The radiant spectrum

Since the plumbing passed, we started removing two inches of gravel between the footings for the insulation under the radiant tubing in the slab. Well, after seeing how tough that was, we decided to cut back to one inch of insulation, given how the slab is underground by at least 4 feet in all places. Even so, one inch across the entire basement (720 square feet, less the footings - 8" per side on the perimeter and two interior footings of 2 feet by 19 feet) is a huge amount of gravel to move.

Wendy enlisted the help of the kids and Grandma Lana one day while I was at work, and they moved quite a bit of gravel out of the cellar hole and onto the driveway. The next day, she and I finished it up and then laid down the foam insulation, followed by the wire mesh to attach the PEX radiant tubing to.


We needed a bit more wire to finish covering the foam, which we got before starting to deal with the PEX. In opening the first box of PEX, we found that the tubing was kinked somewhere in the middle. Kinked so badly that there was a crease in the tubing, which is no good. I made the mistake of trying to uncoil the first three hundred foot coil of PEX to help get rid of the pressure on the kink and determine how far in the kink was. This exercise shortly led to quitting in frustration for the day. Radiant heat tip number 1: Don't uncoil the tubing. Keep it coiled as much as possible, and spin the entire coil to loosen the twist in the tubing as you need it. This will keep the tubing from going everywhere as well as maintain your sanity.


By the next morning I had figured this fact out in my head, as well as the way around it. We decided we should start with the other coil of PEX in hopes that it was not so badly damaged. We got the first loop laid out and noticed that the tubing has the length printed on the side of the coil. Our first loop took two hundred twenty five feet of PEX, and the other loop is smaller because we can't lay it on the heater footing. Looking over the first roll, we determined that the kink was around one hundred and five feet into the roll, and that if we started from the three hundred foot mark, we would have almost two hundred feet of good tubing to use. By doing this we were able to get both loops of tubing laid and zip tied down.


Now we simply have to make the connections to the manifold and pressure test this baby so we can have the inspector look at it and get the floor poured (finally!).

Climbing. The world's loneliest sport, where hardship and philosophy go hand in glove. And here, another American expedition, attempting to be the first woman to successfully climb the north face of the Eastern Interior Kelly footing. She has been climbing tremendously. Documentary cameras were there to film every inch.