Radiators....Not the truck kind, the house kind...

We have baseboard radiators and one of the ones in the partially finished basement has started leaking. I'm pretty good with most plumbing, but the high efficiency boiler scares the living daylights out of me.

I've opted to call a plumber out to give me an estimate on replacing all 3 in the basement, but does anyone have a rough guess on what it's going to cost? Two of them are 6' and one is 8'.

 

Hot water baseboard? Where is it leaking?
I sweated all the copper in my house, but I know many people who swear by "sharkbite" or similar solderless fittings.
Since it's summer, maybe look into it and save yourself a couple bucks.

Good luck

 

Yep, hot water baseboard. It looks to be leaking from a bleeder valve, but the access cover is rusted up after 70 years in a damp basement. I've had decent luck when it comes to sweating copper and replaced the electric water heater in our last house twice, so I might just watch the plumber replace the leaky one see what's involved in swapping the leaky one and try the other two myself.

The fancy electronic boiler is usually pretty quick to throw errors and beep at me if I even look in it's general direction, so I get nervous messing with radiators. I tried to turn back the flow control on the bedroom zone, one time, and the LCD screen flashed errors and beeped for two weeks. The master bedroom is still 10 degrees warmer than the rest of the house during winter months.......

 

My furnace is really old but still runs well. I am dreading the day we need to get a new one, all I hear is how temperamental the high efficiency electronic units are.

Well, plumbers gotta eat too, sorry I couldn't help.

 

The "new" house is almost 700 sqft bigger than the "old" house and our utility bill is roughly the same during the winter, so that's saying something. The summer though is a real bear though, since the house didn't originally have AC and the retrofit duct work and air handler are in the attic.

I wanted to build a new house, my wife wanted a fixer upper, so we compromised and got a 50's ranch that needed lots of work.

 

Not that anyone is interested, but the whole ordeal ended up costing me $100. The plumber bled the radiator and re-sweat the union that connected it to the 1" copper and I spray painted the radiator cover with some black textured enamel.

A one bathroom house sucks, so the next item of business is framing out some walls and building a "real" bathroom around the "pittsburg toilet and shower" that we have in the basement. The tricky part is going to be how to finish the two concrete walls.

I'm damn good with tile, so subway tile seems like the logical choice, but I don't get the warm and fuzzies about tiling over the concrete and our recent foundation repair is going to make that difficult.