I think one of these is an excellent choice. You can probably use an existing circuit since it only draws 8 amps.

http://www.cadetco.com/show_product.php?prodid=1021

I have a large master bathroom with 10 foot ceiling. I have a oil heater or oil filled radiator heater($50) that I have plugged into a indoor timer. I set the timer to turn the heater on about 45 minutes before I get up in the mornings. I also override the timer and turn the heater on about 45 minutes before I bathe at night.

we debated how to have extra heat in our bath and decided to go with a towel warmer. i had decided i didn't want radiant heat because we also use some rugs in the bathroom and so debated between the fan and towel warmer. decided to go with towel warmer because of added benefit of warm towels!(haven't used it yet tho) our model cames with plug or can be hard-wired. keep in mind though that the price increases significantly when you choose a higher wattage towel warmer.
the higher wattage models are described as being towel warmers/radiant heaters by some of the towel warmer companies.

Thanks, busybee3. That's exactly what I'm thinking. Do the towel warmers take a lot of electricity? I'm trying to be energy-conscious, but I'm tired of freezing when I step out of the shower in the morning!

I'm in the same bath as you! A cold one. New house, nice new bathroom that I'm not liking, especially now that it's turned colder. The ceiling is vaulted and too high (that's where any of my heat is!). My shower stall doesn't look very big from the outside (and has 10' ceiling itself), but once inside and showering, it becomes huge and incapable of warming up. The part of me not under the shower spray freezes.

I use a space heater in the bathroom, but with the big bathroom and tall ceiling, I think it's pretty much wasted on the room itself.

In our last baths--in a colder part of the country--our space heater worked great, but the room wasn't as big with regular ceiling heights. In fact, I'm about to move my showering to the upstairs bath where I can get the space warmed up with the little heater.

So, while you decide what you want your permanent solution to be (towel warmer or a fan/heater in the ceiling), you could go buy a space heater--they're great.

Look into your building envelope. Some houses are leaky but they look good inside and out. If you have air leaks, seal them. Outside too.

The coldest side (or corner) of a room is what determines the psychological feeling of cold. Warmth radiating at ankle height is psychologically good. A cold floor accompanied by warm air being blown out from a convector fan is not as good, because you have both cold and warmth in the same room at the same time. Ceramic or porcelain has different heat transfer properties compared to the wood and plaster everywhere else. The largest buildings use floor heating because people need warm feet to feel that the space is OK. More heat applied at ankle height turns the floor into a heat source for your feet instead of a heat sink. Long term slow warmth is better than sudden strong heat. For example, a heated aquarium put into the coldest corner of a room will change everything : people suddenly say the room is warm. An aquarium is permanently working, holding a constant temperature, radiating a small amount of warmth, a little bit all the time, permanently, constantly, continuously. It evens out the room's lopsided heat loss and makes the room's heat field into a flat playing field not a sloped vector field. You get the idea. Any warm object is better than none. And, prior sealing heat losses is even better, as a start. If you have cold air currents seeping in through the baseboards you have a house problem, not a bathroom problem.

Don't let anyone tell you that one idea or another "is not really going to..." as all heat is good (and there is no "bad" as long as the heat stays inside the house and doesn't heat the outdoors) and secondly when it's permanently ON and producing heat the psychological effect is considerable. I have left old computers turned on (permanently) in wall benches, and enjoyed their slow heat which evens out the whole room's heat sensation. I have used the kind of electric kettle that constantly turns itself back on when the water temperature drops below 200F (it's a warm body in a cold corner). Anything goes. In a long time from now (like after you diagnose better the heat losses in your building envelope and seal them), you will have a better idea of how to heat that one space that bothers you today. Your asking about heating the bathroom alone tells me you need to take the time to diagnose your new house as a whole. Your asking about electricity and cost tells me you may have not caught that heat is heat is heat, that there is fundamentally the same cost to transform energy into heat no matter what, and that you have to seal leaks (and add insulation) otherwise you just heat the invisible air currents that flow through a leaky house.

hope this helps.

David,

I had to laugh at your diagnosis of my problem. The house is 80 years old, but the master bath is in an addition that is quite well sealed, insulated, double-pane windowed, etc.. I don't have cold air seeping through the baseboards, I have it blowing on me from the forced air heating. We turn the heat off completely at night for about 8 hours. As I said, we try to be energy-conscious. In bed with down comforters, we're just fine. We turn the heat on in the morning, and the forced air heater blowing on bare wet ankles just out of the shower on a winter morning is quite chilly.

I have never mentioned cost as a factor (that is not my priority), and I'm not sure what your point is about me not having caught on that heat is heat (which is also not true. There is a huge difference in the feel of forced air vs. radiant heat, not to mention that different sources of heat do have different levels of efficiency. And don't get me started about your statement that there is the same cost to transform any source of energy into heat. If that were true we'd get all of our heat from solar and wind power and skip coal and petroleum altogether. But I digress.).

I think I would like the towel warmer; drying off with a warm, dry towel sounds wonderful. I just have to decide if the environmental cost of wasting all that energy for 1 minute of toasty toweling off is worth it.

we all have our way of expressing things and glossing over things; i enjoyed your rebuttal because it made sense. So far I think we don't know what climate you live in. It is great that you have a well built extension on an old house and that you seem to have a clear grasp of almost every subject related to heat and insulation. May I be so bold as to point out that in a cold climate one must leave heat constantly on, and not turn it off at night, in order to be efficient (constant application instead of intermittent application) and besides that, nighttime is when it's coldest ; yes one can turn heat down lower at night too, but not turn it off. Heating one room more than another is a totally different challenge and this may be the best way to view the bathroom in the morning. Forced air is a "whole house" system working against the concept of heating one room more than another, unless one applies workarounds like triggering higher heat at 5 a.m. and directing it to the bathroom duct... but this is not likely to be good either. So, I agree that a towel warmer is A Good Thing for you and your bathroom. It will give you warm dry towels and also perform as a heat source.

To be fair about the concepts: yes, the difference in the feel of forced air vs. radiant heat is huge, and I certainly could have written that too. Also yes to "levels of efficiency" are different; my point above was that one must first rise to a higher level of overview and look at the whole house including its climate surrounding it. Now you've declared the bathroom is in a modern well built structure, so we might conclude it has a sealed housewrap. Still, there is a huge range of winter climates. If you were in the Yukon you would have mentioned it. Between two similar houses, one in cold NY state and one in Poughkeepsie, the heat loss that is expected normally will vary. A lot. And, this makes a difference in the sensation of cold you get when you stand near an exterior wall. Also if your house is built this way or that way. Also if the bathroom has one, two or more window(s) and a large or small span of exterior walls, whether it's in a newly built extension or an old house. It's so obvious that one might wonder why it needs to be written out. Here is why: the OP neglected to provide this contextual information.

Always happy to make someone laugh if they make me enjoy it too. Thank you !

jillalameda,

i'm not viewing the towel warmer as "wasting all that energy"...i'm thinking of it as supplemental heating to make our bathroom more comfortable in the morning!! we too turn our heat way down at night and i usually keep the upstairs heat set pretty low during the day since i'm not up there alot and if i am, i'm moving about...

at this point i plan to keep the towel warmer on at night to warm up the bathroom for nighttime visits and to have it warmer when starting the day in the early morning hours. can set our thermostat to come on higher alittle later and turn off alittle earlier this way i'm thinking to balence out the increase of energy use and be alittle happier in the process! i am always toasty under the covers even with the room very cold, but freeze when out, so might freeze alittle less this way and i'm sure will delight with a warm towel after showers!(we have the amba antus model...)

David,

Yup, I'm in California where we get cold when it's 50 degrees out. So heat around here is more a matter of comfort than survival. Now I know why people include their life stories on their OPs!

Busybee,

I'm not criticizing you at all for wanting to be comfortable! My husband and I kind of make it a personal challenge to see how little heat we can use. As I'm getting older I am starting to think that's kind of stupid. Hence my coveting of the towel warmer.

Eric,

If I'm going to do it at all, I'm going for the gusto and your info about the varying degrees of power as well as your specific info about fan vs. towel warmer are quite helpful. It was good to hear that the towel warmer will suck less juice than the ceiling heater/fan combo, although you're absolutely right that over the long term it will probably take more. But the relatively high ceiling combined with the "heat rises" principle makes me think the Panasonic wouldn't really help much.

Thanks to everyone for posting. You have really helped me answer my questions. Now I just have to figure out where to put my new toy...

haven't viewed your responses as criticism at all! i play the heat game myself...that's prob why i agonized so much with this decision myself! (finally turned upstairs heat on for 1st time this season 2 nights ago!)

f.y.i. my sisters who have lived in California for 5 or 10 years at a time all say that housing in California always feels cold (from now until the Spring) while housing in the cold climate northeast and in Canada always feels comfortable in Winter even when they keep the indoor fairly cool. It's a "building structure" thing. In California, builders say "no need" if you ask them about building like as if the climate were a cold climate. Since the building structure was not built the right way to protect against the cold, you get a cold house that really feels cold too.

Here is a link that might be useful: Canadians who tell Americans how to build so it's insulated

David,

I think your sisters are probably absolutely right. Our master addition is the most insulated part of our old house, and even though we had insulation blown into all the exterior walls and have replaced all but a few of the steel single-pained windows with dual-paned wooden ones and put insulation in the attic, and weatherstripped and put in a dual-flap insulated dog door to replace the broken single-flap one, our house is still not snug. That's one reason why we try not to put on the heat often, since we lose so much. The bathroom and our bedroom are the tightest rooms in the house because they're relatively new. But those are the only rooms we are ever naked in, so they still get chilly.

Today it was 78 degrees out, though, so at the moment my daughter is complaining about being hot. She is still wearing sandals to school even though it is November.

And I know we should just make the dog bark to go out instead of having the heat-losing dog door, but that is one luxury we're not willing to part with.

Jillalameda,

Would you need to add another heat source if you could eliminate the unpleasant blowing of your current system?

Is your heat on a programmable thermostat?

If it is, you might try modifying the program to get the space a bit warmer before your morning shower, so it isn't blowing as much during that time.

For example, if you set back temp at night from 10 pm to 6 am, and wake to shower at 6am....try adjusting the morning temp change to be at 5:30 am instead of 6. This will allow the system to run for 1/2 hour before you wake up, pre-conditioning the space so it is not doing that while you are showering.

If you don't have a programmable TStat, then I recommend you ask your heating/cooling dealer about getting one. Good standard models are not very expensive, and the energy savings that can be achieved by using them can often pay for them very quickly.