How to Install an Electric Towel Warmer: Hardwired & Plug-in

Hello Thank you so much for joining us for today's webinar. My name is Lyn. I'm a customer service representative here at WarmlyYours. And I am joined by. My name is Scott and I'm from WarmlyYours too. Thanks for joining us. Awesome So today we're talking about our electric towel warmers. We're going to be going over our hardwired and plug-in models. And if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask. You can do so either in the sidebar chat or at the bottom of the screen and the ask the question module. If we don't see it right away, we'll definitely get to it and answer it by the end of the presentation. And if you're watching us on Facebook, you can type into the live chat there because we've got somebody watching that, too. Perfect Thank you. So today we are going over some different types of our towel warmers, specifically our new dual connect models. We're also going to be going over the installation for the hardwired type and the installation for the plug-in type of those models as well as the control options available. So towel warmers are obviously they've been really popular in Europe for quite some time now and they're starting to make their way over to the States and grow in popularity here and everything that we offer are electric. So using electric radiant heat through those towel warmers is going to warm up towels, robes, clothes, whatever you put on them. And again, they're very easy to install, whether you're doing hardwired or plug-in. And I think one of the best parts about how and that it really brings the spa experience home gives you that extra bit of luxury. It kind of feels very fancy to get out of the shower in the morning and have a warm towel. Without a ton of cost or a lot of labor to put that in. And it can also be controlled with a timer. So you don't even have to think about it. You can just kind of turn it on or have it turn on when you want it to. Scott, can you tell us in terms of where to install an bathroom? You know, where do we recommend or not recommend? Yeah, the National Electric Code prohibits putting them in a wet location, which means inside of a shower stall or shower enclosure or bathtub enclosure. The idea here is put the thermostat somewhere. The thermostat is to put the towel warmer. My call right before here was about a thermostat. So the ideal place for this is somewhere where you're not standing in water when you reach for the towel on the power because it is a line voltage power, which means there's 120 volts going through it. So that's why the National Electric Code does not allow you to put that in the shower, no matter what the size of the shower enclosure is. Some people have a 3 foot by 3 foot enclosure. That's a shower enclosure. Some people with big houses have a 3 foot by 15 foot shower enclosure and they say, can I put it at the other end. And the other? And then the question is, is that still inside the shower enclosure? And they say, Yes. I said, no, you can't put it in there. So it needs to go somewhere where the water is not going to hit it and where you cannot reach for the towels standing in water. That's especially true for the recommendation of putting it on and a requirement of putting it on a GFCI protected circuit. Yes, absolutely. So there's a few different types of towel warmers out there. There's electric, hydraulic and electric hydraulics. So when you kind of tell us the differences between the three hydraulic units are the ones that have been popular in Europe for years and years and years. And they were simply just if you take a look at this picture, you can see where it's the towel warmer is actually attached to the boiler for the house. If they especially if they have hot water, heat, hydraulic heat, then they just run the water through the towel warmer. Also, you can tell that would require quite a bit of work to get that installed. Plumbing piping is much usually a little more difficult to run than electric wiring, especially if this is on the other side of the house where you don't have hot water already existing and you don't want to run a new hot water line over there. So you don't really see a lot of these I haven't seen a lot of these in the states, but the first ones I ever saw were in Europe years ago and they were there then. Another question, the reason why we wanted to make a note of this is because we get the question all the time is do your units have oil inside them? Do they have water inside them? There are electric units which use a cartridge heater, which is just simply if you've ever made coffee back in the old days with an electric cartridge that you stuck into the water and it started boiling. It's kind of the same thing. Those are what we I guess we can term them as electric, hydraulic, and then ours are just electric. There is no water to worry about. So if your system like if you had an electric hydraulic one, if your heating element were ever to go bad, you'd have to take it out. To take it out. You'd have water going all over the floor once you took it out and replaced it. So those are also much slower heating than our units because that heating element is usually located at the base. Like if we look at this picture, it would be located in the lower right hand side. It takes a long time for the water to heat and then to work its way manually through the entire top warmer. It could take a long time to do that. That's why we just use an electric heating cable inside the top warmer that heats up the towel warmer all at the same time. So you don't have a hot spot down at the bottom, right. And you wait for it to work its way for all the water to work its way through the top, warmer in back by gravity or whatever type of method that cold water gets back, you get heated up. So our system is purely electric. It is not filled with oil. You don't have to worry about oil dripping anywhere. You don't have to worry about filling it with water. It's simply a dry electric heating element. Awesome Yeah. Makes them nice and easy. So are most popular. Models of table warmers are upgraded now to our new dual connection option. Can you kind of tell us what dual connection is? Dual connection is a single tile warmer that can be modified site by an electrician to make it so it goes from a plug-in unit to a hard wired unit. And that way you can decide, you know, a lot of people in apartments can't put electric wiring wherever they want to. They can't have an electrician come in or, hey, can you put an electric spot here on the wall? Because I want to put a power up. Usually, they can get away with putting four holes in the walls long as they, you know, fix them before they leave and the next person rents the apartment. Those type of people would definitely want a plug-in unit because they can put it up and then plug it in. And then when they're ready to move, they just take it off the wall, unplug it, and they're ready to go to move to the next place. So these units are convertible right on the site. So all that is required. They start out as a plug-in unit, and all that's required to make them a hard wired unit is for an electrician to cut the plug off, leave enough power cord to get from the tail warmer into the wall. So one thing that you do want to notice is you're going to see this on the next picture and I'm just going to save it for now because I'm seeing this stuff already. Oh, absolutely. I kind of want to add one there, but the electrical connections are actually done inside the leg in the lower right hand corner. So I'm going to go back here and you can see where that line cord is over here. That's where your electrical connection is going to be made for the towel warmer. And the good thing about this is in the old days, you had this leg and then you had a power leg that went into a separate wall plate. So what it's doing is it's cleaning up this area. You're not really seeing your electrical connection and there is no wall cover plate. So a lot of people order these and they say, hey, they call us back here. Where's my wall? Where's my wall plate? There isn't a wall plate. That's what we've gotten away from to get this cleaner look for the installation. The national electric code does not require a wall plate, does not require a box in the wall as long as the appliance that you're installing, which is the towel warmer, as long as it has a compartment that you can make your wiring connections in that wiring compartment, which is part of the towel warmer is the leg. And that that's how it complies with the US listing and the National Electric Code to allow you to install the wiring in the leg without putting a box in the wall. So if your electrician pushes back and says, hey, we need a box here in the wall, you should ask them to verify that maybe the local code, maybe it does require that. But the National Electric Code does not require a box in the wall as long as a towel warmer has a compartment to place the wiring connections in. So that is how it complies with that rule. Awesome yeah, that's really good to know. And then I think one of the greatest parts about these new models is that they do come with smart overheat protection. So it's going to keep the unit temperature from exceeding 176 degrees Fahrenheit just to protect, obviously, from any kinds of burns and also from any kinds of issues with towels, coloring or things like that. One thing I love about this picture is because it shows you the power switch. The on/off switch is right here. And where that's located on your tail. Warmer is down here, down where the line cord is. That's where your power switch is. So that's where you want to take note, because you'd be surprised at the number of people who don't even realize that there is a power switch on the towel warmer itself. So invariably someone will wire this system up to the wall and send power to it. Then they'll call us and say, you know what? It's cold. It doesn't heat up. We asked them, have you looked for the power switch, which is on the bottom right rung or not rung, but the bottom right side of the upright? And they go, I did not know that there was one there because there is a sticker when you get it that says power switch. But a lot of times the installer just takes it off and then the homeowner, when they go to use it the first time, doesn't know what's there. So that's how, you know, the unit is on. There's a little blue light, especially in this case, that tells you that power is getting to the tile warmer. It's very important to keep that in mind, because if you buy a timer, a hardwired timer that you put in the wall, when that hardwired timer says the unit is supposed to be on, you want to make sure that this blue light is on. And if this blue light isn't on, it probably means that button isn't pushed in. So that's the first troubleshooting thing you'd ever do with this unit, is if the timer the timer is optional, you don't have to get it. Any 120 volt timer in pretty much will work with these units because they pull a very little electricity, usually under 2 amps. So you don't have to worry about overloading the wall timer, but you can also attach these if you're using the cord. You can also attach these to a wall plug timer, which had been around for decades, that people have historically used to power their lights in their living room. So they trick the thieves and robbers to think that there's someone home. It's the same thing you can do with this. So you can have it on a timer, a plug-in timer, or you can do it in a hardwired timer. But when the unit is supposed to be on, the light should be blue. And the good thing is, it's not going to overheat your towels. We recommend a maximum of two towels on the towel warmer. You don't want to overload it because the more that you put onto the towel warmer, the more it gets hot, the hotter it gets because you're trapping heat. A lot of people say, how do I get my towel? Warmer, warmer. They just have a small town on it. You want to try to make the towels warmer, you want to trap more heat to make the towels cooler. You want to make that heat. So it doesn't trap as much, which means you're either covering more of the towel warmer or covering less of the towel warmer. Covering less of the towel warmer. Lets the heat escape, covering more of the towel warmer, traps the heat and makes the towel warmer. So that's what we suggest. When you're using the product for the first few times, turn it on and if you want to leave it on 24 hours a day, you can. But you just want to keep an eye on your dowels to see how you have them arranged on there and see if they're getting discolored or anything like that. Maybe you're trapping too much heat. So, you know, the first few weeks of operation, you're just going to kind of experiment to see what the best coverage is. The thing that people don't realize is the towel warmers will usually reach their maximum temperature within about an hour. So between 45 minutes to an hour with your towel warmer on your towel is going to reach its maximum temperature. So there's no need if you take a shower at the same time every day. There's no need to keep your towel warmer on the entire day. You can just turn it on an hour before your usual shower time and it will be warm at that point. And then you can let it run for an hour afterwards. Then it's dry and then you can keep it off for the rest of the day. That will save you some money in operation. Absolutely and we'll be going over our different control options that we have available near the end of the presentation. So these are the current models that we offer with our dual connect options. Obviously, there's quite a few different styles and designs and these are really probably some of our most popular options that we sell the most of. So yeah, they're very, very sleek looking. Also note that all of on our website, you'll see these pictures and just take note that there are no wall plates. Yes, some units have wall plates. Some units do not. So, please, if you're looking at our website and you're interested in shopping for towel warmers, make sure you take note of whether there's a wall plate pictured or not. And that will give you an idea of which ones have them and which ones don't. Awesome So looking at installing with the hard wired connection, you'll first want to reassemble that towel warmer. So we always recommend starting in check, install in manual, double checking that all the parts that you need are in that box, making sure everything's looking good and then you'll want to assemble the table warmer. Generally, we recommend doing this on some kind of protective service with that either cardboard or something like that, just to keep it from getting scratched or damaged while you're building it. And also while you're building it, you want to make sure that you're using the box that the power came in as a template. So one of the main things you want to think about is where whereabouts you want to put it. Usually many local codes require that it's at least 24 inches from the edge of a tub enclosure. Your local code is going to say whether that pertains to you or not. Maybe it's three feet. Maybe there is no requirement at all. But I can almost guarantee you they're not allowed inside a shower. But local code will tell you how far outside of that it needs to be when you are creating a template for the wall. A lot of people call up and say, hey, you know what? I'm ordering this towel warmer today. What can you give me the mounting dimensions of these so I can go ahead and start on the wall? And we try to discourage that as much as possible, because no. Two, tile warmers are exactly the same. They're made on the same jigs. They're made with the same parts. However, there are small differences in engineering. We call it engineering stack, where you can have a product that's and I'm exaggerating here just to prove the point, you can have parts that are designed to be this big or we can have parts to be designed that big or. So there's an in between. You can have a maximum size and a minimum size on a design and on manufacture. The problem is if you get two that are the maximum size as opposed to two that are on the minimum size. So on the two that are on the minimum size are going to be a little bit closer to on the maximum size are going to be a little bit bigger. And you are not going to know which one you're going to get until you actually get it. And that's why we make such a big deal about using the box that the power comes in and assembling the tile warmer and laying it down and marking the locations of where the legs are. Because that way when you do your install, it'll match exactly to your tile warmer. You don't have to worry about this connection being, you know, 1/16 of an inch out of the way, especially I can't say this strongly enough, especially if you're doing a mounting it to a tile wall. You do not want amounted to a tile wall until you actually get your product and measure it out and make that template. Template does a couple of things for you. It shows exactly where the legs are going to be so you don't have to. I got to bend this to make this fit. It's going to fit perfectly. That's one of the things. Also, you're going to take that template and you're going to put it in different places in your room and go, how does it look here? Should it go a little bit higher? Should it go a little bit lower? Oh, turn it to the left or the right. And what the ideal here is, if you always take note that the power is going to be in the right leg, that you want to get the left legs into a stud if you can. That's very important. You want to try to get it into a stud. So that's where this templates going to help you. So that's where you want to get the left side in the stud, if you can. And the templates are going to say high or lower this way. Oh, let's try it on that side of the wall. It's just going to give you a good thing that's going to be your exact match and it's going to help you visualize it on the wall. For sure. From there, you would install the mounting brackets onto the wall. So if you're putting it into drywall, you'll use drywall anchors for anything that's not going to be attached to a stud like mentioned earlier. Again, you want to make note of the power leg. Again, usually the bottom right corner. The only time I've ever seen it not be the bottom right corner is when someone flips the top a warmer upside down and that's going to be the top left. Otherwise, just make sure that you're aware of it and that you're making your electrician aware of it. Yeah and you can flip it around if you want your power connection to be on the left side. It's going to be on the upper left side because it's originally on the lower right side. So it's going to if you turn it around, that spot is going to be in the upper left side. And if you're going to do that, you're more than welcome to do that. Your switch is going to be on the top. But you then need to try to get the right side mounted to a stud, not the left side, because you can't run the wire in through a stud. So that's where if you're going to keep it normally, you want to try to get the left side into a stud if you're going to turn it so you can get the power on the left side. You're then going to want to try to get your right legs in the stud. So that's what I'm glad you brought that up, because people ask that question all the time. Absolutely and then, Scott, can you kind of tell us a little bit about what the license electrician on site will be doing? Yeah when you get your tool kit or when you get the parts kit that the unit comes with, you're going to see the towel warmer has four legs, right? Otherwise it would be kind of hard to work at if it didn't have four legs. However, you're only going to see three legs in the hardware box because the other leg is going to be attached by a cord to this leg because the plug is there. And this is manufactured because that plug won't fit through that hole. So that's why you'll see this leg disconnected and laying on its side, because the cable has been the plugs here. The cable has been routed into the tube like you see here, and then it's wired inside. So that's why that lower right leg is not going to be in the parts kit. It's going to be attached physically to the lower right side of the towel warmer. And here you can see where the on/off switches here. Also, you can see where our line cord is going to come out. So what we're going to do is if we're going to make this a hard wire, we're going to cut that plug off and we're going to pull the wire through the leg, and then we're going to take a plug hole and plug that little hole because the wire is not going to be going through there anymore. So there's a little plastic plug that comes along. You fill that hole and then the wire is going to come out the end over here. And that's how you're going to make your connections. Awesome So once all those electrical connections are completed, again, you'll be fishing that wire through the power leg. You'll push the towel warmer onto those mounting brackets that you installed earlier and fastened them with the tightening screws. And from there, you're more or less going to go. You want to make sure you're removing the plastic shipping caps, any kind of packaging and things like that. And then that you are wiring up your switch, if that's or your control, if that's what you're interested in utilizing. Yeah, the first time I did one of these, I forgot. I'm going to go back to this picture up here. I forgot I put this color on because you want to put the color on before you make your connection to the wall because you can't do it later. So you need to take this collar and push it up against the towel warmer, tighten the set, screw onto this, and that's what's going to hold it onto the wall. Once you get that, you can then take this and push it against the wall and that's going to hide the holes or any of the Nicks or whatever you've done to the white, to the hole, to the wall there. And that's how your connection is done. Plus, that way, you don't see that set screw going into that bracket. Yes it's very clean, very sleek looking. So if you're doing the plug-in connection, it's really incredibly simple. You'll start by same concept, make sure that you are figuring out exactly where you want it, that you're following the same steps. To begin with, the pre assembly, making a template, filing the mounting brackets, all of that. The only real difference is that you want to make sure that it's positioned besides just where code would want it. You want to make sure it's positioned close to a logical outlet and then you'll be able to plug it in easily. Yeah and here's a case where you probably don't want the power connection to be in the upper left hand side, because then you've got the line cord all dangling all the way down. So the only time I've ever seen people rotate these is to get the power permanently installed in that upper left hand corner. But I've never seen anybody want to see that long line cord hanging down the wall. It's just not a good look. So that's one thing to keep in mind, the difference between a plug-in unit and a hard wired unit. So that's the main difference. I mean, this is incredibly easy to put on. You just need to remember to press that on/off switch on when you're done with your installation. And that can be challenging for people like me who just forget to do that all the time. So once you're done with that, then you'll be installing it again. Same concept, putting the legs onto those mounting brackets, tightening the screws, removing the shipping caps, and then you'll plug it in and just test it out, make sure that on/off switch works, that the towel warmer heats up. And like I think you touched on a little bit earlier, Scott. It helps to kind of play around with the different options of towels, different obviously different materials, thickness sizes, things like that will all have an effect on how much he does trapped or how much heat is absorbed by those towels. So it can take some finagling. I don't know about you, Scott. I get a lot of calls of people who aren't sure how to hang the towels. And I usually say. What? play around with it. Whatever looks good to you and warm towels tends to be the best option. Yeah, you're definitely going to want to root them over the top, not just hanging them over the bottom three. Because if you only hang them over the bottom three year old, you can have an area that's just warm in your towel. You want to take the whole thing and make sure that most of the towel is covering it. So just keep in mind, if you have bath sheets, bath sheets tend to be gigantic. They do trap more heat simply because they're so much larger than bath towels. So if you have bath sheets, you're going to have to experiment. You may have to go to towels. That's going to be up to you to see how your particular sheet reacts with the heat coming from that towel warmer. So that's one thing that you want to keep in mind, but very good points. And then we kind of touch on the controls earlier. Like Scott had said, if you're doing a plug-in model, then there are lots and lots of different plug-in countdown timers and things like that, programmable timers on the market. But we also have these three specific ones, our controls for hard wired towel warmers. So we have our hard wired Wi-Fi switch. This will connect to an app on your phone and you'll be able to program it and turn it on and off from your phone. We also have the hardwired programmable timer. So this is going to give you that option to program it. This is really great. I see people do it. If you're a person who showers every morning at 7:00 AM or every night at 10:00 and you know, you are a very scheduled person. That way you don't even have to think about it. You can just crawl out of bed, get in the shower, and you'll walk out to a nice towel or a nice warm towel. I should say you'll probably have a towel. And the four setting countdown timer is our simplest hardwired model. It's really great, especially if you have kids or you're worried you'll forget to turn it off. It'll just stay on for a set amount of time and then turn itself off afterwards. Yeah, you can just press it and forget it. So if you're somebody like me who takes a bath once a week, whether you need it or not, you can set that timer to come on once a week if you need it to. So that's what you can do. That's what's great about the hardwired programmable timer is you can set it to I take my shower whether I need it or not. Saturday night at 8:00 p.m., just like in the old days. And I'll make sure that I set that timer to come on at 7. My shower is at 8:00. After my shower, I let it run for an hour and then I go to bed because nothing ever good happens on a Saturday night. So you just take your shower and you go to bed, you stay out of trouble. So that's what's so good about the hardware programmable timer, the Wi-Fi switch. What you said you can set up your own schedule, whatever you want to. If you know what the letters IFT means, if this, then that you can set it up to, I could set it up to go for me. Sometimes I like to skip a week and that way I'm doing a shower every two weeks. Then I can do if this than that. If it's on the first Saturday of the month and the third Saturday of the month, I can have it. Come on then too. So it's the IFR is a great thing for the hardwired Wi Wi-Fi switch. So that and some people say, well why don't you offer the units that you plug-in because you can get them anywhere. I mean, they're readily available. You drive in any direction. In 5 minutes, you'll find a store that has these. So that's no problem at all. So those are some of the controls that we use for our art polymers. And that was nice. Scott you gave like a little bit of life advice to like when to shower and don't go out Saturday nights and have fun. That's awesome. I don't have all the options, as you can tell. I can't imagine why. So we also have some really nice crystal accessories that can go with this. There are going to be either the faceplates for the controls or the collars for those mounting are calling a mounting brackets. Those are obviously for different colors, styles really great if you want to make a unique bathroom, if you want to have mesh, the decor, things like that, I think they're super cool. Yeah they are very, very cool. So do we have any questions? Let's give the people a chance to ask a question if they like. And we had some questions. Whenever we let people know that we were having these things online. Sometimes we say, hey, well, we always say, send us some questions ahead of time if you have any. We'll be glad to go over them. So let's take a look at the first question, and that is, can I install the tell warmer myself or do I need to hire someone to do it for me? Yeah so if you're going to, you know, do the plug-in type, then essentially you can hang it yourself. So if you can hang a picture, you can hang a towel warmer. If you're looking at doing it hardwired, though, we do recommend or you know, usually code will require that a licensed electrician be on site to do that wiring and setup especially that's, you know, supplying the circuit, making sure that it's on a GFCI circuit breaker, you know, all that kind of things. You want to do that definitely electrician material when you're doing hard wired and well. We had a question here can the electric towel warmer be installed upside down to change his power access point? And we answered that. We didn't. We? absolutely. The next one is, how do I use a tile warmer after it's installed? I think we talked about that one too, right? About seeing how yours operates. You can try leaving it on all the time if you'd like. You can use a control. If you want to, you can. There's a myriad of ways that you can install and control the product. So I think we did touch on all of those. Absolutely and it really does just take some playing around with it and kind of figuring out what works best for you. And I see Elizabeth reached out saying, will this be available to watch later? Yeah Olivia, can you make sure that we get that sent over to her? Our webinar coordinator will make sure we get that emailed to you and it looks like we don't have any Facebook questions. Olivia has just typed in also, so Thank you Olivia for that. We don't have any Facebook questions, so let's go and keep moving along. Absolutely so our next webinar will be on June 8th, again Thursday at 1 PM right here on I believe we're doing it on crowdcast. We may be switching over to Zoom at all, remember, and we'll be doing the complete guide to heating lives. So please join us for that. We're going to go over a lot of really important tips and tricks for installing heating underneath a luxury final. We get lots and lots of questions about. I haven't lived for. And we do offer daily trainings. These are usually five, ten, 15 minutes, just short, brief trainings or we pick a topic, talk about it and go a little bit more in depth on that specific topics. If you ever want to learn more or if you just have questions about anything, it doesn't even need to be that presentation. Feel free to pop in and we'd be happy to chat. And so this is a very serendipitous. Our may promotion is 25% off of select towel warmers. So visit our website to see that and learn more about that promotion. Kismet exactly. It's like we it's almost like we planned it. And we do love to hear your feedback on these webinars. So after this is over, we'll send you an email asking about your experience. We love comments, suggestions. I know Scott and I particularly love compliments, but we'll take anything. Exactly we appreciate the participation. That's the main thing. We're just happy you're here. And if you ever have any other questions, if you would like to get a complimentary quote that we offer, we offer a complimentary next day quote. If you have questions or anything that you want to chat about, give us a call. Here's an email. Our website is treasure trove of information. We have everything you could ever want to know about any of our products on that website, so be sure to reach out and we're more than happy to chat. Yeah, in fact, we do have videos on how to install these towels, so you can physically go on our website and see the videos on how to do that. So it's great, great resource. And I'm not saying any other questions. So that is all that we have today. Thank you all so much for joining us. Thank you, Scott. And until next time, as always, stay warm and be radiant. Bye, guys.