Sauna, steam room and chiller servicing across Africa

What a service visit covers

Sauna: stones out, sorted, turned or replaced, element resistance checked, thermostat and overheat cut-out tested, bench fixings tightened, timber cleaned, vents cleared.

Steam room and hammam: generator descaled to an interval set by your actual water, probe cleaned, trap flushed, silicone checked, extract and humidistat tested, slab heating checked where it is a hammam.

Cold plunge and ice bath chiller: condenser cleaned, refrigerant pressures read, cartridge changed, ozone or UV cell checked, water tested and the lid seal inspected.

What each climate does to a room

Salt on the coasts — Diani and Mombasa, Zanzibar, Mahé and Praslin, Grand Baie, the Red Sea, the Lagos lagoon: plated fixings bloom, condensers corrode and cavities stay wet. Visits are quarterly and include a corrosion inspection.

Dust in the bush and the harmattan — the Serengeti, the Mara, the bushveld, Abuja from December to February: condensers blanket and filters choke. Quarterly again, with a dust inspection and a filter change.

Hard water in Egypt and on many boreholes: steam generators scale in months, so the descaling interval follows a water test rather than a calendar. Altitude in Nairobi, Johannesburg and on the crater rim: the usual complaint is a heater that never quite reaches temperature, and the fix is often a correctly sized heater rather than a new cabin. Highland rooms are serviced half-yearly, because neither salt nor dust is doing much.

Repairs to equipment we did not install

We take on other installers' saunas, steam rooms, plunges and chillers. Send photos, the heater or chiller model plate and a short description; if the parts are obtainable we quote the repair, and if they are not we say so before anyone travels.

The four usual culprits get the four usual fixes: a heater resized to the real volume and glass, a condenser housed and filtered, softening on the steam feed, and a coastal retrofit — plated fixings replaced with A4, plant enclosed, the cabin lifted onto a ventilated void.

Spares, scheduled blocks and contracts

Each room we hand over comes with a labelled spares case — heating element, thermostat, cartridges, hose seals, an ozone cell where fitted, stainless fixings — with part numbers marked on every item. On a remote island or at a fly-in camp that case is what makes a failure a same-day fix instead of a wait for freight.

Remote clients — islands, the parks, upcountry — are visited in planned rounds, with the travel cost shared between the properties on each round. Our installations carry a 24-month warranty, and maintenance contracts cover the visits after it. The service rates for each country are in the table below.

Second lives

An old cabin with a sound shell is usually worth re-lining rather than replacing: strip, check the barrier and insulation, new lining, correct heater. A heater and chiller that have been fighting an inverter can often be put right with a scheduled circuit and an interlock, which turns an abandoned installation back into a used one.

To book a visit, send the location, a photo of the room and the equipment model plates on WhatsApp; we reply within one business day with the date of the next service block near you.

In short

• Quarterly on coasts and in dust, half-yearly inland
• Corrosion inspection on coasts, dust inspection and filter change in the dry season
• Descaling set by a water test, not a calendar
• Repairs to other installers' equipment where parts are obtainable