kurt

Go to youtube and check out the caleffi stuff.

What Kibbel said. It's about the closely spaced tees. The term we need to learn is "hydraulic separation". Google it, it explains everything. I'd not heard of this before. Hydraulic separation is the new terminology and standard of care for these systems. http://www.caleffi.com/sites/default/fi ... n-tr07.pdf My (minimal) understanding at this time sez the tees should have been much more closely spaced, and there should have been at least 12" of pipe before connecting to the system loop.....or something like that. But, overall, not wrong.

Good idea.... http://forum.heatinghelp.com/discussion ... k/p1?new=1

Yes, and exactly. I don't understand what prevents a short circuit. The floor warmed up just fine, came to temp, nothing seemed strange, but I'm still confused how it's working.

I'm glad we cleared that up.

This is a sort of strange arrangement for the radiant system. It's not a primary-secondary loop system; it's got the return and supply both on the same loop....sort of. Is this right? Click to Enlarge 80.03 KB

People around here freak out when it's 4.1 pCi/l. I'm not kidding. 3.9....whew...we're safe. 4.1? RUN, WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!! I think the highest I've ever found was a 47 pCi/l, and that ended up being about 17 pCi/l on retesting. Mitigation systems must be pretty standard out there.

This has me remembering X10 systems....possibly the buggiest and goofiest early attempt at control system wiring.

Me? I don't even know. I don't care. If it ever comes up and the State sanctions me, I'll just retire. I'm ready anyway.

E&O w/ a GL rider. So, both.

The two houses I looked at....both had the problem in a 3rd fl. office/rooftop deck access "penthouse". Conventional wood structure. There's a lot of 3 story flat roof house in Chicago where the top floor is largely a stairwell enclosure that opens out onto a roof deck. Sometimes they're in the middle with decks on both sides. Sometimes they're larger, and contain an office or wetbar area.

Sounds exactly like my experience. Installer dumbfounded, "never had it happen before", all the same explanations about electronically calibrated equipment making it impossible to screw up, etc..... And, it isn't water "pushing the smell out". The stuff is water resistant, as you note. It eventually got around to tearing stuff out, and we found elongated weird gooey spots with a few globs. No reasonable explanation was ever determined. We don't know why it went bad, but it went bad.

I know this. That's what's weird....the smell was distinctly fishy. It's one of the reasons we didn't immediately suspect the foam.

Certainly possible or even likely. The fish description is not entirely accurate. Sometimes it's like VOC's.

Maybe. But that's not how it worked on the 2 joints I investigated. During the tear out, when it got down to laborers scraping every square inch, we found kinda gummy areas, widely dispersed. It wasn't like it was all goop with pockets of the stuff; it was more like thin stretched areas of failure that would be hard to hit with random core sampling. But, I don't know. We're on the front end of figuring out why some foam applications go bad. I still think it's the greatest invention, but my enthusiasm has been tempered by a couple bad jobs I've seen and some of the stuff I've been reading about failures.

That jibes with my experience. Spring and Autumn temps, moderate to higher humidity.....and the smell starts Couldn't smell it in deep winter, but come Springtime, it'd come back. I have no idea about the blue stuff. You should get in there and cut a chunk of the blue stuff out to see if it's cured all the way through. I'm curious. I've never seen bluish foam.

That's how it worked with the 2 properties I looked at. No smell, then that "fishy" smell that would come and go with changing atmospheric conditions. It was hard to nail down. It never went away after more than a year, so we just started tearing stuff out to find out what was wrong, and we ran into some gooey sections that stank. The blue thing is really weird. Never seen that one. It can't be right.

You most likely have some combination of the bad stuff you described, resulting in incomplete reaction. Somewhere buried in foam that looks OK are some gooey sections that didn't go off. I've been the "expert" called in to figure out two similar things; the storylines are identical to what you're experiencing, and subsequent invasive investigation revealed uncured sections. Foam guys will stall forever because the fix is extremely unpleasant. Essentially, strip it all out and start over. Sorry to be the one providing the bad news.

I have some old coin op Speed Queens....can't break and more steel than some cars. They weigh about 280 pounds. The problem with top loaders is the universal joint agitating the tub (and way too much water). The old Maytags that never broke...had the perfect design. It was ingenious. Everything else is garbage. When Maytag changed from that design, it was all downhill. Front loader technology, with it's adjusting water levels to load size, the extractor spin mode, and the motor mounts make more sense. The LG has a direct drive arrangement...no extraneous moving parts. Mechanically, they're superior. It's the control modules that aggravate. But, they're getting better.

Parks would do a 6' caisson...check valve, overflow tee, bypass pump, etc.... in the front yard for about $8-10k, complications = another couple grand.

LG front loaders here too. 5 pair, one set each apartment. Flawless function, zero problems. Samsung refrigerators and ranges in every apartment. Way better than other appliances. Recall notices on a single model is useful information for that model. Modern mfg. is about globalized supply chains and all sorts of stuff that can lead any company to produce a lemon.

I might lean toward well casing then; I've never seen a well casing <4". This was in a 1956 house out in a suburb that was way on the periphery back then....could've easily been on a private well. The tank sweep came up empty.

Yeah. That's the concern...next to where an old fuel storage tank sat, small for a well stem, hmmmm... Maybe a test well, but it looks too old. I put it in the report for further analysis, tank check, etc.

Cemented in place. It's identical to a well stem except it's so small.

You know, that's way more dangerous than a lot of ladder stuff....the slip on the deck thing. I've had it happen; I was lucky and just barked my shin on a rung. Same thing with freshly sealed asphalt drives...all that shiny new sealant is slick as grease when it's wet. I always tie off on decks, although I might start running in some screws with my impact driver.