Replace heated towel rail?

[Loofah]

Hi All,

I have a 3 bed detached house with the kitchen and bathroom in one corner, neither of which is heated and both have stone or tiled floors. As you can expect, this makes for very cold feet in winter! The bathroom does have a heated towel rail plumbed into the central heating but is hardly sufficient to heat the towel let alone the room (approx 2.5 x 2.5m)!

I don't want to rip up all the tiles and lay underfloor heating so I'm going to ask if it is worth replacing the rail with a proper radiator and if so how much improvement would there be and if there are any recommended makes?

 

[stem]

It will make an enormous difference. 10 years ago, I had only a heated towel rail in the bathroom which was cold and suffered from condensation. I swapped it for a double radiator of the same physical size and now the condensation has disappeared and the room is toasty, even when it's sub zero outside.

For comparison, if you find a similar sized towel rail to yours in an on line store and look at the 'btu' rating which is the heat emitted. Then select a radiator and compare the ratings. Towel radiators are not designed to heat the room they are usually silvered, & so don't radiate much heat, (I bet it stays warm quite a while after the rest of the radiators have cooled down) and the heated parts are covered by insulating towels. Radiators are designed to maximise air flow over their surfaces by the use of large surface areas fitted with fins and thus transfer their heat to the room.

If you do install a radiator, don't cover it up with towels, use a free standing towel rail in front of it, or mount one on the wall above the radiator, making sure there is still a good flow of air around the radiator.

There are lots of on line calculators that will work out what size of radiator you should have for your bathroom.

 

[Loofah]

Excellent Stem, thanks muchly! Think it's time to hunt about for an appropriate rad

 

[Loofah]

For those of you also thinking about it - my radiator is now up and running and makes a MASSIVE difference! Relatively small double rad taking up less space and, I think, looks better than the old heated towel rail.

Very happy and looking forward to nice hot bathroom this winter