Plumbing in a towel rail question

[Jay]

I am planning to install a towel rail, which can be plumbed in to the CH system. Underneath where I want it is a new modern radiator which has a thermostatic valve. What I would like to do is plum the rail into the two blocked off connection points on the top ends of the radiator. The rail would sort of piggy back onto the radiator.

Can I simple turn off the rad at its valves, add the rail to the top connection suing flexible steel clad pipes and then bleed the rail? Seems too easy....

and comments??

Jonathan

[Bob Mannix]

Aside from being a strange arrangement, it should work water wise: you may get problems with the radiator not heating fully as the hot water will shoot up into the towel rail and back down the other side of the radiator. It may be possible to solve this by valving down the towel rail separately to restrict the flow through it. Also (of course) you'll get no towel rail heating if the room is warm (which may be the idea).

[Dave Plowman]

Can I add a supplementary to this since it's relevant?

I've just fitted a chrome ladder type for a friend. He bought it from B&Q, and had bought a lockshield valve/TRV pair, as the original rad was fed from one end only, although in 15 mm, with no TRV.

Of course, the inlets on these ladder rads are underneath rather than on the sides as with a conventional rad - so the TRV head now sticks out the front horizontally. I could have made it go to the side, but this would have showed more pipework.

Inline lockshields are available, but I've not seen inline TRVs. Do they exist?

FWIW, I'm not impressed with the B&Q offering. The brackets were extremely difficult to tighten up as the machine screws had to cut their own thread in the plastic. Nor did they clamp up tight. Also, having an exposed blanking plug and bleed valve on the top of the rail looked just plain cheap and nasty.

[Toby]

Most certainly, try screwfix part 35602 for the generic type.