Heating

Our heating system in each studio location begins with energy efficient hot water boilers, which pump very hot water throughout several portions of our air ducts and heating elements inside the yoga rooms. Air flows through these heated pipes and is instantly warmed to create the 95-105 degree air you know and love.

The way we handle this air flow is key; the air entering our yoga rooms is fresh air from outside of the studio. This is the important part that makes us different. Many other buildings use recycled air to achieve high room temperatures; it makes sense on the surface, because if you’re pumping hot air back into the hot yoga room you don’t have to re-heat it, which saves money. HYM doesn’t recycle air like this. Our goal has always been to provide the healthiest hot yoga possible so we’ve always brought fresh, outside air into the yoga rooms during class, which just so happens to be the best thing we can do during a pandemic!  It’s more of an investment on our part, because there are days when we’re bringing in fresh air that’s 100 degrees colder than the yoga rooms need to be, but we’ve always believed that this is the best, healthiest way to run our studios.

The reason we can heat cold, fresh Wisconsin winter air to 105 in our rooms is through an investment we made in something called Energy Recovery Ventilators (ERV). Fresh air, as it enters each yoga room in our studio, passes through these large ERV units. These systems aren’t cheap, which is why most buildings don’t use them. However, an ERV allows hot air that is exiting the yoga rooms to pre-heat the incoming fresh air through non-contact conduction (the exiting air doesn’t actually touch or mix with the incoming cold fresh air, it just transfers heat to it).  Thus, we can bring in a constant supply of fresh air into our yoga rooms during class, before class, and after class.

Finally, we run the fresh air fans in our heating system continuously during class, constantly replacing the air in the yoga room in a matter of minutes. This ensures that as we breath out, that air is constantly pushed out of the yoga room to be replaced with fresh, newly heated air.

We don’t cut corners when it comes to humidity. Every one of our yoga rooms has its own dedicated industrial-grade steam humidifier. These systems take fresh water and boil that water to create steam, which is then added to the hot airflow entering the yoga rooms. The humidifiers are a key component of our system, and is the reason you really feel immersed in the heat in our classes, as opposed to feeling like heat is being projected towards you on one side or another like some other buildings do.

When it comes to the pandemic, there has been some scientific interest and evidence suggesting that the virus does not transmit well within environments at 40-60% humidity (we raised our class humidity to 50% after seeing these studies). While more study needs to be done to completely validate this, we feel like our commitment to maintaining our high-humidity environments could be helpful in reducing potential transmission.

We invested in state of the art air-duct UV disinfecting systems in 2020. These ultraviolet germ-killing lights are hidden deep inside our air ducts, and kill any germs that pass through the lights. It’s the same safe system that hospitals use to disinfect medical equipment.

In addition to in-duct disinfection, we continue to follow a strict regimen of disinfection and cleaning processes in our studios. We have professional cleaners come and clean the studios using the safest most effective cleaning agents available, and our staff disinfects the yoga room and high touch areas between classes when needed.