Radiant Heat on LI

Tucker

I grew up in a Cape Cod house in N. Babylon built in 1953 with a concrete slab. The heating pipes were buried in the concrete. There was an oil burner under the stairs that looked and sounded like a creature from hell. Some of my earliest memories are lying on the warmest areas of the floor (the heat was not even). Today I live in Southern California where most people have either forced air gas heat, or in the older houses, a gas grate in the living room.

Do the radiant systems in the old Cape Cods still work? Or have they been modified?

Constantin

It's my understanding...

... that a lot of these systems were bare copper pipe embedded in ferroconcrete (Levitton was built this way, as Dan describes in his radiant books). Copper usually doesn't play nice when exposed to ferroconcrete so leaks have disabled some (perhaps even most) of these systems due to glavanic corrosion. I imagine that foundations that were wetter would fail faster than those that remained dry because galvanic corrosion requires a electrolyte to carry ions.

Todays approach of using PEX embedded in concrete works a lot better because the stuff is usually seamless, the joints that have to be made are done with non-reactive stainless materials, and no galvanic corrosion can attack the PEX.