Dual Fuel Towel Rail From Scratch

Hello, friend! Have you ever wondered, "Why don’t more people make their own towel radiators?" It’s just a bunch of pipes—how hard can it be?

After all if you fancied one of those 'designer' towel rails in copper (which would actually be copper coated steel), you would be needing to pay a pretty penny. Especially if you wanted an extremely tall one, that was custom made to fit your odd shaped bathroom. More so again if you wanted it to run from a dual fuel energy source, AND to have it do extra duty as some shelves!

The materials you’ll need will depend on the size and design of your towel radiator. Here’s some bits I used:

1. a bunch of 28mm copper pipe (I had some left over from my UFH/heat pump adventures, but not enough)
2. I already had a batch of scrap 22mm pipe (it required lots of cleaning)
3. some wood or other material for the wall brackets
4. plenty of copper end feed T fittings
5. bleed valve or auto air vent of some kind
6. a thermostatic immersion element (for summer heating via electricity) .

Tools:

1. emery cloth for clean joints and pipe (120g to 320g is a good starting point)
2. soldering paraphernalia: blowtorch, solder, flux, wire brush, de-burr tool
3. I used a pipe bender - but it's not necessary
4. pressure tester/ gauge
5. hose pipes to commission (purge air and add water) to your creation

Without a rough plan all is lost. We need to know what sizes to cut and how much copper we need to scavenge / acquire. Our situation was quite unique - we had a narrow area that had plenty of height - so that dictated our towel rail sizes. We also wanted the towel rail to have quite a high volume, so that it increased the total circulating water volume in our central heating system, hence the use of 28mm copper pipe (also thicker pipes are just nicer, more sturdy, and to our taste ;)

For all these reasons, I'm not offering a plan with dimensions to you. Instead, make one based on your space and taste.

I had lots of old green pipes to sand until they shine, so I made a little adapter to clamp larger pipes into the drill chuck. It speeds up the process immeasurably. It consists of a 10mm to 15mm reducer, a small length of pipe, and a 15 to 22mm compression fitting. If you cut the olive before use, and don't over tighten, it's easy to get the pipe out when your done sanding.

There is little point making whole lengths perfect before soldering (as soldering dulls the pipe anyway), but when they are very old looking a little 'drill cleaning' is a useful step.

Before any soldering the pipes, we need to clean the ends. The part of the pipe the fittings will slide onto needs to be meticulously clean and bright, so use the emery cloth on those bits.

The inside of the T-joint fittings (yes even if they are new) also needs cleaning with a wire brush or emery cloth.

Check it all fits together right first!

Even 22mm pipe can be hard to bend. An extension bar can be very handy.

If you want curvy 28mm pipe, know that benders that will do it are expensive. My attempt to make one didn't go so well, so I stuck with few bends, and only in 22mm.

There are many good tutorials on how to make a long lasting solder joint in copper pipes. Watch a few, then do some practice joints. The nice thing about this project is that it will up your soldering game significantly (there are lots of joints to practice on). Think about how you order the joints you solder in your assembly. I talk on this in the video.

A note of caution: Testing with air instead of water can be risky. Water can't really be compressed but compressed air - well, it's compressed (!) and can expand explosively if something fails. If it is at high pressure (has been compressed a lot), and a fitting comes completely loose, it will potentially shoot off at deadly speed.

So yeah, keep the pressure low on a dry test, and stop the test the second you hear hissing. Also give all the joints a good wiggle/bash test before you start - this should reveal any real duffers.

It is commonly done on big complex plumbing jobs, but please be aware of the risks and stay safe.

With a little pressure in the system, you can go round cleaning up the joints with a very soapy sponge, this lets you see very tiny leaks because they blow bubbles.

You can also hold the towel rail at pressure for an hour or two and check it doesn't loose pressure.

Fix any leaks.

This thing's already heavy - it's going to be very heavy when it's full of water.

Our design was quite simple. It was, surprise surprise, made based off of the materials we had to hand. That meant it was three layers of wood glued together with a large long coach screw pinning it to the wall.

As we had the pleasure of using the DIY CNC, I was able to make the central portion of the lamination smaller by approximately the thickness of some squashed flat copper pipe. This strip of copper made a cover piece to hide the coach screw hole.

If you are like me, the perfect end feed solder joint is impossible. I'd rather add a tad too much solder than have a joint that leaks. This leaves us with some clean up to do to make things look presentable. A file works well to address the bigger blobs. Emery cloth for everything else.

As I found out this is hard to do once the towel rail is mounted (at least in the orientation I was fitting it), so do it first.

The idea behind the electric element is that it can be used in the summer when you wouldn't want your central heating on. Honestly, I doubt we will use it much, but it's there if we decide to opt for decadence.

Try and get the wall brackets just right :)

Be aware that if you have a big one like ours it will be heavy! Even more so when it's filled with water. Therefore check the wall can handle the weight, We were lucky in that ours was a solid strong masonry wall. If it was a stud wall, you would want to find the studs in advance so you could plan where the mounts would go on your towel rail.

After hanging it on the wall the two rad valves/ taps are plumbed up to central heating. In our case this is into the bathroom's small underfloor heating (UFH) loop. We added a flow meter, so that we can visually equalise the flow between the towel rail and the UFH circuit by partly closing one of the valves. (See the note later about keeping one valve always open)

It's way safer to go to higher pressures with water as a leak will just be a leak; it is not likely to have explosive force. In our area mains water is at 6 bar, which is way higher than the 1.5 bar this towel rail will see in use. So yeah, for our pressure test all we needed to do was flush out the air, and hold it at mains pressure. If you lived in a low water pressure area, you would need a wet pressure tester tool.

To do our test we had to take off the nice central pressure gauge, which only goes up to 2 bar and could be damaged by such a large over pressure. We also had to shut both valves attaching it to the central heating system, because the central heating has an expansion vessel, and pressure relief valve, which wouldn't let the pressure go that high.

To completely flush all the air out of the two shelves, we had to use the bleed valves / drain valves on each shelf, as well as the valve right up the top. We flushed a good amount of water through to try and make sure any wayward flux or debris was flushed out. Apart from that the top auto air vent ensures air escapes and it fills completely. Watch the video for more details.

We used melamine lacquer with extra heat resistance to coat the towel radiator. Unfortunately this project probably needs some chemical coating like this to stop it oxidising and staining your wet towels green... I don't particularly recommend this product, it's just something we were given a while ago, so it was handy and seemed to fit the requirements. A lacquer that you can brush or wipe on is good (less will go in your lungs than spray lacquer!).

We heated up the towel rail before coating, so it was 100% dry and condensation free, and the lacquer cured really nicely.

It is nice to both store and warm towels. And of course surprize people who go into the small bathroom and weren't expecting a monster steam-punk-esque towel radiator.

It works with both direct electric element and the central heating (heat pump).

Note though, that when using the electric element, one of the valves to the central heating circuit must stay open, so the warming, expanding water can be accommodated by the central heating's expansion vessel. Without that, the pressure of the water would quickly rise and probably cause a leak. For this reason I'd advise removing one of the tap handles, to make it hard for a well meaning person to shut the valve.

If your interested in our DIY underfloor heating adventures and more explanation of our pressure relief valve and expansion vessel check out our video here: https://youtu.be/9kzdCyA9fH8

Building your own towel radiator can save a little money, turn a practical item into funky artwork, and let you create a design that perfectly suits your unique (or downright strange) requirements. While the process is labor-intensive (maybe skip this if you're short on time), it’s a great way to improve your plumbing skills... and perhaps learn how to handle unexpected bathroom floods (kidding… mostly).

Thanks for checking out our instructable! :D Leave a comment why not.