Heated Towel Rail questions

[Gad-Westy]

Building a small shower room at present, approx 2500*1200

I'm considering using a towel rail as only source of heating. Handily, the only place to position it is right next to the shower door so would provide a good place to hang towel while using the shower.

So far, so good but I have read a fair bit about towel rails not providing enough heat to act as a radiator. The online calculators suggest I need approx 950 btu to heat the room. The 1600x500mm towel rails I'm looking at are in the rated approx 1600 btu. Towels would only be on there during showering, not likely to be used for storage so on the face of it, it looks fine. What am I missing?

I've noticed a lot of talk of incorporating an electrical element to use when central heating not operating. I assume this is not needed if I just want to use it as a radiator and not too bothered about the towel heating aspect?

[Rosscow]

They just don't convect heat very well.

Have you thought about adding some electric underfloor heating?

[Gary29]

I've a towel rail in my small bathroom, it's the only heating source in there, one of the warmest rooms in the house.

I think you'll be fine, in my limited experience.

[Gad-Westy]

Rosscow said:

They just don't convect heat very well.

Have you thought about adding some electric underfloor heating?

Yeah, I can see that size for size they're far poorer than a normal rad but I assumed that btu is btu.

So my thoughts were that even if I have a towel radiator 3x the size of a conventional radiator, it doesn't really matter as long as the overall output is sufficient. Or is there more to it?

UHF possible but I'm not sure it's needed. Room is south facing with only 1200mm of external wall.

[Gad-Westy]

Gary29 said:

I've a towel rail in my small bathroom, it's the only heating source in there, one of the warmest rooms in the house.

I think you'll be fine, in my limited experience.

Cheers. What sort of size room and what size rad if you don't mind me asking?

[matt666]

I've got one which I over specced by 2x and the room is still cold. In my other bathroom I've got one of these which is much warmer, could you use one of those instead?

[Harry Flashman]

We used these, which have integrated radiators. They are pretty warm but remember, insulation is half the battle here. If you're re-doing the room anyway, inculate under the floor and in the ceiling, and any outside walls with insulated plasterboard (assuming the building can still breathe as required - proper ventilation is a must here, so spec your fans accordingly).

This room is insulated in floor, ceiling and walls and despite the huge double glazed glass pane, is warm enough with just the rad. We never use the underfloor heating. Bathrooms don't have to be stupidly hot IMHO - you are generally using them to shower in or bathe in anyway.

Houzz bathroom 4 by baconrashers, on Flickr

The big brothers to this do duty in our kitchen, heating the room and drying tea towels (at the end of the room, under the windows)

DSC_0595.jpg by baconrashers, on Flickr

[Trustmeimadoctor]

I must admit I love your house

[Harry Flashman]

Thank you! That's kind.

[Toyoda]

Have another one Harry What a beautiful house.

On topic, in my experience heated towel rails aren't great at giving off heat, even when they're not covered in towels. If you like a toasty warm bathroom I'd be tempted to stick to a traditional radiator.

[Gad-Westy]

Toyoda said:

Have another one Harry What a beautiful house.

On topic, in my experience heated towel rails aren't great at giving off heat, even when they're not covered in towels. If you like a toasty warm bathroom I'd be tempted to stick to a traditional radiator.

Thanks all. That's starting to sound sensible. Unfortunately don't really have the depth for the combined type. Or at least not without it being a bit intrusive.

[eybic]

Chrome gives off a lot less heat too, I don't think the coating is as tough as the normal white ones.

[Fastchas]

My bathroom was always cold even though the towel rad was too hot to touch.
I looked at the BTU's - it gave off something like 750-800. I replaced it with a smaller normal radiator that gave off 2200 BTU's and it's been much better.
I would suggest looking at that combination pictured above but never again a towel rail on it's own.

[Harry Flashman]

Toyoda said:

Have another one Harry What a beautiful house.

On topic, in my experience heated towel rails aren't great at giving off heat, even when they're not covered in towels. If you like a toasty warm bathroom I'd be tempted to stick to a traditional radiator.

Thanks!

OP. you have a few options. You could go with a tall column rad and a U shaped rail bolted to the wall either side of it: think about another location in the room where you have space for a narrow but tall rad. Remember, if the floor is lifted, you can put heating wherever you want it - it's nothing but pipework!

Sorry for posting more pics of my house, but hopefully it should help visualise. We have these in some rooms. They come in white and their use in small rooms is to get a lot of radiator heating area for a small floor footprint. This one is just 450mm wide but 2000mm high.

Untitled by baconrashers, on Flickr

Have your plumber fabricate some copper pipe bent to a shallow U shape and mount in the wall so the pipe goes around the front of the rad. It won't be heated, but being in front of the radiator it will still dry towels. If you go really fancy, he could expose the feed/bypass pipe to the rad in the room somewhere and you could use that to hang towels on. Constant heat when central heating is on, even if the rad itself is off. If you are totally gutting a room, the extra to do this won't be as nuts as it sounds.


You could also use a small rad, just mounted low. This is one in en en-suite shower room, which is smaller room than yours at just 2m x 2m. We used the dead space under a window. You couldagain fabricate a custon rail to fit around or over it for hanging towels.

Untitled by baconrashers, on Flickr


They do these in 300mm and 450mm heights too, so depending on your design, you could fit one under a window easily. Remember if you are installing new tails for radiators anyway, you have a lot of options. You can tuck a radiator under a window and a simple towel rail high on wall, as we did in this bathroom. The towel rail in the first pic was not quite enough to heat the room. So we added a wall mounted rail as well, above the bath. The point is you can be pretty flexible: just think about what you want, available space, and what works. When a room is stripped back to brick, all of this stuff is easy to put in. Just plan first.

Excuse the mess - still sorting our place out and this top bathroom appears to have become a ski store...

Untitled by baconrashers, on Flickr

Untitled by baconrashers, on Flickr




Link to the Revive rads we used - I can vouch for them, having used them in 3 properties over 10 years...

https://www.mrcentralheating.co.uk/radiators/colum...

Edited by Harry Flashman on Monday 18th June 14:47

[uluru]

We have just a towel rail in our bathroom and it's fine as the room is only 2.4 x 1.8m. No underfloor heating but some of the pipework for the central heating does run under the floor anyway which probably helps a bit.

[Gad-Westy]

uluru said:

We have just a towel rail in our bathroom and it's fine as the room is only 2.4 x 1.8m. No underfloor heating but some of the pipework for the central heating does run under the floor anyway which probably helps a bit.

What sort of the size towel rail is it out of interest?

[uluru]

Gad-Westy said:

What sort of the size towel rail is it out of interest?

It's about 500mm wide by 800 tall. Don't recall any other details, chosen mainly because I wanted one where it attaches to the wall by the uprights. So many we looked at attach along the horizontals and at that width it means that you can't really hand a towel on there at all.

[Chris Jay]

I have a decent sized towel rail in the bathroom, but the room is always cold in winter. I have to prop the door open to allow heat from the rest of the house in to warm it up, despite the rail being too hot to touch!

[227bhp]

I have a SS one about 1.8 high, .5 wide, lots of cross (hanging) bars and it's not good enough when it's really cold, I back it up with the underfloor heating then.

[Alucidnation]

Towel rails are becoming a bit council imo.

Just get a nice designer ish radiator.

It will look good and give much better heat output.