Radiating

Rainy Sunday. No fun. Except if you decide to install radiant heating!

Now, if you recall (no, not the most famous reindeer of all) we ordered all the materials needed months ago from TruVal... but just hadn't had the time to pick them up and install. Until this past Sunday! The forecast was rainy and windy, so the guys weren't planning on working outside. But it was also going to be 50 degrees - what a perfect time to shut down the heat for the day! So Mike grabbed up all the tubing and fittings on his way home from work on Saturday.

Sunday, everything went fairly smoothly - for a heating job. Usually, when copper pipe is involved, it's a long, strenuous, expensive day. And we get leaks and other things go wrong... Plumbing is downright difficult! Mike's become rather adept at it over the years, but he's no master plumber. This experience was the exact opposite. The only real problem - and we knew it as soon as we started uncoiling the tubing - we didn't have enough to do the entire downstairs, only the living room. (And we also had to run to the DeepHo for about 10 extra feet...)

We cut and removed a couple of the long copper sections, then just attached one end of the tube at the beginning of the loop, snaked it up and down the floor joists, and attached it at the end of the loop. (Sounds like it took 5 minutes, but there was a lot of drilling and connecting involved.) At the end of the day, Mike strapped the entire living room section to hold the tubing up near the floor.

Pre-strapping - the white may look like wires. Nope it's tubing.

The concept is simple. Hot water travels through the pipes. Heat radiates out and up onto the floor. Then, heat radiates up from the floor and heats the room. We still have our baseboards, this just helps our home reach optimum temp faster and more efficiently. Plus, the floors are toasty.

We've had heating problemos in the past, mostly because our house is old, but partially because we didn't evenly distribute the length of baseboards when we installed. (Mikey's room, strangely enough, has the longest one, so if his door is closed, his room gets super warm while the rest of the house is at a normal temp.) The only zone downstairs is controlled by a thermostat in the living room. We had at first considered adding another zone for Mikey's room... but we think this will prove more economical and efficient.

We hope to complete the radiant heat in the rest of the downstairs soon, before it gets any colder around here. Of course, the porch still needs finishing. My "no-new-projects" rule is still kinda upheld... this just happened to be a "rainy-day-project." And that's totally different, right?