UK households who have towel rail in bathroom slapped with £120 charge
Your towel rails are in the wrong place and it’s adding £120 to your annual energy bills, it has been warned. Nicholas Auckland, energy and heating expert from Trade Radiators, has advised placing them away from windows.
By halving the time your electric heater rails are left on, you would save roughly £120 a year, he explained. He said: "If you want your heated towel rail to heat the bathroom as well as the towels, then you need to make sure that they're placed away from windows, as open windows will let out the heat.
"In a bathroom, it's vital that you open windows to let out steam and therefore reduce the amount of damp and moisture in the bathroom, so to save energy it's best to keep the heated rails away from the window space."
READ MORE Met Office speaks out over UK being hit by 'notable' snow next week
Nicholas added: "You should think about placing them in a cupboard or drawer in order to let the heated rail emit heat into the room instead of into the towels. A heated towel rail can use up to 200W an hour, meaning that if you have it on for 10 hours a day, it's using 2,000W a day.
"For gas heated towel rails, this currently costs around 21p, and for electric heaters, this costs 66p. If you half the time that it's turned on, and make sure that your bathroom stays warm by keeping the rail away from windows and removing towels, then you're halving the price to just 10p or 33p a day."
If your heated towel rail is already installed underneath the window, you can try moving it to another wall, with plumbers charging an average of £200 for a job like this. But despite having to fork out £200, it could lead to big savings.
It could mean saving up to £120 every year.