Making Your Towel Rail Actually Smart
Most towel rails are honestly a bit sluggish. They rely on heating up water or air, which takes forever. We decided to ditch that and go with infrared (IR) emitters instead. The difference is huge. Instead of trying to warm up the whole room, IR sends energy straight into the fabric of the towel and your skin. It’s fast. Really fast. You don’t have to wait around for the air to get warm; the heat is just there. The Guts of the Thing To make this work with a smart home, we plug a heavy-duty relay or a TRIAC dimmer into the power circuit. For a standard 150W to 300W rail, we use a Wi-Fi or Zigbee module. When you tap “On” on your phone, the circuit closes and the IR filament hits its peak temperature in a matter of seconds. We usually go with carbon fiber elements here. They provide a wider spread of heat and, more importantly, they won’t scorch your favorite towels. The “Wake Up” Experience The real magic is in the scheduling. Imagine your alarm goes off, and you walk into the bathroom to find a towel that’s already toasted. We set the system to trigger about 10 minutes before you wake up. To keep things from getting too hot, we use PID controllers in the high-end models. It’s basically a way to stop the heater from overshooting the temperature and damaging delicate fabrics. Plus, we add a little humidity sensor. If the bathroom gets too steamy, the system kicks in automatically to dry the towels out so they don’t get that damp, mildewy smell. A Few Real-World Quirks It’s not all magic, though. Because these heat up so quickly, there’s a big spike in power at the start. You have to make sure the smart relay can handle that load, or you risk welding the contacts shut. Also, IR is very directional. If the towel isn’t hanging right in the path of the heat, you lose that efficiency. That’s why we spent a lot of time on the geometry of the rail—we want to make sure the heat hits as much surface area as possible.