Starting an ozone room: cost, pricing and payback

What you are actually buying

An ozone room is a piece of equipment in a room, not a build project. Our ozone steam sauna is a self-contained fibreglass cabinet with an on-board ozone generator, a steam element and far infrared, supplied with a medical oxygen concentrator. The client sits inside with their head outside the sauna. Nothing is plumbed in and nothing is drilled, and the cabinet sits on four lockable castors.

That is why it appears in spa expansion plans so often. Compared with a hydrotherapy bath or a flotation tank, the fixed-cost side is genuinely small. The commercial risk sits elsewhere, in whether you can fill the diary.

We make three models: the Standard, the Deluxe and the Red Light ozone steam sauna. Current specifications and prices are on each model’s product page.

What the room has to provide

• Space. The minimum room we recommend is 2 m × 2 m. Optimal is 3 m × 3 m or larger, which gives you room to work around the sauna with the doors open, somewhere for the client to change, and space for a chair and a water station.
• Power. Total draw, including the oxygen concentrator, is 1,750 W. Rated 220 V / 10 A. For the 110 V versions (ordered from the international section): Red Light 110 V / 13.5 A; Standard and Deluxe 110 V / 11 A. The oxygen concentrator runs on its own separate socket (300–450 W). A 110 V sauna needs its own dedicated circuit. Before delivery, ask a qualified electrician to confirm that your circuit and socket can carry the sauna’s rated current continuously. The concentrator is a separate appliance, so plan two sockets rather than one. A 3 kVA or larger inverter will run the pair; a generator will too, but we do not recommend one because of voltage fluctuation.
• Ventilation. Normal room ventilation is sufficient — an open door and window clear any residual ozone, and the room needs airflow anyway so the concentrator has ambient air to draw on. Nearly twenty years of operation is the basis for that position. An extractor fan is an optional extra precaution.
• Water, by hand. No plumbing means no drainage either. You fill a bottle at the back with verified distilled water. One bottle covers four to eight sessions depending on your temperature setting, since a hotter sauna makes more steam and uses more water. No descaling is needed when the right water is used.

Staffing: what “no extra staff” actually means

An ozone sauna lets you add a service without adding a dedicated member of staff. Nobody has to be hands-on with the client for 30 minutes, and that is the entire economic difference between an ozone room and a massage room. What it does not mean is that the room runs itself.

Someone still has to screen the client against contraindications, brief them, set the sauna up, start it in the correct sequence, stay within call so the heat can be adjusted, and clean the sauna afterwards. In a business, a trained person must be present and within call during every client’s session, with constant supervision if the client is a child. To get out, open the doors and step out. To stop the ozone, switch the sauna off at its wall socket once you’re out. If a client feels unwell, follow the steps on what to do if a client feels unwell.

The realistic model is one person covering the ozone room alongside reception or another treatment. Budget attendance in minutes per session, not whole sessions, but do budget it.

Throughput

A session is about 30 minutes. Around it:

• First preheat of the day, or after a long gap, takes 10 to 20 minutes depending on the room’s ambient temperature.
• Five minutes for the client to get out and dress.
• Five minutes to wipe down, clear the water from under the footrest and reset the towels.
• Five minutes for the next client to undress and get into the sauna.

The sauna is built to run back-to-back sessions, so a 45-minute slot is realistic once the sauna is warm and an hour is comfortable. Capacity is almost never the binding constraint. A room that can turn over eight or nine slots a day is not the problem; demand is. Model demand first and capacity second.

The equipment-consolidation argument

The Red Light model carries seven modalities in one cabinet — blue, green and red light, near infrared, far infrared, steam and ozone — plus a brand screen you can customise with your logo and colours, and a customisable phone and fan holder. That is a real commercial argument: a broader service menu from one footprint, one outlet and one turnaround routine, instead of siting and staffing several single-purpose devices.

Build your business case on throughput, menu breadth and equipment consolidation. Those are the things you can show a client, a landlord and an accountant.

Pricing a session

Your price is yours to set. The method that travels between markets:

1. Price the course as the primary product and the single session as a premium-priced trial. The clinical convention of ten sessions is also the commercial one.
2. Set your floor at the room’s opportunity cost. If the room currently earns nothing, the floor is your variable cost. If it currently runs facials, the floor is what the facials cleared.
3. Put booking commission inside the price, not on top of it. On theBooking.site that is a flat 15% per booking, with credit-card transaction fees included.
4. Display prices inclusive of tax. TheBooking.site’s terms make outlets responsible for displaying accurate, tax-inclusive prices and for honouring them.

What a session costs you to deliver

• Electricity. 1,750 W for the sauna and concentrator together. A 30-minute session is therefore under 0.9 kWh at full draw, and less in practice, because temperature control cycles the element rather than running it flat out. Multiply your measured figure by your tariff.
• Water. Verified distilled water only, four to eight sessions per bottle.
• Oxygen. No recurring gas cost. The concentrator makes oxygen from room air at 5 l/min and 93% (±3%) purity.
• Everything else. Towels and laundry, cleaning products, staff minutes, the 15% booking commission, insurance, and the rental instalment if you finance.

Capital cost and payback

Get the current price from the model’s product page and a written quotation for your country, then keep the calculation as a formula rather than a worked example:

• Payback in sessions = capital cost, or total rental over the term, ÷ net margin per session.
• Payback in months = payback in sessions ÷ the sessions you will realistically run each month.
• Net margin per session = session price − water, electricity, laundry, cleaning materials, staff minutes and commission.

Two inputs are ours and worth using. Equipment lifecycles: the ozone generator runs for more than 3,500 hours, the oxygen concentrator for 15,000 hours and the LEDs on the Red Light model for 30,000 hours — at half an hour a session, 3,500 hours is roughly 7,000 sessions before the generator is due for replacement, which sets the horizon your payback has to fit inside. And leave residual value out of the model: we do not buy units back, so assume the asset is worth nothing at the end and let the sessions do the work.

The rest of the inputs are yours. The sessions-per-month figure moves the answer more than anything else, and it is a marketing question rather than an equipment one. That is where your time is worth spending.

Before you take the first booking

Trained staff, a client intake form, a documented screening and cleaning process, and your own insurance. We supply comprehensive training, manuals and support, with additional session guidance and safety measures through theBooking.site — which adds signed disclaimers, contraindication warnings and an audit trail, while stating plainly that it offers no insurance of any kind. That cover is yours to arrange.

One thing to be clear about in your marketing: we sell our saunas as wellness devices, not as medical devices. No session is currently covered by any medical aid or health scheme in any market, so plan on clients paying in cash.

Ozone therapy is regulated differently in every market. Confirm with your regulator, your professional body and your insurer what you may offer and how you may describe it before you advertise anything.