All weekend long
Prep for the garage floor project. Down to the garbage can, recycle bin. washer and dryer. A few boxes which I will deal with this evening. And then it’s all up to the guy with the Bobcat. I cleared a space for the riprap that is coming out of the garage and I hope to have the wife and daughter help me wire tie the PEX in place next weekend.
So, when you’re done, you’ll have the…..
….. Garage Mahal?
*runs!*
Jim
Sunk New Dawn
Galveston, TX
Mmmmm. Heated garage floor. Luxury!
Indeed! One I’ve been waiting for for a long time
I have sworn upon the Altar of G-d that if I ever build a house for myself, it will have in-floor hydronic heat.
I don’t mind cold air so much, but I do mind cold floors.
I admit to a bit of surprise that you’re using PEX under concrete. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I really don’t trust PEX (from a structural point of view only; the idiot Californians who said it posed drinking water health risks were later proven wrong).
Pex is the only way. People used to use copper, which is an equal mixture of suck and fail.
Heated floors are the bomb. We built a 32 stall farrowing barn on the farm when I was in high school. Ran a loop of tubing through the concrete floor of each of the creep areas between the crates and used that to heat the whole place on two 60 gallon water heaters. That hot floor was nice to lay on when coming in from the cold when we were finishing up construction. Kept the piglets out from under the sow too so they didn’t get crushed. Boosted our weaned pig average above 9 per sow.
Hat Trick: I’ve seen that done where they just used a chain grate to sweep the pigshit into a bin that was lined with a stainless coil, and the fermenting shit heated the water, only needing a pump to circulate it. I thought that was brilliant. I can see where the piglets would be safer, too, I always felt for the little shits for being suffocated when Mom rolled over.
When we tore out and rebuilt the entryway stairs and added a wheelchair ramp at a building I used to help manage, we installed electric calrods to heat the stairs and ramp to keep the ice off, along with an electronic control system that to this day I’m not sure how it works (supposedly it monitors temperature and there is also a photo-sensitive component that apparently keeps the system on if it gets covered with snow). Obviously this was not cheap.
I asked at the time why we weren’t considering using low-pressure steam coils for that purpose. The building was (and still is) heated by low-pressure steam boilers and it would have been a nothing job to run a steam line over there to do that. But there was a lot of mumbling and uncomfortable looks and we ended up with the electric option after all.
Which, a year later just before the warranty expired, the contractor got to come out and replace under the ramp because they’d been careless and a dead short had developed. That could not have been cheap, given that they had to tear out the concrete to get to it. One of the other guys on the building board, who worked for a large electrical contractor in town that normally did most of our work, characterized that job as “the best competitive bid I ever lost.”