Our little office has no installed heating. It's not a big room, and it connects to the rest of the house, which allows warm air to flow, so a small electric fan heater serves for when it's really cold. However, this is an expensive way to heat, and there are heating pipes that pass overhead upstairs, so I have taken on a project to install and connect a small water-filled radiator.
I bought the radiator online, and the bits that go with it I bought at Leroy Merlin, the local DIY shop. The first job was to get some pipes up and out onto the floor above. I managed to forget about the mild steel support for the plasterboard ceiling, so I had to go out and get some metal drills to make a big enough hole.
The radiator will be halfway up the wall. Not ideal I know, but it means that the little desk-side cabinet can sit below it. Any new owner of the place could easily lower it if he wanted.
I had some trouble soldering the copper pipes. There were only three joints to make per pipe, to take them from behind the radiator on to the connections. I thought I would be able to do all three at once since they were close together, but once I had done the first one, the flux had burnt off the other two, and the solder wouldn't flow. So I had to take them apart and re-do them.
Here is a pic of the radiator on the wall. It's not connected in yet; I will do that on Monday when the shops are open and I can go and get any emergency necessities in case of problems. The copper pipes will be painted to match the radiator.
5 comments:
Those pipes are for the Zyklon B, sure of it.
I recently added a rad and re-plumbed the downstairs toilet and utility (lockdown project). Soldering was ridiculously frustrating because I needed more solder and nowadays it's lead free, and I can't make the damn stuff work. Eventually I used mostly compression fittings and found the end of an old reel of 'real' solder in the back of the shed for the few solder joints- magic, worked perfectly.
Hi Woodsy42, I only have lead-free solder, but it seemed to work OK for me. Perhaps the flux is designed for it. I expect flux to be of a thick cream consistency, but what I have here is liquid, and it gets painted on with a small brush that is part of the container lid.
... and, is the office now nice and warm?
Mark, it's fine, but we haven't had much in the way of cold weather since it was installed. Bit the radiator is working, it gets hot when I open up the valves, and I think it will be powerful enough for our little office.
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