Years ago a friend gave us a beautiful chrome heated towel rack for use in our bathroom.

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Plug it in, drape your towels over it, and treat yourself to a nice warm towel after every shower or bath. Sounds great, right?

Problem is, it’s expensive! The device has a normal plug but no off switch. That’s because it takes a while to heat up, so the manufacturer wants you to leave it plugged in all the time, so it’s ready no matter when you take a shower.

To find out how much it cost, we first hooked it up to a $25 Killawatt meter, to measure how much energy it used.

The result? About 140 watts. All the time. 

Have you ever touched one of those old 100 watt light bulbs after it’s been on? I have, and it’s HOT! Which means it’s consuming a lot of electricity. This towel heater was using even more energy, all the time. But how much did it cost?

To convert continuous watts to dollars, we first have to do a little algebra to get kWhs, which are the units used by our electric utility to bill us. Here we go:

(140 watts) x (24 hours / day) x (365 days / year) / (1000 watts / kwatt) = 1,226 kWh / year.

Most of us don’t have a feel for kWhs, but note: this is more energy each year than even the biggest modern fridges (here’s one that uses only 530 kWh/year). 

Next, we need to know how much we were paying for electricity. This can be complicated because of tiered or time-of-use rate plans, but I’ll cut it short: our “marginal rate” for electricity used at the time was about 40 cents per kWh. So, the next step to calculate how much the warm towels cost is now easy:

(1,226 kWh / year) x ($0.40 / kWh) = $490 per year

Having warm towels costs $490. Every year!

Knowing this, and having a long list of other things we could spend $490 on each year (including a day at a spa with warm towels), my wife and I quickly agreed we didn’t need warm towels.