Advice on pipes in concrete

Wookey

Nothing wrong with pipes in solid floors if lagged properly, armaflex or tubolit type lagging is more than sufficient. One problem in older type houses is where a screed is being filled in over piping and it is of inadequate depth to accomadate using the foam type lagging, hairfelt or even denso tape (the sticky stuff folks have talked about) may have been used to then allow enough of a cement covering to cover the pipes without the floor crumbling to possibly happen. Routing pipes thru a roofspace and down a wall is fine but as sure as that householder is happy with it the next won't be and it can also lead to problems with airlocks after drain downs etc. As a plumber who dug up my own floors to fit heating into my own house, if depth is a problem and remember if you sink into a floor to far with a chisel/kango hammer you risk damaging your dpc, i dug down enough to get a min covering of about 1" of concrete and then smoothed of with a 1/2" cover of cement, pipes where covered with tubolit lagging of approx 10mm thickness. If the OP piping is in a normal sand/cement screed they wont be hard to bare up should he deem lagging them correctly to be a priority.

ic

paddypaws101 wrote: »

Tricky.....Pipes in conctrete ARE a disaster waiting to happen, but then again it might never happen while you are in residence.

There's only one way to find out.....FIGHT!!!!

dampdaveski

I deal with the consequences of leaking pipes in concrete floors regularly.
It is better if you didn't haver a leak - obviously!
If you have a combi boiler, it only needs to lose about a gallon and it would shut down
If you have a traditional heating system which tops itself up from a header tank, you can mark the water level with tippex, tie up the ball valve! and moniter the level to see if it drops, if it does you know you might have a leak

Pipes in floors which are lagged (including the joints) arn't really an issue.
My advice as someone has already said, is when you are ready to decorate or do other works get as much of the pipework surface mounted as possible
.
OR
alternatively I agree with ic - FIGHT