Radiant Pictures...FINALLY!

So good news, bad news. Good news...after procrastinating for so long, I was still able to get pictures of all the radiant tubes for the basement. Bad news...since I took the pictures today, that means that the basement floors didn't get poured. Travis went out there this morning expecting to see walls and floors being poured. There was no activity and the contractor wasn't answering his phone. Come to find out, they are harvesting up in Big Sandy. Pretty frustrating. We'll be glad when we can take over all the work, and not have to worry about anyone's schedules, but our own. More bad news...the pictures aren't that great. I was rushed because I was unintentionally getting in the contractor's way, so I took the pictures and drove off. They were probably wondering what the heck I was doing, but people probably wonder that about me even when I am not running around with a camera.

The first picture is the guest bedroom, bathroom, and craft room, which are all on one manifold, which is under the stairs. That makes it easily accessible, but still hidden.
The second picture isn't real close, but it shows how many feet of tubes we ran.

The last picture shows a close up. You can see the manifold box in the middle of the picture (no, not the cardboard box, that's just garbage) and against the far walls are where the header pipes will be connected to the main zone manifold that runs everything. Everything else is run off the manifold in the picture, and this manifold will be hidden in the bar cabinets.

So, now that you've seen the pictures, I can tell you the adventures of actually hooking the pipes and tubes up. When we last left bloody and sweaty, all the tubes were run, but nothing was connected. On Saturday, Travis had to work, so on his lunch break, we went and rented some crimpers so that we could tighten the tubes on the pipes. After he got off work, we took all our supplies out to the house, and were thinking we would be done in an hour. Well, that wasn't the case. We got out there and the crimpers had to open so wide, that we couldn't get to the pipes in the bottom of the manifold. So, our choices were to unscrew the sides of the manifold box (which we didn't have the driver), or get the different crimpers that require a different piece of metal to crimp. You'll have to excuse my terminology, Travis is working, so I am pretty much just making up words! Travis' new kick is trying to only take one trip out to the house, so needless to say he was a little bit frustrated when he found out we would have to go back to town. I fully support his new "kick", but wasn't real found of how far the crimpers were thrown:) So, we headed back to town, and went to rent the other crimpers and buy the new crimps. Well, the rental place only offered the crimps in packs of 100...which cost about $40 and we only needed about 10-20 crimps. Lowe's offers them in packs of 10, so we decided to buy them there as well as the crimper. Good choice by Travis because Lowe's crimps wouldn't have fit the rental place's crimper. An hour later (our original time estimate) we were back out at the lot ready to try out the new crimpers. We were having trouble with one of the pipes because it kept rotating every time we went to crimp. Travis decided that he would hold the pipes, and I should crimp. So, I crimped...just not the right way. I didn't get a good crimp, so the pipe was still loose, but it was tight enough to be almost impossible to get off. After many failed attempts, Travis got the crimp off with the hammer and we were on our way again. We got everything hooked up and attached a few fittings on the end of the header pipe so that we could pressurize the system with air and check back on Sunday for leaks. We bought a little air compressor so that we could pressurize the system and brought out some extenstion cords so that we could use our neighbor's power, since we don't have any yet. Just in case you are worried, we asked the neighbor's first. Travis fired up the compressor and it sounded like it was sick. The amount of power we needed couldn't travel the length of the power cord, so there was strike 3 for the night. Travis had to carry the compressor up to the neighbors house, fill it with air, carry it back down, and fill the air into the pipe. That thing was HEAVY...I know because I "helped" carry it down and could only make it halfway. I really like having our sloped lot, but I sure felt bad for Travis having to carry that thing up and down and up and down. He had to make four trips, which was less than he was thinking it would, but it still didn't make it any easier. So, we got it filled up and my folks took us out for a well deserved drink.

We went out on Sunday to check the system to see if it held pressure. It didn't hold as much pressure as we would have liked, but there were so many variables that we couldn't tell where the leak was. Ultimately we believe that it was in the fittings that we put on at the end. We don't think that the actual tubing has a leak, so we weren't too worried that concrete was going to be poured over that. We still have access to the manifolds and the ends of the header pipe, which are the most probable points for the leaks.

Sorry for such a large update. I will try to update it more often so I don't write a novel and bore you to death. As for upcoming events, the crawl space walls were supposed to be poured this afternoon. I was in such a rush to get out of the way, that I didn't look to see if it was done, but I am pretty sure it was. The basement floors are supposed to be poured tomorrow morning around 7 or 8:00. Hopefully, I do a little better on my picture taking tomorrow.