Heated towel rails can help deliver a convenient and luxury experience in the smart home. Everyone likes to step out of a shower or bath to a nice warm, dry towel. If put under the intelligent control of a smart home, they can also use very little energy. We have spent a lot of time in our current home researching how best to control and automate our heated towel rails.
There are various types of towel rails used in UK homes. Some are directly connected into the central heating system and effectively also act as radiators. Some have an additional electric heating element that enables more powerful control and some only have an electric heating element.
Our preference is very much for the latter approach, as this gives isolation from the heating system and allows towels to be dried during the summer months, when the heating system may not be in use at all.
Simply connecting a towel rail enables a lot of control, schedules, etc. but the real challenge is in delivering intelligent control and a great user experience whilst minimising energy usage. As always, our goal is a zero-touch user experience.
We use models for all connected appliances and for all types of connected appliances in our Home Control System. Our technology abstraction this means that any towel rail added to our home inherits all of the capabilities supported by our models and all those of our wider contextual smart home. Essentially, every connected towel rail connected becomes instantly very smart and they can all be controlled by any of the many user interfaces available, providing a great user experience.
We can associate a controller with any towel rail to enable intelligent and adaptive control. Towel rails may also be controlled by a slave processor. Regardless of this, all of them can also be controlled by all of the user interfaces in our smart home and and this includes buttons.
It is actually quite difficult to intelligently automate something like a towel rail, without switching it on needlessly. You can't simply use things like bathroom occupancy because people walk into a bathroom for numerous things. Occupancy down to shower level is a start but this becomes much harder for a bath.
Our initial approach to automation was based on allow anyone to turn on the towel rail easily, simply by pressing a smart button. This would then extend the time the towel rail was on by a set time (typically 30 minutes).
In our main bathroom we had a wall-mounted corner cabinet with a gap at the back, which allowed us to 3D print a smart button mount and install one discretely on its underside.
It was only when we installed our smart shower that our contextual smart home gained the sensors and the additional context that they provided, to enable a zero-touch user experience. A shower occpuancy sensor is a clear indication that we might want to turn on the heated towel rail, especially when a water flow sensor detects the shower actually being used. A bathroom humidity sensor is also a good source of context.
