Under Pressure

We had a couple of days off - Sunday's weather was less than stellar, so we decided to get some things done around the house, and then for Memorial day, we set off and Emmet threw up five minutes out of the driveway. After a bath and a nap, we decided to try again and headed off to Grandma Lana's house. He was sick again, but we made it. When we finally got up to the site, we realized that we had forgotten the fittings for the manifold - they very thing we had hoped to finish! Well, it seemed that someone had not intended for us to work that day, so we packed it in for the day.

Today we tried it again. After some grunting, heaving and sweating (it's amazing how hot a basement hole full of insulation can get - as Wendy quipped, "Why do we need radiant down here? It's plenty warm already!"), we had the manifold and the loops all hooked up.


We filled the system with 50 pounds of compressed air to pressure test the fittings and went to get some breakfast. A few sausage, egg and cheese sammiches later, we came back to check the pressure. It had actually gone up to 55 pounds due to the tubing heating up and held pressure for 2 hours. During that time we tied the tubing all the way down to the bottom layer of wire mesh. Once the pressure test was complete, we put down the top layer of wire mesh and tied that down, trimming all the zip ties so that we don't have any flying up out of the finish floor slab. The top layer helps weight the tubing down, protect it from the power trowel in case it rises and diffuse the heat more evenly.



All that is left to do before the slab pour is to build out the box for the under tub access and stuff it, stuff the manifold box and wrap the toilet pipe in cardboard so that there is a gap for the flange to be fit on after the pour. We cut out early for a early birthday party for Sean and cousin Danny (born the same exact day!) thrown by Grandma Lana and Aunt Sandra.