In Floor Radiant Heat Leaks

We have a new floor (4 months old)...it has radiant in floor heat with Pex pipe. I believe that the person who put the pipe in did not pressurize it before the cement was poured. Now we have a leak. We have an idea but not exactly sure where this leak could be. We are losing pressure and it is leaking antifreeze. Was wondering if there was anyway of finding this leak and if and when we do find it, is there anyway to fix it? I am trying to stay away from tearing up the whole cement floor...(32 x 40 foot garage)...it is a lot of cement. HELP!

You might be able to find the leak with an infrared camera or a night vision device. Some of the video cameras (I think Sony) had a detector that was sensitive in the infrared range. They were so sensitive that people were using them to "see through" clothing at night.
You will want the floor completely clear so you can see everthing, and you will need to work in the dark and run some hot water through it. I would start when it is good and dark, run the heating circuit, and see if you can detect anything odd. I would suspect a hot spot where there is water that leaks out. But whether the spot is hot or cold, you are looking for differences that might indicate the location of something different in the system.

You should start to see warm lines where the heating tube is located. Then, if there is a big enough leak, you should see some more heat at a leaky spot.

On the other hand, if the area is wet with a lot of water in the ground, it may not heat up as fast. Remember, you are looking for differences, whatever they are.

Now a word about heating concrete floors. The lower level of my house has hydronic heating with the baseboard units connected with copper under the concrete. Besides two leaks in 40 years because of erosion or corrosion of copper tube with no joints, I discovered that there is a lot of heat loss into mother earth. With oil at about $2.20 per gallon in the northeast, I have abandoned the under-floor copper because of the heat loss. There must be very good waterproof insulation between concrete heating and earth to make that system practical.

**They were so sensitive that people were using them to "see through" clothing at night.** My husband might like that a little too much!

But seriously thank you very much for your response. We'll see how that works.

chelle_89 said:

**They were so sensitive that people were using them to "see through" clothing at night.** My husband might like that a little too much!

But seriously thank you very much for your response. We'll see how that works.

Click to expand...

http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/forums/viewthread/17/

If you have friends at the local fire department, you might talk them into letting you borrow their infrared camera. I used one awhile ago that was sensitive enough to view the outline of a handprint on a wall 10-minutes after touching the wall for a few seconds...I've thought of buying one and running a service showing people where they are loosing energy. Still may do this, but the better cameras are expensive. Note, this is not the same as the more common night vision devices...unless it is infrared based, it won't show what you want. Many of the nightvision devices use light amplification, not heat. If you can find it, they used to make infrared film. Use a deep red filter on your film camera and a long exposure.

The camera doesn't in fact "see" through clothing. The sensor in the camera is sensitive in the infrared portion of the spectrum. If you are in the dark where there is no light in the visible portion of the spectrum, it is possible to get a weak image of the variations of temperature in the infrared spectrum.

There are people who sell filters http://www.advanced-intelligence.com/camcorders.html to allow you to get the infrared image when visible light is present. If there is no light in the visible spectrum (very dark as in a closed garage), and there is enough contrast in the infrared spectrum (temperature variation) the temperature variations are represented as visible images.

Some of the earlier versions of Sony video cameras (some were called "night shot") produced some infrared images if there was little or no visible light. It is my understanding that they added a filter to reduce the infrared capability on later models.