Meet Gordon – Heated towel rail

The maximum operating temperature has a limit imposed by what is safe and comfortable in a room where the user tends to be wearing little or nothing. The British and European Standards weren’t much use here as they allow a maximum surface temperature of 95ºC. We believe this is genuinely dangerous in our opinion and worth noting that many products on the market operate towards this limit. In order to keep things safe we adopted the Low Surface Temperature standard used in public buildings such as hospitals of max 43ºC. This is for an electric towel warmer without a towel on. Once you cover it with a towel this can be allowed to rise a bit because it’s much safer for the user in this state. We set ourselves a limit here of 56ºC. Still much lower than most radiator temperatures of c.60-80ºC.

This was the clever part… How do you promote the convection currents that will provide a constant flow of warm dry air over the towel. This is where our two decades of experience designing high performance radiators combined with state of the art modelling techniques come in. It’s essentially all in the form.

This is where the ladder rail design breaks down completely. Not only does it not provide adequate airflow, but due to the horizontal nature of the towel hanging it also traps a pocket of damp air underneath the towel that, once it has become saturated with moisture, cannot absorb any more and so prevents the towel from drying further in that area. Gordon towel radiator’s use of long vertical fins provides free air galleries that constantly exhaust the humid air, replacing it with dry air from underneath the towel warmer.