Heated towel rail

[berbles]

Does anyone have any tips for a wall-mounted heated towel rail for the bathroom?

My first thoughts were a conventional chrome water-filled towel rail (the sort you'd connect to your heating or hot water loop in the house) with the pipes sealed off, filled with water through the bleed hole at the top and a summer element 150W (0.6A) fitted. Run it off the inverter, the element has a thermostat so you just keep it ticking over

Or would you plumb it in to the central heating (diesel-powered in our case) and keep the summer element for when the c/h not in use?

 

[Kannon Fodda]

I doubt this is practical.

You aren't going to have a water based towel rail off your standard MH heater. In a home, the water from boiler whether on the radiator or hot water circuit is either pumped flow and return, or in the ancient system of ground floor boiler first floor bathroom, circulated by gravity. Your MH simply stores a tiny reservoir of hot water in the heater (or heats "instantaneously") and that gets pushed out by the pump when a tap is opened. There is no return so your MH heater can't re-heat the water being cooled in your towel rail.

Now to turn to an electric element in the towel rail. Unless you are on hook up, or have a massive battery bank, you'll not have enough juice. 150W at 230 V, a notch over 0.6 Amp, through an inverter will be needing something like 13-15Amp at 12V (depends a bit on the inverter efficiency). Even with thermostatic control limiting the on period, that's a lot of power. There are 12v elements, or pads, usually used to stop water tanks freezing, but they are only to keep water just off freezing, and still take a lot from your battery.

Most will simply rely on the warm air circulation from the heater ducts via our Truma, Alde or similar systems.

 

[sallylillian]

Does anyone have any tips for a wall-mounted heated towel rail for the bathroom?

My first thoughts were a conventional chrome water-filled towel rail (the sort you'd connect to your heating or hot water loop in the house) with the pipes sealed off, filled with water through the bleed hole at the top and a summer element 150W (0.6A) fitted. Run it off the inverter, the element has a thermostat so you just keep it ticking over

Or would you plumb it in to the central heating (diesel-powered in our case) and keep the summer element for when the c/h not in use?

The latter in our case. I have a towel rail plumbed into the Alde system but also a 200 watt 230vac element poked up one end. I have the element wired through a conventional dimmer switch to control the power it uses and the heat it generates. We run it through the inverter and have it on 24/7 to dry towels. In the summer it is just warm.
I use the lighting dimmer as it has a constant draw whereas a number of the towel rad "thermostatic" switches are really glorified on and off switches just limiting the on periods. This poses an issue on my Victron Multi, as it would any inverter charger that has a UPS function. If you are close to the cusp of the UPS support on EHU it is continually switching in and out of UPS as the towel rad is switched onto full power for seconds and then off again. I have had this setup on the Flair and the Morelo. Be under no illusion even at the lowest setting which is circa 40 watts that is a fair amount of DC amps over a 24hr period maybe 80-90amps or more so if off grid and relying on solar you are giving up a big chunk of your harvest.