Electric or CH Towel Rail?

[r.rain]

Hello All

Need some of your advice again!

I have removed an old electric towel rail from my ensuite which is in the process of being converted to a wetroom as you may have already heard :)

Now the oid towel rail was a pile of rubbish and did very little to a: provide any heat to the room which has no other heating in it or to b: dry towels.

Based upon this I *was* going to install a wet one. After googling this group I have found that the best way based on my requirements to plumb this, would of been to run it from the boiler feed before it passes through any diverter valves. The problem I have is that the boiler is in the kitchen and the valves are next to it in a cupboard. Unfortunately from there to the old ensuite is a fair old distance and it would be a bit of a pain in the butt to run pipes up through the ceiling and then into the loft and then across the loft and then down the wall to the towel rail.

So my question is are electric ones any good nowdays? I think the old towel rail could of been 15 years old but I'm not sure, I'm assuming there was oil inside it but again I'm unsure. I guess the only reason I was going the wet root was due to the performance of the old, which also seemed to take forever to warm up.

Now if I could take the feed from somewhere else like near the hot water cylinder it would be really easy as the wetroom is directly underneath as the hot water cylinder is in the loft.

Any comments, advice?

TIA

Cheers

Richard

[Andrew Gabriel]

Personally, I think heated towel rails are of limited use. When I redid a bathroom a couple of years ago, I decided not to install one. Instead, I have an unheated towel rail (or towel shelf, as the rails are in the horizontal plane) fixed to the wall well above the radiator. I did connect the bathroom radiator so it's driven whenever any of the heating zones are operating, although it also has a TRV. I'm not saying I would never install a heated towel rail, but my bathroom doesn't have spare space, and in considering what I needed in there and what would comfortably fit without making it feel cramped, a heated towel rail dropped off the bottom of the list.

As for heating output, towel rails are much lower than an equivalent sized radiator, and drop to almost zero when they have towels over them, so can't be relied upon for the room's heating.

[r.rain]

Thanks for the advice Andrew. Unfortunately SWMBO insist on a heated towel rail of some kind. After posting I had a thought that I could simply purchase one of those dual powered rails so I could plumb this into the CH system so it will be on in the winter, just like a normal rad, and in the summer we could rely on the heating element. Thinking about this some more I'm not so sure I would need it on in the summer at all this could just be wasted effort on my part. Also the wetroom willl have UFH as its primary heat source.

Cheers

Richard

[Jeff]

We drape the towels over the rad, in the winter they are dry and warm but in the summer they are always wet so i dont think it would be wasted effort

Regards Jeff