re going to need 30-40 kilowatt of power if it’s an electric system to warm this room, as an average depending on where it is in the world. If you’re in warmer regions, you can get away with a lot less. But insulation can definitely cut down on the amount of power required to heat a space. If the space is well insulated and it’s very tight with good windows and door seals and everything kind of locked in, you can get away with half as much as you would need if the building was relatively un-insulated and loose construction.

Lucas:

Yeah, and so 30-40 kilowatts, for non-techie people like me, I mean I remember when I was setting up my studio what they said was -- what we had to do was get the equivalent of three household, I think they called it 3-phase electrics put in. So it was the equivalent of three houses worth of electricity.

Is that standard? I mean -

Chad:

I would say the easiest way you can compare the idea would be, 30 kilowatt would be 30 hair dryers plugged in at once, because each hair dryer, typically, draws about 1,000 watts. Things that are important would be ceiling height; outside windows if you have windows, that they’re well-sealed; if the building is built with walls that go from the floor to the roof which would be called deck to deck, it’s more helpful because you really want to isolate that room as much as possible as if it were a walk-in cooler which maybe a restaurant would use to keep their food cold, that’s

3 how you want to construct the room so that it’s completely tight. Lucas:

Great, so I mean, your average commercial space, they’re probably not going to have enough electricity right away when they walk in the room, right? They’re probably going to need to get more juice. Is that fair to say?

Chad:

No, I don’t find that to be accurate, at least in the US and Canada. Mexico perhaps, and I have run into some issues over in Europe where they didn’t quite have enough power because many of their power systems are a bit out of date. I think countries like Germany, Switzerland, they have better power systems for the buildings because they use a lot of radiant heat.

But ordinarily, you’re going to need an electric panel that has 200 amps of service, on average, just for the yoga room requirements and for lighting and humidification. Things that absorb the most energy would be electric heat because it’s mostly resistive heat or radiant heat, and then you have steam humidification typically which will absorb, on average, 15 kilowatt itself. So with a steam humidifier, you di introduce a lot of heat into the space, but you also more importantly introduce clean humidity, which helps the students break into a sweat faster than anything else.

For example, a room could be 80 degrees, and if it’s 60% humidity, you’ll start to bead sweat shortly after starting your yoga routine.

Lucas:

So we’re looking at 200 amps and 30-40 kilowatts, and you’re saying that the humidity really make an ability for a room to get -- or at least to feel hotter, right?

Chad:

Yes, the difference between a room that just feels a little warm or a room that feels somewhat sweltering is the level of humidity. I like to compare the humidity control to the pain button for yoga teachers, so they understand that when they turn up the humidity, they increase the student discomfort because the more humidity there is in the space, the more difficult it is for a student to remove heat from his body just simply from evaporatively sweating. So if there is not much airflow in this high humidity, you can really feel the humidity and the effect on the body.

In other words, the heat index that people are often talking about, compares the relative humidity to the temperature. It does not take into account any airflow. For my systems that I supply to the vast majority of the studios, we incorporate a lot of airflow, a lot of outside air, and humidity, and heat. Those three combined together really are more of a comfort index than just a heat index. Because if you’re standing in a light breeze, even in a hot humid room, you can let your body cool itself naturally through sweating through evaporation.

Now the higher the humidity level, the less evaporative cooling you will feel, because once the air becomes saturated with moisture, it doesn’t evaporate sweat from your body as quickly.

But the most painful experience in hot yoga room is typically when you to sweat to drip to cool. And if you’re sweating just to drip to cool, it’s a very uncomfortable experience and it often leads to symptoms of heat stroke. So you have to be very careful if you’re going to heat a room and humidify it, if you find that students are not getting through © 2014 – All Rights Reserved I Absolute Yoga Academy

4 class and they’re laying down or getting the chills, then you need more airflow in the system. And that can be achieved as simply as installing a few ventilation fans, not ceiling fans but cross flow ventilation fans as used in greenhouses, typically in a circular pattern will give 100% relief to that right away. Or, a more intensive system as I typically use with forced air and all components integrated such as humidification into the system.

Most studios do not have fresh air. Fresh air is a very important aspect of heating and keeping a room comfortable. The typical ratio is roughly about 1,000 CFM for your typical 1,000 square foot room. That allows up to 30 students to get, typically 50-20 cubic feet per minute per person, and that’s a kind of light load of air. There are some airs that may require a little more air, some that are a little bit less.

But if you’re bringing in outside air, you have to keep in mind that if you’re pumping the air in, that means that you’re displacing air out of the space, because you can’t just simply pressurize a room.

So if you do use ventilation, it’s important to consider energy recovery ventilators. An energy recovery ventilator is a device that brings in air and also exhausts air at the same time, but it pulls the heat and the humidity out of the air that it removes from the room and it re-heats and re-humidifies the air that it brings into the room.

That allows you to completely balance the space so you’re not pushing hot, humid air into wall cavities where it could possibly grow mold or into a neighbor’s adjacent space where it could make them uncomfortable. I have seen many studios that have had issues with their neighbors because they had simply an air outlet into the space from the roof or somewhere else pumping into the heater and drawing more air in, but not really removing the air so it pushed hot, humid air into a neighbor’s facility where they were constantly running their air conditioning or trying to keep the place cooler. So it doesn’t work well. But if you use energy recovery, it can be 80% efficient on average and recover a lot of heat and humidity that you would have to kind of regenerate if you were simply bringing in air from the outside. Does that make sense?

Lucas: Yeah absolutely. So I think everybody’s had an experience where they’ve gone to a class and they said, “Wow, that was really hot,” but they hated the class. They just felt like they were dying. Chad:

Right, that’s like the average New York City experience.

Lucas: Yes, exactly. And then they’ll go to another class and it will feel even hotter, and yet they don’t feel like they’re dying and I think it really does have to do with that fresh air setup that so few people do that you’re talking about, that 1,000 cubic feet per minute per -- that’s for like a standard-sized yoga studio with, say 30 people? Is that the idea? Chad:

That’s the idea. And more than that, we use what’s called a CO2 control, which is a control that measures the level of CO2 in the space. So when you exhale, you exhale someone’s CO2. In the atmosphere, there’s typically about 360 parts per million of CO2 in the air ordinarily. If you go into one of these rooms that is poorly ventilated, after 15, 20 minutes, you’ll see the CO2 levels hit 8,000 to 12,000 parts per million. And that’s extraordinarily high, and that’s right where you see beat red faces and people start to

5 hit the floor because there’s not enough oxygen for their normal consumption and it becomes more of a high altitude, mountaineering training at that point, rather than a yoga class. Lucas: Sure. Chad:

So a CO2 relay will simply turn on the ventilator when it needs hair and then shut it off when it doesn’t need air, and that’s where you really start to capitalize on savings of utilities. Because it’s with systems that are designed to be ventilated constantly whether you have 3 people or 30 that are most inefficient. You want to only have the air when you need it.

Lucas: Well great, so somebody’s coming into the new room, they’re looking at their ceiling height, their insulation, and they’re trying to make sure they have enough power and they’re really keeping in mind fresh air as sort of the key to making a comfortable room. Chad:

Let me touch on that though, ceiling height, a little bit. Ceiling heights seem to be most effective when they’re about 12 feet for all students, because some students are quite tall. And if you have an 8 foot, a 9 foot ceiling, there are many students who can touch the ceiling, and if there are metal objects on the ceiling that might get warmer as the warm air rises in the room, they can tend to burn themselves.

I found that studios that use those heating panels, oftentimes have students that will singe their fingers because they’ll bump into one of those panels on the ceiling.

And regarding insulation, we want to really kind of make a tight, tight room in there. So we want a room that is not just insulated thermally, but we want radiant insulation because radiant energy is dispersed into the outer walls and will penetrate through a wall even if it’s insulated with fiber glass, or foam, or any kind of effective insulation.

The most effective walls for yoga studios are constructed with a 2x6 distance, which is maybe, what, 10 cm I’m guessing, maybe longer, you know 6 inches deep, and then they’re spray foams on the interior, and then covered with a product which is a radiant barrier insulation, which usually may be 1/8 or 1/4 inch thick, comprises of foam on the inside and a foil on both surfaces. So it reflects the energy back into the space that would normally kind of radiate through the wall.

And you can tell by putting your hand on the other side of a wall that’s insulated in this manner, because there’s no loss of temperature. In other words, it doesn’t feel warm. So we isolate all of our loss by correcting the radiant and the thermal loss through the structure.

Once the insulation’s in place, it can be sheet rocked with ordinary sheetrock, nothing necessary there, nothing new or you don’t need to use moisture-resistant sheetrock or materials. As far as the insulation’s concerned, if the insulation’s built as I just described, you can cut your utility costs by 50%. So that can really help a bigger studio.

Lucas: And a lot of studio owners, they think really short term, and maybe in the short term 50% doesn’t sound that exciting, but just 12, 24 months down the road saving 50% off your electric bill really adds up fast. © 2014 – All Rights Reserved I Absolute Yoga Academy

6 Chad:

Right, for example, a 40 kilowatt system that’s in use all over the US, you would find the electric bill would typically be $1,800 to $2,000 a month. And that’s just without any kind of insulation, just regular building insulation. But if they have good insulation, they can cut it by half. So if you look at a year, you’re looking at $12,000 in savings. So it is worth it to at least double rock over a radiant barrier, if not do the foam and the fiber glass as well.

Lucas: Well great. The other thing I just want to chat about really briefly is if there’s a way for people to take advantage of existing systems, like if they went into a room that happened to have some ducting or it happened to have some kind of gas heater already there, is that a good idea or should they just scrap it and start over? Chad:

That’s a very popular question that I do get quite often. And the truth is, that if a room already has an existing gas furnace, if you want to economize and just get started, you can use that system, especially if it’s an older system. The newer systems are built to be so efficient, that any extra temperature rise in the air stream going through them can cause the system to have all kinds of chronic failures. But for an older system, they have less safeties, less electronics, they’re able to take the heat better.

The short answer is to take your return air duct, and that’s the air that’s being removed from the room back through the system, and you take the return air duct down to the floor. And typically, you would build what would look like columns in the back of the room that are just ducts that go to the floor. Say an average is 8 inches by 14 inches, and you’d use typically about 4 of these for 1,000 square feet, and you’d typically put a grill on them and then since they’re typically metal, you would cover them with sheetrock.

And that would give you up to 15 degrees in increase in temperature compared to just a ceiling return. Because when you have a ceiling return, that’s how you would normally heat and cool like an office or some other facility. The air tends to come out hot and they go right back to the return and then tell the furnace that the air is too hot, so it shuts the furnace off.

When you do floor return, you get the room to warm all the way down to the floor, which is essential to get these rooms to warm in an efficient manner because it takes too much energy to warm them, typically, with a ceiling return and a ceiling supply because of that short loop action. Does that answer your question?

Lucas: Yeah, yeah that’s great. I never have thought of that. That’s really great tip. Well good, so I think people have at least a good overview on what they’re looking at when they go into a room, looking at the insulation, looking at the ceiling height, thinking about their electricity. Chad:

Let me talk about the electricity just for a moment. With an electric system, if a building does not have much electric and has poor insulation, a radiant electric system is a practical system to use. But with a radiant panel system such as panels by Berko or ENERJOY, those are the two popular panels out there, if it doesn’t have a radiant insulation on the back of the panel, it reflects as much heat upwards as downwards.

7 panel to direct the energy down. And then you can have savings of 30%, 40% over just normal operation.

But radiant heaters only heat the objects that they’re focused over. So if you take a radiant heater over a student, that student will be warm, but outside that radiant beam the area won’t be warm. So it can be very efficient. In my yoga room, I actually use radiant heaters for some of my students that are very heat resistant and very skinny, so they want to be hotter, so I have a little twist timer on the wall where they can energize several of these panels over their yoga mat just to make them a little bit hotter. I currently keep my hot yoga room at about 115 degrees. So those students really want the temperature to be more like 130. And they get that extra heat from these spots by using this target-specific radiant energy panel.

So radiant energy can be very good when you don’t have much electricity, because a panel will typically use 400 watts to 600 watts, and if you have a smaller room, say 400 square feet, maybe you only need, say 10 of these panels that are 400 watts. Well that’s only 4,000 watts. If you had to heat that room with forced air, you would need more like 10,000 watts because you’re heating the air instead of just the objects.

Also, gas radiant heat is another way of heating efficiently, especially when youhave high loss. So if you’re in an old building and it doesn’t have good insulation, you’re much better off using radiant heat than you are using forced air heat.

Lucas: Well great, and for everybody listening who hasn’t seen radiant heating panels, which I’m sure some people haven’t, they don’t make any noise and they’re these sort of white panels that are above you, and what they do is kind of -- I guess you could compare it to a microwave. They kind of zap the person. So it’s possible that one person who’s on one side of the room and just two mats over the person is totally cold and the person right under the radiant heater is very hot. Some people like them, some people don’t like them. I think they’re great.

The noise factor is a big deal. They’re completely silent. And the energy saving is a big factor as well. And I didn’t realize that they actually -- I knew they used less electricity, but I didn’t know that they actually needed less to set up the room. So that’s a really great point. If somebody’s restricted with their electrical setup, that might be another thing to consider.

Chad:

Right, now the one thing that should be stressed about panels is the typical control method for a panel is to use an in floor sensor. If you put your yoga mat over that sensor, that panel is not going to shut off. And I find that most of the studios that use panels, do complain that they use too much energy and it’s simply because they put the sensor in a location where someone’s going to put their yoga mat over it so it’s not insulated, so the actual panels never get the signal from the thermostat to shut off.

So I find that with radiant panels, you have to be careful about controls, about sensing. Otherwise, they are a good way to heat. I find that the heat for my own use is less comfortable because it does heat my head more than it heats my whole body, and I do like to keep my brain relatively not under a heat lamp, which is how you can feel in one of these rooms.

Now they are great for heating, but they only provide heating. The disadvantage of radiant heat is that it can take a long time for a room to cool down once you warm it up because you’re actually warming the surfaces of the space.

The advantage of a forced air system is that you can quickly heat or cool a space, because you’re just using the air as the medium of heat transfer. So it’s important to know that when you want to deodorize or add fresh air or anything else with radiant panels, those have to be auxiliary independent systems that are kind of completely different piece of equipment.

With a force air system, you integrate everything into that system, much like a home audio system where you have an allin- one system like a boom box, or you have a CD player and then you have a record player, you know, separate components.

So it’s just important to keep in mind that when you do have a radiant system, it doesn’t cover all the bases. You’re really just working with the heat.

And the main difference between electric heating and gas heating for a studio, besides the utility bills, is the amount of humidity that is necessary for each system. Electric systems operate at lower temperatures, so they will displace less humidity. Gas systems operate at higher temperatures because there’s combustion, so they have a tendency to even dry the room. So if you’re in a very hot, humid region, you may want to remove moisture, and with a gas system that is possible because as air is drawn through the heat exchanger, it does have a tendency to dry it and the vapor squeezes out of cracks in the system that escapes to the outside.

Lucas: Well great, so we’ve talked about radiant heating in terms of cost saving. Can you give us a cost idea compared with gas or electric? Chad:

Well for example, a radiant heater, typically for a normal 1,000 square foot room, a radiant panel system would require about 24 panels. So 24 panels and average cost is say, $275 a panel. That is $6,600. Now that’s for an average system. Some studios might need 48 panels, which drives it up to $12,000. But that’s just equipment.

And then it’s installed much like electric lighting. So an electrician just comes in, connects all the wires to different switches, and the system is in place.

For a forced air system, you have duct work and you have electrical work to contend with, if it’s electric. If it’s a gas system, you have venting, duct work, gas piping, and electric. So you have all these components that have to be connected, plus your controls.

But I find that overall in comfort, that the forced air system is just easier to interact with than a radiant system, because if you use radiant, like I said, it’s hard to cool the room down. So if you get to the point where the room is very uncomfortable, very oppressively hot, it doesn’t de-energize instantly, whereas a gas furnace, once you shut off the burners, the room’s going to begin to cool, especially if you bring in the outside required air. So I find that the controllability with radiant is not as careful as the controllability with a forced air system.

And the most comfortable systems are ones that will modulate. Now if you could get a radiant heater to somehow pulse, it could be a bit more comfortable because it would only pulse as fast as necessary to maintain a temperature. That technology is available in electric forced air heaters, and it’s called modulation. So that modulation does pulse the heaters to what’s called a SCR Control. And that’s simply a controller that will send the energy through the heater at a frequency that corresponds to how much heat is necessary. So you can maintain a very precise temperature through this modulated or SCR Controlled system, which you can’t with an ordinary system which would either be on or off.

With gas, they do have some pulse technologies available, but I find that they prematurely wear the system down. If you want to maintain a precise gas temperature, there are some other technologies as individual burners being fired, or using a broiler system with a hydronic coil, which is simply hot water being pushed through the system that’s heated more or less to maintain a precise temperature.

Lucas: Well great. In terms of cost of operation, I guess it really depends on where you live, right? So some areas have really expensive electricity and some areas have really expensive or non-existent natural gas. But in areas like US and Canada, in terms of operating gas or an electric system or a radiant, which is electric as well obviously, what is going to be the least expensive and what’s going to be the most expensive? Chad:

Well, the use of insulation is definitely the way to cut down your expenses. That is the least expensive and the most effective way to take one of these rooms and make it efficient.

As far as the different technologies, there’s a lot of interest in solar right now, and solar could be electric or it could be hot water heating. For our purposes, hot water heating is really rare. A studio could possibly have a close to zero footprint, and that would be a system that would integrate hot water collection, typically rooftops so you’d have to be in an area that does have sun, storage tanks which are typically stone-lined for this application, and then a backup broiler for days when there just isn’t enough heat or there isn’t sufficient sun, say at times when you’ve already exhausted your stored heat.

So when you look at the cost of the different technologies, solar typically have a 25year payoff. And a 25-year payoff is about 5 years beyond most equipment lifetimes. So although you can achieve the efficiencies and have a very low bill, when you look at a cost of a system installed, it could be between let’s say $25,000 and $60,000, whereas an electric system, radiant panel system might be installed and cost anywhere from $10,000 to $18,000 installed. And then when you look at a forced air system, if it’s electric, it could be installed typically for, with equipment, $15,000 to $20,000. And gas systems are typically installed -- the equipment costs for a whole package with gas is typically, say $15,000 and it ranges up to $35,000, and then the installation fee can be anywhere from $4,000 to as high as $40,000. And that’s what we see across the US.

So with the gas system, you may pay up to, on average, say $30,000 to $40,000 for the system, but your operational costs with gas at today’s gas prices are typically as low as any utility that doesn’t involve solar. And if you use a gas system that has hot water as its heat medium, you could always add solar panels at a later date and still end up with those efficiencies as the money comes in the door to pay for those improvements. © 2014 – All Rights Reserved I Absolute Yoga Academy

There aren’t many studios that are using solar. It’s a very new technology, so the studios really haven’t embraced it because there’s not a lot of equipment available for it. There are some solar air conditioning units available, which could be integrated into many studios and are fairly inexpensive. And they just basically supplement their energy use with solar, with a single or dual panel setup. And that just cuts down the electric usage.

The greatest electric usage is typically with a resistive electric heat, and that would be through a radiant system or a forced air system, just because the kind of energy that’s required to supply 15, 20, 30, 40 kilowatt is the kind of energy that’s typically derived from coal or nuclear power plants.

Lucas: So good. So people need to look at their local area, too, and just see what’s available, like in the US and Canada natural gas is really cheap, and in other parts of the world like Asia where it’s just kind of nonexistent, you’ve got to kind of see what your options are. Chad:

That’s important, and also the voltage itself. So if you have 208 volt, 208 volt doesn’t heat very hot and that’s a two wire system. A single wire system would typically be 120 volts. But a two wire system in the US and Canada is either 208 or 240. But when you have commercial facilities, you may have 3 phase power, and you may have 3 phase power in 240 or 208, or you may have, in Canada I think it’s 377 and also 460, 480. The highest voltage that you can get, just makes the heating element heat up that much quicker. And typically, insulation costs go down with the higher voltage because the wires can be smaller since they’re conducting more electricity it just makes more sense to use the highest voltage available for these applications.

Lucas: Well great. So my next big question is many teachers that I talk to, probably 80% to 90%, they’re looking for a real fast and cheap way to get started. What we’ve been kind of talking about is the ideal for somebody who has got a long-term plan and they want to open a studio that’s maybe going to be their business for the next 5 or 10 or maybe 25 years and they really want to do it right. But the reality is, there’s a whole lot of bootstrappers out there, and people are looking towards the future and hoping to be able to do something and maybe they haven’t got much money, they haven’t got much time, and they want to get a hot room set up as quickly as possible, pitfalls be damned.

So with that in mind, what would you recommend as kind of a quick and dirty setup that people could get started with?

Chad:

I think most studios will need probably an electric heater to get started. But you have to look and see how much electric capacity you have. Next as important, if you’re going to use an electric heater, is it going to be one heater or is it going to be multiple lightduty portable heaters? And by light duty I mean they’re just easy to pick up and move around, but they’re generally going to throw out 1,000 to 1,500 watts. The more heavyduty heaters will throw 3,000 watts per heater or more. I have radiant heaters that put out as much as 4,400 watts. But for most studios, just to get started, a ceramic radiant heater works very well, it’s very durable, and is relatively new to the market. The units do not have internal thermostats typically, so you plug them in, turn them on, they may either have a high or a low or they just may have one setting. So you just turn them on and they start to generate heat.

I happen to sell a heater called The Hot Zone. And The Hot Zone is a very popular heater with studios as well as home users because it’s a wire-in ceramic construction that has no loss to the backside of the heater. So wherever you aim the heater, it throws a considerable amount of heat in that direction. It will typically glow like a pink-ish glow and there are some other ceramic heaters that are in the pipeline. I’m expecting to have some new ones to offer to the yoga studio folks, but The Hot Zone has proven itself to be quite amazing for what it is. One heater can typically take care of someone at home. Some home practitioners want two, one for each side of them, but everyone that uses that particular style heater finds it to be completely sufficient.

For a studio, I find a wall mount Hot Zone would work well, because you don’t want to take a chance of someone bumping a heater and singing themselves, because The Hot Zone does make the front side of the heater hot. So you have to be careful about anyone who might get burnt.

I have been in some studios that were so low budget that they used four hot water kettles, those little electric hot pot heaters, kept them full of water and that was their humidifier. Each one of those typically uses about 300 watts, which is like nothing, and between that and a few of the electric plug-in heaters, they seem to develop their business. And now that same studio owns two locations, is looking at a third, and has the complete commercial package that I supply.

So if you have to start from somewhere, I would start with little forced air units or The Hot Zone heaters. The disadvantage of a forced air heater, is typically that they’re going to achieve their limit temperature and shut off. Heaters like Hot Zone don’t have any extra parts in them except for a knock over switch and an on/off switch. So they’re on until you shut them off.

Lucas: And so let’s say somebody’s got a small room, which a lot of startups do, like let’s say it’s 800 square feet or something like that. Let’s just say it’s 1,000. Let’s say they did get a good sized room and they did at least that right. How many of these wall mount Hot Zone units would they need to heat a room like that? Chad:

I think with a 1,000 square feet I would start with probably 6-8 heaters, but your average startup room tends to be about 400 square feet, you know, something like 25x12. And that room would typically get by with say 3-4 of these heaters.

Lucas:

Okay. And so in terms of investment, what are they looking at?

Chad:

Well, you figure the Hot Zone heater is typically $500 to $575 per heater, and if you need 4 of them you’re looking at -- I think I offer package prices on them, so say it’s about $2,000 to $2,200, around that range. I do have some new ceramic heaters that I’m going to be testing, which will be a little less expensive, but they haven’t hit the stores yet. They’re still in shipping from the UK.

Lucas: Well great, I mean, for a lot of people that’s really pretty reasonable. Even for setting up a home studio if somebody’s really serious about it, that’s really not a bad investment at all to get something set up. Chad:

No, it’s important to stress that if you have a space that already has some sort of heat

12 system and you move the return air duct to the floor, you can oftentimes install a steam humidifier, whether it has its own blower or is ducting steam into the system that’s existing. Either way, you can achieve that hot yoga feel that you’re going for.

It’s not going to be everything, but if someone’s starting off and there was already a forced air system in the space or some other sort of heat system, they can install a steam humidifier. Typically the cost on a steam humidifier that will work for this use, is say around $2,500 to $3,500. And a system like that, once you install it in the wall, adds heat and the steam humidity, and that makes the room really kind of feel like what they want it to be. And I’ve installed that in many, many power yoga studios and a few full-out hot yoga studios that just didn’t have enough ***[36:49] and once they put that steam in, it made all the difference.

Lucas: Well great. For teachers who are not do-it-yourselfers, the people who they’re not comfortable with the hammer or they don’t want to mess with any of this stuff, can they hire a local heating or cooling expert? Can they hire somebody like you? How can they go about this if they’re just looking at this and Chad:

It’s important for them to understand, this isn’t simple heating. When we’re building these rooms, the classification in the heat industry of what we’re doing is called process heating. So they have to make it very clear to the person that they do retain, whether he’s a heating and cooling professional or just someone who’s just trying to help them out, that this is a special type of heating that they’re looking for, because it is above 100 degrees. Normal heating/cooling goes up to 90 degrees. Some equipment is designed to go up to 95, but most of it cuts out at 90.

So when you’re looking at a hot yoga room, hot yoga environment, you have to stress that this is process heating so that they don’t just give you the same heater that they used down the street at someone’s restaurant. You need something with a little more power.

Lucas:

It’s one of the most common things -

Chad:

Oftentimes they undersize them. They think you only need so many btu, but the actual btu count, which is the quantities of heat that you would pump into a space, for 1,000 square feet you’re looking at typically 150,000 btu, and most installers would only put like a 75,000 btu heater. So you need to know that with 1,000 square feet, 150,000 btu is about the heat that you would need. And if you have a system that already makes 75,000, well then you would add something else that would inject that other 75,000 btu. And that’s an average for all spaces whether they’re insulated well or not.

Lucas:

I talk to a lot of people and they always say, you know, they’ve got this heating guy and the guy assured them that it would be hot enough, but he didn’t understand that they want it really hot. You know, like no natural room would ever be heated the way a hot yoga studio’s heated, and very few people who work in the heating industry understand what you’re really trying to do. So it’s a really common thing where people set up the room and their heating guy told them it would get plenty hot and they’re 10 degrees cooler than where they’ve like to be. So it’s always better to be able to get your room 10 degrees hotter than you’d like it and keep it cooler.

13 Chad:

Well typically, saunas have been around for a very, very long time. And electric saunas have been popular for the last 40, 50 years, and an electric sauna is typically 12x12 and it uses 10,000 watts of heat. So if you explain that to your installer, although a sauna is designed to go 160 to 235 degrees, our low temperature saunas need that kind of power. They really need the amount of energy to take the room up quick and make the room hot without being on all night or anything like that.

The smaller systems, many times the studio owners will leave them running all night, and they may leave humidifiers running all night to maintain the humidity. And that can be dangerous. You want to make sure that whatever you do with a yoga room, that you don’t have a 50% relative humidity for more than 48 hours. As soon as your relative humidity stays at 50% or more for 48 hours, then you start to grow mold. So you have to break the mold cycle by not allowing the room to stay humid and hot over 48 hours. So it’s important to have a heater that’s big enough and a humidifier that’s big enough to just heat it and humidify it quickly and then let it cool down so that you can preserve the safety of the building.

Lucas:

It’s a really great point because everybody’s experienced a hot yoga studio that was moldy. One student was asking me, they said, “I just keep going to hot yoga and I just keep getting sick. I just can’t figure it out. I keep getting sick and I’m detoxifying,” and I said maybe you’re detoxifying, but after it happened six times maybe you’re just breathing in the bacteria that’s growing on the walls of that studio.

Chad:

Well a lot of times they use carpet in the studio. In fact, one major studio group, the Bikram Yoga Studio folks, do even require carpet. But I find, many of my customers who own Bikram Yoga studios, just simply are fed up with the odor and with the risk of problems like staph infection. That can grow in a fibrous floor. So we use a material called Zebra Mat, and Zebra Mat is originally designed as a martial arts floor. It’s made of recycled latex foam, it comes in various thicknesses. I prefer the one inch thickness, and it helps keep the room warm because now you have an insulated surface underneath your feet. So you don’t have the cold toes and the complaints from the cold floor that you would necessarily get.

Now it doesn’t get hot, it’s not conductive, but it doesn’t get cold. So it is a way of cutting down the amount of energy that you need to maintain the space, and totally eliminating the funk of a stinky carpet or an unsafe surface.

Because wood floors can be quite slippery, and I have a friend who someone fell on her arm and broke elbow against the way the joint normally folds and it took her a few years to get healed. And it was simply because the studio wanted the wood look on the floor, and what they put in was just too slippery.

Now Zebra Mat is not the prettiest, but it is, in my opinion, the safest material. I have it in both of my yoga rooms, and the 1/2 inch thickness in my power room and the one inch thickness in my Bikram Yoga room. And you don’t get those ugly calluses or have any kind of problems with the floor, because if you ever had a section that you needed to pick up, it comes in a 1 meter by 2 meter square. It’s made in Germany and brought into the US and Canada, and it’s available worldwide.

14 much for sharing all this knowledge with us. Do you have any other tips before we wrap up about just again, the majority of the people listening to this are just getting started and just any other tips that you might throw out there in terms of things that they can think about or maybe just an approach to setting up their heaters? Chad:

I think as you start, you have to think of three things. You have to think of one, preserving the teacher and their ability to teach. So I find even a very simple microphone system with even car audio speakers can help. I use the Samsun airline micro ear set, which fits over your ear and it’s better than their old headset, and they can be plugged into a stereo receiver, they can be plugged into a boom box, you can plus it into just about anything that has an auxiliary input and take the pressure off your voice. Because otherwise, you can find yourself teaching 10, 20 classes a week and soon you start getting a sore throat and then you have other problems. You want to preserve your ability to teach, and that’s one way to do it.

As far as the room itself, get it warm, once you get it warm, take care of the students. The biggest effect on students tends to be the conditions, the heat and the humidity of the room, the fresh air, and the lighting. And it’s important to use indirect lighting as much as possible. I just simply build a large kind of rain gutter around my yoga rooms, and then I put florescent light inside it so that it bounces the light off the ceiling. And that makes it inexpensive, indirect light that makes everyone comfortable. And to get away from the blue florescent color, I use a theatrical gel to just make it a little more pleasant. Because I want the room to be just slightly dimmed so it encourages a relaxed feeling.

And with the microphone, I can be anywhere in the room and making corrections and everyone can hear me clearly. So it makes sense to just try and do things just as effectively as you can without breaking the bank. And then as you move forward, you want to make improvements, there are always things you can add to your room.

Lucas: Well great, well awesome. Again, so for everybody listening, please do check out Chad’s site. It is www.HotYogaStudioSupply.com, and thanks so much, Chad. I really appreciate your time and your help here, and I hope to learn more from you soon. Chad:

And my 800 number is 877-468-1080.

15 LUCAS ROCKWOOD is a yoga teacher and teacher trainer. He co-founded Absolute Yoga Teacher Training programs, one of the largest, professional training networks in the world with their home training center on Koh Samui Island in Thailand. He produces and co-teachers 4-6 courses per year. Find more info at www.AbsoluteYogaSamui.com

CHAD CLARK is a yoga teacher who merged his extensive background as a General/Mechanical/Electrical Contractor with his love of hot yoga. He directed his comp any, Cavalry Services, Inc. to specialize in meeting the unique needs of hot yoga studios everywhere and developed his website www.hotyogstudiodesign.com, to dispense his findings to the blossoming world of Hot Yoga. Find more info at www.HotYogaStudioDesign.com

HELPFUL RESOURCES HOT YOGA TEACHER TRAINING – 200hr Yoga Alliance course, professional training center on a beautiful island in Thailand. Videos, interviews & more online: www.TeachHotYoga.com FLOW “YOGA” TEACHER TRAINING – 200hr Vinyasa Yoga Alliance course, professional training center on a beautiful island in Thailand. Videos, interviews & course info online: www.TeachFlowYoga.com 500hr YOGA ALLIANCE COURE – Professional training for career teachers. Advanced anatomy, history & adjustments. Learn to teach workshops, business skills and leadership. A must for serious teachers. www.500HourYogaTraining.com CHAD CLARK – Hot Yoga studio heating consultant/expert. 877-468-1080.ONLINE at: www.HotYogaStudioSupply.com