When remodeling our house, one goal was to move to the highest efficacy lighting while remaining cost effective. In terms of pure lumens per watt — pure efficacy — LEDs are, by far, the winner on the commercial market and have been for the last decade.

Up until two years ago (when we remodeled the kitchen), though, the cost per lumen of LED based lighting has been prohibitive outside of things like rope lights or other installations that had tons of low power, cheap, lamps. Unfortunately, rope lights and christmas lights just don’t make for good task lighting in your typical kitchen. CFLs, though, pretty much suck. After 18 months, the lamps are starting to fail, they are sometimes noisy, and their warmup time can be annoying (contrary to reports from the energy & incandescent lamp industries, CFLs are actually not terribly toxic — the amount of mercury is tiny).

I have been watching the LED market for quite a while. In particular, Best Hong Kong has an interesting selection of relatively current and relatively reasonably priced lamps. I’m using some of their products to illuminate the hand blown glass pendant lamps at the top of this picture. Thank you to EMSL for suggesting Best Hong Kong in the first place!

In monitoring the technology, the one name that came up over and over is CREE, who seems to be one of the leaders in manufacturing LEDs and LED fixtures. At least, CREE is the name that comes up most often for products targeted to residential applications (Phillips and others seem to be big names in the commercial space).

Now, if you search Amazon for CREE lamps, you’ll find a bunch of units, but the state of the art tends to be about six months behind and, frankly, comparatively expensive (of course, if anyone happens to stumble on the above link a year or two after I wrote this, I hope the prices are reasonable and the technology current).

Since the technology existed, the issue was then a matter of figuring out where to find lamps with the latest CREE LED technology integrated into a package compatible with standard home lighting fixtures. After having found some CREE 3x 1 watt GU-10 (i.e. track light compatible 120v AC lamps) and found some 3 watt CREE LEDs with the same form factor as the 1 watt LEDS, a bit of searching revealed that, in fact, if you are willing to import lamps in lots of 10 (or more), you can buy the latest lighting technology

Through Alibaba.com, I found Ledsion Lighting Technology Co. Ledsion manufacturers a ton of LED based lamps, both for home use and in various commercial applications.

Not having ordered product from Ali Baba or — frankly — ordered anything direct from the manufacturer in this fashion gave me a bit of trepidation. But, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

CFL based illumination; not as bright, no highlights.

I ordered 10 (minimum lot size) 3x3w (9w) CREE based GU-10 120VAC lamps. It took about 10 days for the company to make and ship the lamps (yes — make — a lot of the manufacturing is pretty much on-demand). It came to about $19.00 per lamp. While just about 2.5x the price of the 7w CFLs they were replacing, the LEDs generate 150% the light output and have a rated life of 50,000 hours vs. the CFL’s 8,000.

I.e. the performance and long-term cost– the efficacy — of the CREE based 3x3w LEDs completely dominates CFLs. Better still, the light quality is just stunning compared to the CFLs. The LEDs are “on” instantly and provide a very even light. Frankly, it looks better than 50 watt halogens original to the track in that the light is, for lack of a better term, more comfortable; less harsh.

The image at left was taken while the counter was illuminated by the old CFLs with considerably more light coming from other sources. No highlights on the counter, to speak of. With CFLs, the track lighting was nothing more than ambient overhead lighting. With the LEDs, it provides more ambient light and enough directed light to provide for highlighted spots.

Long term viability obviously remains to be seen, but I remain optimistic.

I returned to the Lesdion Lighting Technology to order more lamps and see if I could grab some 12vAC or DC MR-16 CREE based LEDs for other applications and, via AliBaba’s built in chat system, ended up chatting with the seller. Extremely professional, patient, and helpful. Answered a handful of technical questions and I was able to customize my order a bit to meet my needs. (And, really, I’m still a bit in shock that, through Alibaba, I can talk directly to a manufacturer to get a relative one off of a product with the custom color, lens, and wattage I desire. I feel like I just experienced a bit of Blade Runner from my living room.)

All in all, I’m extremely happy that LED technology has advanced to the state of being usable in “normal” home applications. While still slightly initially pricy, the long term costs may be significantly less and the reduced energy use is attractive. Because of the increased light output from the track lights, I’m finding that I no longer need to use the 30 to 40 watts of florescent tube under-lighting!

As a part of our ongoing home improvement adventure, we are installing solar panels. Between the state and federal rebates, the increasing cost of electricity, and the improvements in solar technology, it is an investment that will pay for itself in a decade or two. Maybe less, if California really starts paying for excess production.

And, of course, Solar scratches my techno-geek itch. In particular, the system we are installing uses per-panel micro-inverters that leverage IP-over-powerline to network with each other to synchronize phase and deliver power back to the grid. As well, it makes the system easily expandable in that we can drop new panels in without having to replace a costly single inverter.

Apparently, when this is all said and done, I’ll have access to a web site with a set of schematics that show our panel layout along with individual and overall power generation statistics.

Of course, being that we live in an Eichler, the path between concept and final installation has to have at least one adventure.

Not surprisingly, the house’s electrical wiring is the source of our installation woes.

In particular, much of our electrical (and a bit of our water) infrastructure is on the roof of our house. During the original construction, wires were literally thrown over our roof from above the fuse box to wherever their destination might be.

To “protect” the wires, they were covered in metal angle iron quite literally laid over the top of the wires. On top of this, the builders laid down tar paper, tar, more tar paper, and gravel.

Of course, tar paper and gravel is just crap insulation. We have a neighbor who still has the original roofing material and their houses internal temperature stays lockstep with the outside in the summer! Ouch!

So, most Eichlers have been through two phases of insulation upgrades. In the 80s, most people laid down a relatively compact layer of fiberglass covered with more tar paper. An improvement, but still kind of pathetic.

Once foam roofing technology matured, many Eichlers have laid down foam with a thick plastic-y coating on top. Ours is one of them and, actually, we have had two layers of foam laid down. It is beyond 4 inches thick across much of the roof.

And, yes, it does a very effective job of obscuring where the wiring is.

Thus, when the solar installer were using their hammer drills (mistake, assuredly) to attach the mounting brackets to the beams of the house, they managed to hit not one, but two, of the random wires across the roof! An easy mistake to make. Actually, I had pretty much assumed that we would end up with at least one electrical break.

While the installer’s mechanical installation is quite clean and of excellent quality, their electrician simply didn’t know how to deal with an Eichler. His “fix” to the broken wire was to try and inject insulative goo into the broken area.

Unacceptable.

His second attempt at a “fix” was to pull some of the wires up into a box, match colors, and hope for the best. That didn’t work so well, either. Worse, the end result were more dead outlets in the house and other electrical problems.

In the end, we replaced their electrician with the electrician we used during the remodel. Our electrician, Rob, is a top notch professional, pays great attention to detail, and obviously has extensive experience with Eichlers.

Not only did they hit some of the original wiring, the installers happened to drill through one of the two “upgrade” wires that were run over the roof when some previous owner added window air conditioners in, likely, the early 80s.

These wires were “throw and cover” that were tossed on top of the original gravel, the metal covers tacked down, and then covered by the insulation and, eventually, foam. The metal cover is extremely thin; paper thin, really. Thin enough that you cannot see any indication on the foam surface of where these damned wires run!

Akin to throwing a dime off the roof and randomly hitting a line of ants.

You can see the whole in the metal cover that just so happened to drill through the hot conductor of the underlying wire.

To properly fix the wiring requires cutting away enough of the foam insulation to expose the problem areas along with enough wire before and after the break to make it possible to pull the wires up to weatherproof junction boxes on the roof.

I truly appreciate my electrician’s attention to detail. In particular, he recycled the old wire cover for the two wires that were left in the roof unscathed. While he could have just left the cover on the roof and let the foam seal it down, Rob took the time to properly tie it down to the roof, ensuring it won’t move and pinch the wires. Beyond that, Rob placed the tie directly over the hole that was accidentally drilled in the first place, ensuring that none of the foam goo spooges into the wiring channel.

During the remodel, Rob was also the electrician that placed metal wire protectors over basically every bit of framing with wiring through it. This was, quite literally, 3x or 4x more locations than code dictated and he did it to ensure that the cabinet hangers — during the remodel or any time thereafter — wouldn’t accidentally put a screw through his wires.

Of course, the timing for all of this just couldn’t be better (need that sarcasm mark right here) as the bay area is expecting Rains of Biblical Proportions. Translating from Stupid Newscaster speak, the does mean that we will be seeing a few inches of rain in the next week, relatively constant precipitation.

Exactly what we need when we have a bunch of holes in our roof! Especially since it’ll be at least a week before the foam company can make it out to seal our roof.

So, at the moment, we have fully repaired electrical system and 6 mil plastic sheeting sealed over the holes containing the fixed electrical. With the rain today, all seems dry on the inside.

Hopefully, we’ll have everything repaired and installed within a week or two.

I did have to add one more photo.

This is a picture of the roof area over the garage. It is also proof quite positive that the foam roof does a wonderful job of insulating the interior of the house.

In particular, that entire area is covered in a thin layer of ice. In the damp early morning air of California, the foam roof does an amazing job of condensing liquid out of the air. If it is cold enough, it freezes to the roof nearly immediately.

You cannot imagine exactly how much of a surprise it was stepping over the peak of the roof to discover that said gentle slope was a frictionless plane!

While making my own low voltage cable light fixtures, I searched high and low for a little piece of hardware that would elegantly connect between the suspension cables and the wires down to the lights.

No luck. Everyone wants to sell you a cable lighting kit or, at best, the only “parts” are $40 bare MR-16 halogen lamp fixtures.

No thanks. Until I could figure out a solution, I simply bent a few bits of heavy gauge copper wire and made hangers like the one at right.

It worked OK, but clearly needed to be replaced with a real solution.

The answer?

Spend less than $10 on parts and make my own connectors. Well, $10 on parts and $225 on the tools necessary to solve this particular problem.

What follows is a description of the tools and some photos of the various stages. If you have even the remotest amount of metal working experience, there’ll be nothing new here (and probably lots of opportunities to make fun of me).

But, as pictured at left, I achieved success!

At left are the two connectors I have from the original set. I liked the general design and wanted to do something similar.

My one complaint is that the set screws that hold the wires in stick out way too much. It looks shoddy.

I decided to use 8-32 threaded hex rod connectors as the basis for my cable connectors. Into these, I found that 6-32 threaded set hex head set screws would likely fit and thumb-screws to fit the hex rod connectors are easy to find.

So, clearly, I was going to need to drill some fairly precise holes, cut threads, and then cut a slot into whatever base material I decide to use. This was turning into a bit of general machining on relatively small parts.

This was going to require tools I do not have.

The Tools

Drill Press

I ended up with a 12″ Ryobi drill press from Home Depot. It isn’t the best press in the world, but it’ll do for the relatively light duty use I’ll get out of it.

Overall, a solid machine. Like the press pictured at right, it includes a set of lasers that create cross hairs on the work area.

This is handy for sighting things in and drilling accurately.

But it isn’t good enough.

As I needed to drill holes pretty close to dead center in the hex rod connectors, I would need some means of holding the things down on the drill table.

Enter the cross-sliding vice.

This rather brilliant little bit of iron works like a standard vise to hold whatever part you need held.

However, the base has two additional cranks that, quite literally, slide the vise around on the X and Y axis.

Thus, you can clamp the cross-slide vise to the drill table, clamp the part you want to machine into the vise, and then use the X/Y axis cranks to exactly position the vise under the drill bit.

I bought the one pictured at right. It works well enough for my needs at this time.

For about $100 more, you can pick pick up a device with considerably more quality of build and precision of movement.

And then they go up from there.

Cutting threads requires a Tap and Die.

I have always wanted a tap and die set. As a 10 to 12 year old, who didn’t spent a half an hour in the nut/bolt or plumbing department of some random hardware store screwing this bit to that bit and dreaming of all the ways the world would be better if everything were threaded?

This was pretty much the ideal started set for my needs. It included the 6-32 and 8-32 taps I would use for this project and, as a bonus, it contains a 1/4″-20 tap and die. 1/4″-20 being the standard sized threads used across all cameras, tripods, and every other device that can mount to same.

They key to success with a tap and die is two-fold, as far as I can tell:

(1) Use oil. A couple of drops on the cutting blade. Go in a full turn, back off a half a turn. Repeat.

(2) Use exactly the right sized drill bit. With the Irwin tap&die set, they provide a list of the exact drill bits that should be used with each. The bits — which can obviously be had from any number of manufacturers — are of “wire gauge” and do not necessarily follow the standard sizes found in, say, your average drill bit kit.

Every drill should come with lasers.

It really does help align the bit with the desired drilling point. I used a punch to make a divot on the piece to keep the bit from scooting off to one side or another.

Besides, lasers are cool.

Like the tap and die, drilling metal will benefit from a little bit of oil on the bit. It makes the bit last longer and keeps the piece being worked cooler.

And heat is more problematic than just a burn risk. Some kinds of metals can be hardened if heated too much while being worked. If this happens, then it is quite easy to, say, break a tap when trying to cut threads in the freshly drilled hole.

In this image, I have already drilled and cut threads in the hole for the set screw. This second hole will be what I would later cut down to using a hack saw to make the cable channel.

This is the finished and assembled connector ready for use.

I used a hack saw to cut from where the thumbscrew is inserted down to the hole drilled in the previous picture.

I then used a fiberglass cut-off blade in my dremel (a small file or grinder would work fine) to smooth down the channel and make sure the cable would fit.

Finally, I ran the tap through both the length of the hex connector and the hole for the set screw to ensure that both had clean threads.

This is a comparison of the new connector and the old “connector”.

I’m particularly happy with the set screw. It is nearly flush with the surface of the hex connector, yet is very snugly applying pressure to the cable.

Finally, this is what the cable connectors look like once installed.

Not bad!

Of course, I can see things about them that I’ll do better next time.

But the reality is that most people will never see them from closer than about 4 feet and, at that distance, they certainly don’t look like the hacks that they are!

When we lived in New York City, we had these awesome cable lights with hand blown glass pendants and, in the middle in the picture left, an awesome little beaded center piece lamp over our living room table.

One goal of the remodel was to make sure that we had a place for the pendants to finally hang again after being in boxes for the past decade.

The glass pendants are hung above the bar between kitchen and living room and the bead shade was hung over the kitchen table.

But the shade was too small to hang by itself. Thus, we needed additional fixtures.

At first, I soldered a couple of stiff copper wires to the bottom of some 12v MR16 compact fluorescent lamps. Plenty of light, but obviously not terribly pleasant to look at a couple of random bare bulbs hanging about.

I have always been enamored by the cheese grater light fixtures in That 70s Show.

As we were heading to IKEA for other reasons, we decided to poke about the kitchen accessories area to see if anything Light Fixture-esque struck our fancy.

Christine found some ORDNING stainless steel cutlery caddies that seemed pretty close to ideal.

Cheap, too.

So we grabbed a couple and I picked up some silver lamp cord from the local hardware store.

Assembly was trivial:

• Solder ends of lamp cord to ends of lamp
• Tie not in lamp cord just above lamp
• Feed lamp cord through center bottom hole of ORDNING
• Solder stiff copper wire to other end of lamp cord at desired height
• Bend copper wire in a hook to hook over suspended power cables

The end result is clean, simple, and provides great light. Better yet, the interior of the ORDNING has wonderful concentric rings from the machining process.

The blue light at the top of the cabinets is from blue LED rope lights that extend across the top of all cabinets.

Simultaneous with the flooring going in, the construction crew installed cabinets. Actually, the cabinets were roughed in first to ensure that the floor tiles could be cut correctly.

The image at was taken from the top of the bar cabinets between living room and kitchen and shows the island, the refrigerator cabinet, and the big storage cabinet on the left.

Behind the island are cabinets all along the wall. Though not visible in this image, there are now cabinets hanging on the wall in the corner by the fridge cabinet.

(This is actually an HDR image again. Much better than the original images. Would have required massive lighting to expose this properly otherwise, I think.)

The cabinets are rocks solid and the hardware is really nice. Soft close doors/drawers and the slides are top notch. We picked out some curved hardware to go on the front of the cabinets, to tie with the curved handles on the appliances on the curve at the front of the island.

Our friend and professional artist, Trudy, is making custom glass panels for the cabinet doors and custom glass tiles that will be installed in a row along the backsplash over the kitchen counters.

Trudy also made the exquisite stained glass piece seen in this picture. Some detailed images can be found here and here.

The past few weeks, the remodel has been in turbo mode.

Every day, coming home from work reveals yet another item checked off (or nearly so).

A couple of weeks ago, it was the floor tiles. At left is the living room with tiles completed, but not yet grouted in.

The tiles used are 24″x24″ slate tiles that are about 1/2″ thick. I.e. large. And heavy. Each tile ways around 35 lbs.

Thus, each palette of tiles weighed about 2200 lbs.

The tiling process itself is interesting. The designer and contractor placed a single master tile in the living room such that two living room walls would be flush with the edge of the tiles as they were laid down.

From there, the entire rest of the area to be tiled is laid relative to that single master tile. As a result, there are no seams between rooms. On the downside, the guys had to cut some relatively complex shaped tiles to fit around cabinets and into odd shaped corners.

We decided to go with a non-glossy seal on the tiles. Thus the final, grouted, sealed product looks much like these pictures.

At this point, the floor is complete. There is still tile work to be done as the master bath shower’s walls will be done in the same tile.

The image at left is shot from the living room into the kitchen.

It is actually an HDR image, created with the Hydra Aperture plug-in from Creaceed. I had a look at Photomatix, but there were too many knobs for my tiny brain to deal with at this time. However, if you really want to dive deep and have lots of control, Photomatix looks like it has a lot of potential.

So far, HDR has proven a mixed bag. I’m only using it to improve the detail of otherwise nasty shots; bring out the detail in the shadows while not blowing out highlighted areas of the scene.

For the past couple of months, our real kitchen has either been full of holes or otherwise under construction.

As a result, our refrigerator and the rest of our make shift kitchen has been in our atrium.

As we couldn’t move our stove into the atrium, I picked up a camp stove to see us through. Specifically, I wanted something that had at least two burners and we very easy to use. I already have a Coleman dual-fuel stove
, but it is a bit bulky and, though it can run off of unleaded gasoline, it is not exactly “push button” easy to light.

After reviewing a slew of stoves, I settled on the Coleman 2-Burner Fold ‘N Go InstaStart Stove.

It is compact, surprisingly solid, and very easy to use. It also spits out a ton of heat. Seriously. Beyond easily boiling water, frying foods, cooking pancakes, and the like, I have also successfully stir-fried in my very heavy cast-iron wok (seriously — 12+ pounds of cast iron)!

My only complaint is that the adjusting the stove for a low flame is trickier than it should be. If you simply push and turn the knobs, you’ll always end up with a flame that is bigger than desired. However, by simply pulling on the knobs as you turn slowly, the flame height can be set quite specifically to as low as you want.

Great stove. Very attractive design, too.

The 16 oz propane tanks run about $4.50 each and last for about one week with near daily cooking (or, at the least, boiling of water).

Normally, when you are redoing an interior room, you would typically hang drywall once the wall is insulated and all interior infrastructure is installed.

Not so in an Eichler!

At least not in earthquake country.

An Eichler is a textbook example of post and beam construction.

The house sits on a slab and there are numerous vertical posts that then support large (typically redwood) beams on top of which the roof is built. The framing and walls are typically run between posts, but non-structural interior walls are often used, too.

While Eichler houses typically fare very well in earth quakes, with no shear walls to cause the house to shift off the foundation (a common failure mode).

However, the whole house can be subject to shear forces that can cause catastrophic failure.

Thus, since the original construction, building codes now require that a certain amount of shear strength be maintained.

In particular, any exterior siding work must use siding the runs the full height of the house and must be nailed to the house with #8 nails spaced at certain intervals.

For interior walls, any wall that does not have internal cross bracing, must be finished with plywood that is attached with a certain gauge of nail at a certain spacing.

So, we end up with structural plywood and structural siding.

As can be seen in the above photos, the electrician has been doing a very thorough job. Everything is neatly organized in the electrical panel and clearly labeled.

As well, he installed cable protectors on every joist with a cable through it, even where code did not require it.

A small attention to detail that I really appreciate. And something the cabinet installers and the rest of the crew appreciate, too, as they all have different horror stories of driving a nail or screw through a power cable near the end of a job (suddenly, not so much the end of the job anymore as cabinets/counters must be removed to repair the damaged electrical subsystem).

This is a picture of the frame into which the tub will be installed. The marks on the wall indicate where a section of wall needs to be cut out to make the opening bigger.

Of course, the drywall guys paid no attention to the instructions given and finished right over the top of that only to have the carpenter sawz-all right through everything. More evidence that I need a sawz-all, given that it took the guy about 20 minutes to mark, verify measurements, and then cut down that chunk of wall.

Of which the drywall guys will have to refinish it.

A couple of weeks ago, our roof was mighty torn up.

Cutting through the multiple layers of roofing and creating Conduit Canals over the top, obviously the integrity of roof was basically naught.

And, of course, the first rain of the season was to be about 5 days after those torn up photos were taken!

The day before the rains came, the roofing guys came out and filled the channels with foam and then put sealant on top of the foam.

One day later?

It rained.

No leaks. Not a one.

Excellent.

While inspecting the roof, our contractor indicated that he had found something rather unexpected.

He went above and beyond and repaired a couple of the bubbles in the original foam. Quite literally, some areas of the roof had bubbles in the roofing material that were several inches high. These are fragile and animals tend to like to rip into them. Not good.

Contractor (mostly joking): “One of the bubbles had a hole in it, but was filled with some black stuff. We dug it out entirely and now I’m wondering if we shouldn’t have brought in the biohazard crew. Strangest damned mold I have seen. I think.”.

I just started laughing. That particular bubble had a hole in it and some mice had moved in. I had filled it with that expand-o-foam insulating material. I had chosen the toughest, nastiest, version I could find, the type designed to fill cracks in chimneys and insulated stove pipes.

The foam was black and did look kind of mold like. I told the contractor it was simply toxic waste and not some mutant mold from hell.

He was much reassured.

This is what the roof of an Eichler should look like. Or, at least, an Eichler with a foam roof that is a couple of years away from needing recoating.

Aside: Eichler’s, by the way, were a mid century modern design by Joseph Eichler. Mostly post and beam (though not all) with an emphasis on an open floor pan facing the outside with an open to the air atrium in the middle. Sort of Levitt-with-style for the west coast. Eichler owners get Eichler specific spam and there is an entire network of web sites devoted to Eichlers.

Fairly smooth, unbroken, sea of off-whiteness. Reflective. Waterproof. A solid roof over our heads to keep us dry, out of the sun, and warm in the winter (sort of).

Of course, being an Eichler, the roof is much more than just a shelter over the house. Since there are no unbroken walls — just windows — between the walls, almost all electrical and any re-routed plumbing ends up on the roof.

Or, more specifically, in the roof.

Thus, as of yesterday morning, my roof looked a lot like the picture at the right.

Big-ass Holes cut everywhere. Electrical conduit canals all over the place.

And wouldn’t you know it! Rain is in the forecast for as soon as tomorrow and most likely on Saturday! Awesome!

Since the original wiring wasn’t really any great shakes, any kind of a remodel — especially a kitchen remodel that involves new appliances — requires moving or replacing much of the wiring.

Which requires cutting through the roof and dropping new conduit into the walls.

“But why not just run the wires through the existing conduit?”, you ask.

Because there was no existing conduit! Instead, the original builders would simply lay the electrical wire over the roof, cover it with right angle strips of metal, and then bury the whole thing in the roof.

That is, bury it under a layer of tarpaper, then insulation, then more tarpaper, then tar and gravel over the whole thing.

Which didn’t last long and it really sucks to have a tar and gravel roof in the hot summer sun. So, most Eichler homeowners coat the roof in 3″ to 4″ of very hard foam and then seal the whole thing with a plastic material.

Once the electrician cuts through all of the layers of roofing, then it is a matter of carefully cutting and peeling back the angled sheet metal to patch into or replace the existing cables.

Fun!

I like to think of the long canals running through my roof foam as “electrical canals”.

Much of the conduit on the roof is to support lighting in new areas and to run new power from the breaker box to the other side of the house.

And there are a couple of boxes stuck through, ready for future expansion. If we ever were to do solar panels, there is a junction box ready to bring power down to near the breaker box, for example.

All of these “canals”, holes and other stuff is now filled in with foam and the whole thing is nicely sealed.

We’ll see on saturday whether or not the house still keeps water out.

Speaking of water, our hot water pipe (at left) that services the showers and sinks near the bedroom runs across the roof.

And, of course, one of the down pipes (foreground) had to be moved.

Now, who the heck would ever run a hot water pipe over their roof?!?!! Literally on top of the roof!?!?

When most Eichler’s were built, the water pipes were run through the slab directly. Along with the radiant heat.

The two are normally isolated. However, if there were any kind of direct or indirect conductive contact between the two, this would cause the pipe with new water running through it to gradually rot.

This is what happened in our Eichler to the hot water pipe. Since the radiant heat system should be sealed, the water never changes in it and, thus, the oxidizing agents in the water are very quickly neutralized; radiant heat typically does not rot unless their is a leak.

Since tearing into the slab to fix pipes is a gigantic pain in the ass, a former owner simply ran the hot water pipes over the roof. The pipe couldn’t be run along walls as there are floor to ceiling windows on all possible routes from one side of the house to the other (and no crawl space or attic)!

It works OK, save for the handful of nights in winter where it does get cold enough to freeze. I have to remember to leave the hot water at a slight trickle to prevent catastrophe.

And the birds/squirrels like to remove the insulation from the damned pipes. Actually, the squirrels will sometimes fill the insulation with nuts, if they can find a hole.

The next time I have to replace the insulation, I’ll definitely wrap the pipe in a heating blanket.

The adventures of owning a “mid-century modern home”….