Laying the radiant floor system

Tuesday finds us putting down 5 runs of pex tubing for our radiant floor system. I have watched the DVD and read more about radiant flooring in the past 10 months than I care to admit.

My hopes are to have all of the pex laid by the end of the day on Tuesday and ready for inspection on Thursday. The only part of this that will probably hold true is the inspection on Thursday. My feelings at this point are that this to will be a bigger project than I think, and will probably take longer than I initially planned and will run into Wednesday.

Through deduction today I have learned that our raising will probably not occur until after Thanksgiving. I went out to the web site of the company who is constructing our frame. They post their upcoming raising on their website.

I had written this first part just prior to going up on Tuesday to lay the pex tubing. Since then a lot has happened.

First off I did find out that the current schedule puts us at raising the frame the week of the 27th right after Thanksgiving weekend. This gives us a chance to take a bit of a breather and get things lined up and prepared for the raising and for applying the SIPs.

Now on to the pex tubing. We left early Tuesday morning, and after a quick stop at the county office to pick up another set of red lined prints we were off to Williams.

Upon arriving, the concrete company was digging a couple of piers and adjoining footing that were initially overlooked by them. They were out there for about 2 hours finishing up digging, making final preparations for Friday's pour and setting the sonotubes.

We wasted no time and got the pex tubing un-boxed and stuck a couple of rolls in the truck to warm them up to make them a little more flexible. My wife and son came up to help which made all the difference in the world having three people there helping.

So with the plan in hand as to the pattern the Radiant Floor company had drawn out for us to follow we made the first connection to the manifold and took off putting done the pex. The first roll took about 45 minutes and the remaining four just got quicker. I am happy to report that the whole process went flawless!!
Then the moment of truth came when we went to pressurize it. They said that this may take a little while and they were right. The compressor took a while to bring the pressure up to 50 pounds. Once that was reached we continued to do some final tieing down and watched to make sure the pressure held.

For about the first hour and a half it held steady and then as the area began to get shaded it slowly dropped which was to be expected. By the time we left it had dropped about 5 pounds, again this is to be expected.

So fortunately the whole thing took about 4 hours. We were all amazed how easy the whole process went. We were careful to keep our turns from getting to tight so as not to kink the pex. This would then require a splice which I really did not want to see happen. We also added about a five foot piece of pex at the manifold with the end taped for a sensor that will be fed down in to the pex prior to start up. This acts as a thermostat for the system to control the temperature of the floor.





Also while my wife and son were putting the finishing touches on the floor, I picked up some 1" foam insulation with foil back vapor barrier. I was not comfortable leaving the pier area within the slab coming in direct contact with the stem walls. I also did not want the 2" Styrofoam there either due to the fact that these areas were going to be supporting the 8x8 posts and I did not want to compromise any support there. The one inch allowed me to do make a break between the slab and the stem wall and not compromise support.

In filled and just about ready for a concrete slab

We finished getting the stem walls infilled with cinder. This ended up being a project in itself, which included 27 truck loads of cinder, 1300 gallons of water and an engineer certifying the type of soil and doing compaction tests as it is being backfilled.

At the time it seemed like a lot of work to get everything infilled and ready for a slab, but having poor fill and poor compaction is not all that good of an alternative. Compaction tests turned out great, and the comments of the plumber who had to trench in waste lines verified that we had good compaction!!

This past week was time for the plumbers to get waste lines and water lines put in prior to putting down vapor barrier and 2" blue board. The plumbers finished up on Tuesday and passed inspection the same day.

That same day I had a discussion with the plumber and the person doing the finished slab work for us at the building site. The topic was radiant heating.

I had brought up that I would be putting 2" blue board around the perimeter of the house along the edge where the block goes from a 8" width to a 6" width. This was to prevent the slab from radiating heat out to the stem walls. They looked at me as though I was crazy. I was not only informed that that was not the way it was done up here but that I would probably have a tough time convincing the county as well of the technique I was planning on using.

To make a long story short, after several phone calls and a trip to the county building department to discuss the way I was intending to do our radiant floor heating the county only asked for a detail drawing and said they were fine with the whole technique.

Friday was pre-treatment day for termites. This also needed to be completed prior to the vapor barrier and the 2" blueboard being put down.

Early Saturday morning found me digging the fireplace footing prior to laying down the vapor barrier. I wanted to complete this myself so as not to have to have the concrete slab crew trampling all over the blue board

After that was completed we put down the 6mil vapor barrier. We were fortunate that we had light winds for doing this as well as putting down the blue board. A windy day would have made this job a whole lot less enjoyable.

After we had the vapor barrier down we started to put down the blue board. This really was not all that hard of a job, but it sure turned out to be very time consuming. We did end up finishing by dark but it made for a very long day!!

Early Sunday morning I put the manifold for the radiant floor in place. After the rebar has been put down tomorrow, we plan on spending Tuesday hooking up the 7/8 Pex tubing to the manifold, and then stringing out 5 - 300' runs and tying it down to the rebar with zip ties.

Three years ago my wife and I purchased 10 acres of land in northern Arizona.

We immediatley went to work getting a driveway cut in and started work on a 24 x 32' garage/shop with a living area above. This project for the most part is complete othere than exterioir fininshing and eventually doing a more complete job of fininshing off the living area upstairs to be used as a guest house at some point.

Our efforts have now turned to getting a timber frame home built. I have since purchasing the land purchased a Woodmizer saw mill and have recently completed a saw shed for it. My initial thought was to saw my own timbers and build the timber frame from scratch.

Not that there is any great urgency to move up from the Phoenix metro area to our 10 acres other than escaping the chaos of the city, I felt that doing the frame from scratch myself would be a very long and drawn out process. Although I would enjoy nothing more than tackling that portion of the project myself, reality tells me that it would take way to long to complete being able to work at it only on weekends.

So here we are mid October and to get this far has taken a little longer than I had anticipated. I would say the most surprising part of the whole process is the amount of coordination, planning, phone calls and the amount of getting rather ticked off as to how long it takes people to get back to you, or just plain lighting a fire under some of them to get the show on the rode!!!

As of today 10-17-06 the frame work has begun and from what I am told is well underway for a first half of November raising. Today I recieved word that the infill inside the stem walls is near completion. I have had to have an engineering firm perform soil sampes on the fill. This is due to the fact that I am in need of over 4 feet of fill in the great room area. And on top of that they have had to be on site performing compaction test on every 8" lift.

So needless to say the slab, which I initially thought may come a little under budget is back up to about right at budget or slightly higher.
Here are the stem walls as of this past weekend. In the lower left hand corner we have installed several sleeves through the stem walls and have the conduit rising in the mechanical room. The rather large pipe with the red cap on it is Eco-Flex.

It is roughly 85' long and will connect to the solar panels for our radiant floor heating. It is about 7" in diameter and conatins two 3/4" pex tubes surrounded by insulation. It seemd to be the best way to go, and far out weighs building a raceway myself and tryiing to insulate it. Although it was rather expensive 3/4" copper was not much less in price and I would have still had to construct an 85' raceway and come up with a decent way of insulating it.

Plumbers are to arive on Friday and hopefully will finish up Monday. Our weekend project is to get electrical conduit layed inside for floor outlets as well as stove and oven outlets in the kitchen. Also after a very muddy weekend last weekend try and get the remainder of walls backfilled around the outside.