Heated towel bars are racks that warm up your towels. You may have seen them in fancy hotel rooms or when you’re spending a day at the spa. And though they sound like a high-end product made only to indulge and pamper, they also serve more practical purposes. And if used in the right way, they can even help you save some money on energy bills. Although it’s certainly nice to have a warm towel when you get out of the shower, especially on those cold winter mornings, a heated towel bar can produce more than its fair share of real work. These units are extremely energy efficient and safe, so most of the time they are left on 24-hours a day (though they come with timers and on/off switches, of course). Well, it costs about the same as lighting a light bulb. But the real beauty is that they can act as a low-impact heating unit for the home. They’re great for warming up cold bathrooms, which tend to chill off quickly with their tile and porcelain surfaces. And heated towel bars can also dry out the humid air in these otherwise damp areas.

These products don’t just warm up towels. They’re often used as passive clothes dryers, saving you money and effort on unneeded laundering. Put a heated rack in the kitchen for wet dishtowels. Water Resistant Faux Wood FlooringPut one in the laundry room for extra clothing that won’t fit in the dryer or for those delicate fabrics. Curtain Track Gliders SmallPlus, they’re perfect for rain-drenched socks, snowy hats, and mittens, or bathing suits that need quick drying. Bathroom Mirror Paper BackingThey’re not fully waterproof though, so watch out that you don’t overwhelm or immerse the racks. There are two basic models of heated towel bars: electric and warm-water hydro systems. Electric models simply plug in anywhere, though they can also be hard-wired into your home’s electrical system so that they begin working whenever your furnace does.

The metal rods are filled with oil, so when turned on, a filament slowly heats this oil which then heats up the metal (it takes about 15 minutes for optimum temperatures, and about an hour to fully warm a towel). But another option is hydro-heated systems. Connected directly to your home’s plumbing, these units are warmed by your water heater, which makes them easy to use and energy efficient, although they will have to be permanently mounted in your home. Need to find a pro for your heated towel bar? The selection is intimidating. You can choose any material (brass, chrome, nickel, etc.) and they come in almost any size and design to match your interior décor. Plus, they are available in any form. For versatility, buy a portable free-standing scaffold. Save floor space with wall-mounted rods or horizontal shelving. You can even purchase sturdy, floor-mounted racks that connect directly to your home’s plumbing or wiring. These items exude class and wealth, which is one of their intentions.

But to gain this reputation means that, by their very nature, they can’t be cheap (otherwise, everyone would already have one and they wouldn’t be the specialty items they’ve become). So be prepared to spend. Like anything in the home, if you want to spend extra money, the sky is the limit because some custom-made units can run up to $1,000. But, depending on the size, model, and material, typically they’ll cost anywhere from $40-$200, and most run somewhere in between these two extremes (around $100 seems to be the standard price). You can be the first to comment!The only thing cooler than a pool party on a summer night in New York City is a secret pool party.And the only thing cooler than that, as a few enterprising developers recently discovered, is a secret pool party in a pool made out of a Dumpster on the banks of the Gowanus Canal in industrial Brooklyn.On a rented lot that’s hidden from the street they have erected what they call a lo-fi urban country club: three connected pools housed in Dumpsters;

some lounge chairs, grills and cabanas. On Saturday night just three dozen people got the nod to check it out, at an afterparty for the art journal Cabinet. “Please don’t forward,” the invitation read.“It’s amazing,” the artist Nina Katchadourian said after taking a dip in the moonlight. “It makes you wonder, as so many things in New York do, what’s behind every wall that you can’t see past.”Bobbing in the water on a pool toy was “the last thing I expected to be doing tonight,” added Aaron Levy, a curator visiting from Philadelphia.Since the space opened over the Fourth of July weekend, it has been host to barbecues, photo shoots and a film screening. Lectures and other events are planned for the rest of the summer, but none are open to the public, to the chagrin of the design bloggers and other cool-hunters who have been chattering about it. The idea, said David Belt, a real estate developer and the president of Macro-Sea, the company behind the pools, was not to create an exclusive party destination but to experiment with underused space and materials, repurposing them with urban renewal in mind.“

It’s a very simple concept,” said Jocko Weyland, Macro-Sea’s project manager. “There aren’t that many places to swim in New York.” And Dumpsters “are everywhere; The concept itself is borrowed. Mr. Belt, Mr. Weyland and Alix Feinkind, Macro-Sea’s creative director, heard about it in April, when they were scouting a project in Georgia. Curtis Crowe, a musician in the Athens band Pylon, had made one.After Mr. Weyland had a brief phone conversation with him, Macro-Sea decided to make its own. It took about a month to find a suitably out of the way yet accessible space with an agreeable owner. (The pools are insured, Mr. Belt said, and the lot, filled with junk and machinery, is protected by a chain-link fence.)From there the project proceeded quickly and cheaply, in guerrilla fashion: the Dumpsters were donated by a construction company that suddenly had a surplus (thanks, economic downturn), the designers who helped render the plans were recruited through Craigslist, and members of the small crew that erected it in a week were unpaid.“

They just wanted to be able to use it,” Mr. Belt said.The garbage containers, which he described as “newish,” were cleaned and lined in plastic, and a filtration system was installed, as on a regular above-ground pool. Mr. Belt’s wife, Antonia, stitched together the coverings for the cabanas; the furniture came from Ikea. The main cost was the wood for the deck and the water: about 18,000 gallons, delivered from a New Jersey aquifer for $1,200.“I tried to do it so that even if you had to rent one, you could do a stand-alone Dumpster, a grill and chair for under $1,000,” Mr. Belt said. Copycats are welcome, because Macro-Sea itself is using the project as a template for a larger idea: turning eyesore strip malls into artsy community destinations, with Dumpster pools and other indie attractions.“I thought if we could get people to come here and swim in a Dumpster, I could probably use the same aesthetic sensibility” to get people — and, not incidentally, better retailers — to come to a dingy strip mall, Mr. Belt said.

The company hopes to open its first repurposed shopping center in Atlanta this fall, ideally with dozens of pools in the parking lot that visitors can rent for the day. While the project is conceptually simple — get a bunch of trash containers, clean and seal them, fill with water, jump in — there were a lot of details to finesse. The coarse edges inside the containers were filed down, and underneath the liners, the bottoms were covered in sand, for soft landings. Tightly packed sandbags double as benches along the walls, and pool toys and kid-friendliness provide an intentional counterpoint to the neighborhood grit.With brightly colored lanterns crisscrossing overhead and music piped in from an iPod connected to a boombox, the feel is of a do-it-yourself urban oasis.“The water’s amazingly fresh, for swimming in a Dumpster,” said Alexis Bloom, a documentary filmmaker from TriBeCa, after doing a few laps. She compared it favorably to the pool at Soho House, an actual urban country club.

The problem, of course, with having such a sexy space — especially a sexy private space — is that everyone wants to come.After Mr. Weyland gave an interview to ReadyMade, the D.I.Y. design magazine, two weeks ago, breathless coverage and links began appearing all over the blogosphere. Soon the location was decoded. One post led to people standing on the roofs of cars in a nearby lot, snapping photos, Mr. Weyland said with an eye roll.Though they’re certainly aware that there’s nothing more tantalizing to some New Yorkers than a party to which they weren’t invited, the creators profess surprise at the level of attention their project has received. “I’m glad that people like it,” Mr. Belt said. “But it’s not the end all, be all.” They hope that visitors will be as chill as the Cabinet magazine partygoers, who somehow resisted the temptation to text all their friends the minute they got there. “It’s so easy to ruin something,” one sighed.The pools are supposed to be open through August or until the coolness wears off.