04/20/2026
From a growing interest in masonry banya stoves (Russian saunas), last year I joined the Masonry Heater Association - . A couple weeks ago I attended the annual gathering and participated in the Basics and Theory class. These pictures include photos from our build.
Unlike conventional fireplaces, the flue gases take a circuitous route before finally leaving out the chimney. This results in much more complete combustion and heat capture in the surrounding mass, creating soft radiant heat. You can safely touch or lean against these stoves - our design incorporated a bench along the flue path.
You'll see in some pictures that the inner heater core built with special firebrick is wrapped in cardboard. That creates an expansion layer to keep the internal core from pushing against and cracking the joints in the surrounding external layer of masonry when heated. Our external mass was made with redbrick; some heaters use stone or stucco/plaster over brick. Inspired by one of our instructors projects, I designed the Morse code over our firebox with each line representing the letters MHA (_ _; ....; ._).
In addition to our beginner class heater, there were several other projects building heaters, bake ovens, and homemade bricks from local clay. We spent Tuesday through Friday building the heaters. Friday afternoon everyone fired up their heaters and we had a party, including over 200 pizzas made in the ovens just created, a shrimp boil and beef roast made in another, a masonry pong tournament (ping pong but with masonry trowels as paddles), music, and good company. Then Saturday we took it all down. These heaters are built in place and don't ship due to the masonry joints. We were able to save much of the material to be used for the projects next year.
I'll try to get a post out with several of the other builds from the week and some more musings about the group and some of the similarities and differences between masonry heater and sauna subcultures. A huge thanks to all the instructors and other masons who shared their knowledge, and the great company of everyone at the event.
Let the banya heater experimentation commence!
