cost to replace in floor radiant heating system?

[Clarence Martin]

What is the average cost to replace an in floor radiant heating system. 40 + years old. Metal piping and layed in concrete slab floor. This would be for the whole ranch house. Sulphur well water has clogged up the pipes.

[Jay Jolliffe]

It may be cheaper if you have a cellar to put it under the floor instead of removing the cement which would be a big job...cost no Idea. I installed my own Pex
tubing & had Gypcrete pumped in over it.

[Kevin Bourque]

It would be much cheaper to change to baseboard heat. Tearing up the concrete floor and repairing the damage will cost a fortune.

[Dan Hintz]

There's nothing you can pump through the pipes to break up the sulphur?

[Jamie Buxton]

In this area, there were lots of houses built in the fifties with heating in the slab. Most of those systems have failed. The usual fix is to change over to forced-air heat. Apparently repair of the in-slab stuff is prohibitive. Usually the ducts are inside insulated chases outside the original building.

[Jim Becker]

I agree with Jamie...a lot of the Levittown PA houses were built with in-slab radiant heating and once it "goes", everything gets switch either to baseboard hydronic or forced air heat-pumps. Trying to fix it in the slab would be prohibitively expensive, not to mention a "pain in the posterior". Some homes sometimes get mini-splits to avoid the ductwork

[Jim Matthews]

+1 on the baseboard retrofit.

If they used copper in the slab, you're dealing with more than accretion of salts
you're also dealing with corrosion. I would SWAG that if you can dissolve the
deposits with something like CLR (http://www.grainger.com/Grainger/CLR-Cleaner-4LEY3?gclid=CKeflOyq-7gCFdAWMgodJksAlg&cm_mmc=PPC:GooglePLA-_-Cleaning-_-Chemicals-_-4LEY3&ci_src=17588969&ci_sku=4LEY3&ef_id=UfRlRAAABMYvmTOy:20130813211100:s), you'll also find the pinholes forming around them.

My folks had a similar problem with radiant heating in the slab and investigated recoating the inside of a pipe with epoxy.
http://www.americanleakdetection.com/tx-dallas/epipe

It was MUCH cheaper to stub out and drain the radiant zone before replacing it with baseboards.