Seems dumb but does such a thing exist ?

essentially a heated towel rail that detects if a towel is on it !!

Wet or dry towel?

20 minutes ago, readiescards said:

Wet or dry towel?

Lol either !

 

seems strange it doesn’t exist 

guess I could link an event like using a bath or shower ( via say z wave motion detection ) turning on the towel heater for a predetermined length of time 

Edited December 10, 20178 yr by pocster

I would think a simple resistive sensor on the bars could detect the presence of a wet towel and kick the power on until the the towel dried and resistance rose sufficiently.

Mount the towel rail to a plate (perhaps polished stainless) that looks as if it's flush to the wall.  Behind the plate secure it with some slightly resilient mounts plus a load sensor in the centre.  Use the change in weight of the towel rail to sense whether or not a towel is present.  You could also detect the change in weight as a towel dries, to turn the rail off, or turn down the temperature.

 

Personally I think you have to ask whether any sensor system is going to work more effectively, or be sufficiently more efficient that it will recover its capital cost, than a simple time switch.  I have a cheap and simple programmable timer on the landing, that controls the power to both the bathroom towel rail supplies.  Each towel rail also has it's own switch, so we can turn them off if that bathroom isn't in use.  The timer comes on for an hour in the morning and and hour in the evening, which is long enough to get the towel rail up to temperature and the internal thermostat to operate.  This seems to work OK, and combined with the way the MVHR dries towels pretty quickly, anyway, seems to be as much automation as is really needed.

4 minutes ago, JSHarris said:

Mount the towel rail to a plate (perhaps polished stainless) that looks as if it's flush to the wall.  Behind the plate secure it with some slightly resilient mounts plus a load sensor in the centre.  Use the change in weight of the towel rail to sense whether or not a towel is present.  You could also detect the change in weight as a towel dries, to turn the rail off, or turn down the temperature.

 

Personally I think you have to ask whether any sensor system is going to work more effectively, or be sufficiently more efficient that it will recover its capital cost, than a simple time switch.  I have a cheap and simple programmable timer on the landing, that controls the power to both the bathroom towel rail supplies.  Each towel rail also has it's own switch, so we can turn them off if that bathroom isn't in use.  The timer comes on for an hour in the morning and and hour in the evening, which is long enough to get the towel rail up to temperature and the internal thermostat to operate.  This seems to work OK, and combined with the way the MVHR dries towels pretty quickly, anyway, seems to be as much automation as is really needed.

Hey !

 

i know perhaps it’s overkill ; but seemed like some company would of done this even with just a simple micro switch on the rail . I guess just on/off twice a day for an hour would do the trick especially with Mvhr .But in these days of interconnected devices just seems to be a missed / simple thing :-)