Heated towel rail control

[benflux (Ben)]

Any tips on how to control a heated towel rail? Something like a Shelly relay and then just do timers for that in HA? Should I have a wall-mounted controller that is my fallback?

[FloatingBoater (James Derrick)]

Hi,

I created an PWM controller for resistive towel reail heaters using a Shelly Plus 1 (ESP32) and ESPhome. The platform: slow_pwm does a lot of the control, but I added several features like four heat modes, auto-turn-off and safety overheat sensors.

The project isn’t written up yet, but here is how it started:

Controlling Towel Rail

Fairly new to HA. I currently have one Tasmota switch controlling my garden lights (got to start somewhere). For my next project, the Kudox controller for the heating element in my towel rail has failed. I like the idea of replacing it with something I can program from HA and found the Timeguard Wi-Fi Controlled Fused Spur. Based on this post it looks like it should play nicely with HA. However, one feature of the Kudox that I want to keep is the abililty to set the element on less than 100% p…

At the moment, the code has worked for two years but the latest ESPhome release 2025.5.0 has broken the large project (360 lines) so it won’t compile on a HA Yellow - my suspicion is memory.

The end result looks like this (with the Shelly behind a blanking plate and bonded button):

I’ll write it up (with safety disclaimers) sometime.

[Karosm]

@benflux

Shelly relay and then just do timers for that in HA?

That’s the straightforward way to get control of it. You can wire a switch for manual control.