The Wait

10:30 PM

7:00 AM

The pressure test of the heat system is on. As you can see, we dropped 5 PSI over about 8 hours. This made for a tense morning. I called Radiantec, our manufacturer and super-supportive group of techs and sales people, and they assured me that we should not be concerned with a 5 PSI drop overnight. This is usually due to changes in temperature and expansion of our nearly 1,800 linear feet of PEX tubing that we ran. So, lookin' good so far. We left the system pressurized and will check it again later tonight.

I spent the night working on the two remaining obvious leaks, both of which were on vertical copper-to-pex fittings. It was tedious, but in the end, I got them. After multiple attempts to fix them in place, I ended up removing the fittings as well as the pieces of pipe that they were soldered to. This seems to be the way to go. I cleaned the fittings really well and cut shiny new lengths of copper to replace the existing ones. Freshly buffed and fluxed and placed horizontally in the vice, they soldered up with little difficulty. A couple of minor splatter burns to the ankle, thumb, and a hacksaw slice to the hand later, the system was pressurized for testing.

If all goes well, we could be insulating by Wednesday!

- John