Oh yes, They use PEX for radiant heat in cement pads and in joist bays. I think it would have been a really suitable heating method for your living room rather than a radiator. They use it in conjunction with reflectors and such in the joist bays. If ever I go to hot water heat I will heat all floors in that way for comfort and saving space.
>From what you describe you should be able to route the plumbing including >quite possibly the drains in the joist bay between the floor and the ceiling >but if this wall is that thin I would be surprised if they managed to get a >significant sewer down it. If at an outside wall you might prefer to box in a race to keep the plumbing out of the cold but that need only be enough to hide the plumbing and you can dress it up or maybe even hide it among shelves or inside of a closet or other cabinetry. If rerouting the drains any distance it might be desirable to raise a vent to the loft space and either join it to the stack up there or put on one of those vacuum caps to keep the drains running freely. Usually you will find the stack very close to the toilet which I would bet is on an outside wall and you won't have to reroute that at all. The water supply though might be a different matter. It may well come up through that wall along with some electricity. This is the third attempt at this, my computer has developed an interesting but frustrating attitude of rebooting spontaneously at the least convenient time. Dale Leavens, Cochrane Ontario Canada [EMAIL PROTECTED] Skype DaleLeavens Come and meet Aurora, Nakita and Nanook at our polar bear habitat. ----- Original Message ----- From: Dan Rossi To: [email protected] Sent: Tuesday, February 05, 2008 10:22 AM Subject: Re: [BlindHandyMan] The great kitchen dream project. Dale, thanks, always good to have someone else's eyes looking at the same problem. This wall is technically not a load bearing wall. The house is 15 feet wide and 30 feet long. The floor joists span the 15 feet. In the basement there are no supports, the joists just rest on the foundation walls. However, they do double up the joists every fourth joist. In roughly the middle of the house, front to back, there is a wall that spans the 15 feet and has a large archway in it. It wouldn't be a supporting wall because it is parallel to the joists. There is a wall perpendicular to the wall I just described, it runs from that wall to the back of the house and separates the back half of the house into left and right halves, kitchen and dining room. Yes, it runs perpendicular to the joists but only those joists in the back half of the house, so I wouldn't really expect that it is a load bearing wall either. the only issue might be that typically, in these old houses, when they built the bathrooms, they just dumped cement between the floor joists. SO there may be a bit more weight around that area. Next, the wall is constructed with the 2X4 studs on edge making it a thin wall. Lastly, many of the 20 units have had varying amounts of this wall removed. Some have had the big archway wall removed. I don't think any have had both walls fully removed. Snaking some PEX around may do the trick although would the drain stack be a problem? Also, is PEX rated for the comparatively high temps of hot water heat? -- Blue skies. Dan Rossi Carnegie Mellon University. E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tel: (412) 268-9081 [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
