yes,
Really it is unclear that the heat contractor is fault to start.
So better to leave the finger pointing out all together.
Why/where the leak (s),
First questions.
Fixable?
Livable?
Dan

The viability of litigation option varies widely by state. If your contractor is in state that has contractor regulations, the contractors will be licensed, bonded, and insured for several million dollars just to protect consumers from these sort of problems. Some regulated states have contractor boards that will resolve these problems without any need for litigation or expense. Yes, it is always best to first try to work with your contractor to get the problem fixed…and this is in fact often required in some states BEFORE you can proceed with contractor board assistance or litigation.

There is no need to throw $$$ at an attorney only to lose the case or to actually win the case but not be able to recover the judgment because the contractor isn’t good for it and skips town. There are plenty of attorneys who will gladly pursue a case for a fixed percentage of the recoverable judgment. If there isn’t any recoverable judgment, the attorney works for free and your legal cost is zero. This is often the best way to ascertain if your case has any real merit before pursuing it and to also obtain a highly motivated attorney who is well versed in how to lasso a slippery bad contractor.

There is nothing wrong in putting bad contractors out of business even if they flee the state to setup operations again in some non-regulated state. In fact, there should be consumer passion to do this and a national website to post their names and photos. There should also be consumer passion in non-regulated states to enact regulation that will give them some protection from bad contractors.

So,
How do we know this is the contractors fault?
Ok if so what contractor? The general? the tradesman? whose call on extending the apron, the cement contractor?
What about the architect? Where are the details? What happened? Oh, I know sue them all, sort it out later.

Just curious.
Dan

The nature of overhead garage doors means there will always be slab exposure to the outside. Even if it was thermally broke at the door, it would not be wise not to put in glycol but that would be the only excuse for not putting in frost protection in an area the experiences -20ºf.
The other defence would be that the contractor offered the glycol but as an option and the homeowner declined. This does not seem to be the case here.

How would you feel if you lost a job to this contractor over the price of glycol? Many homeowners shop by price alone (not saying this is the case here) so many competent trades loss jobs because the homeowner goes for the dollar.

I have no problem with putting bad contractors out of business but the easiest way to do that is for the homeowner to do their research. I would love to see a national register of scumbags but there is no guarantee that people would check it out before hiring. How much legislation do we need to protect people from themselves. Must the government do everything or are we capable of protecting ourselves?

We do NOT yet know the exact cause of this problem much less if anyone is actually at fault. Hopefully the OP will get back to us once a determination is made. What we do know is that there a surplus of unlicensed, incompetent, and unethical HVAC companies operating from unregulated states that use the internet to illegally operate into regulated states. Only consumer education and consumer action will put an end to this situation.

Put your thermal breaks directly under the garage door. That way there is nearly no exposure to the outside for the garage slab.

Of course no one is at fault, these things just happen!

Have you done a census to determine that? OP doesn't indicate his contractor was from out of state or that the internet was involved. Neither does he indicate he was unlicensed or even if a license was required.

Unlicensed doesn't mean incompetent, incompetent doesn't mean unethical.

I wonder how much more it costs homeowners to build in "regulated states". If you want cradle to grave government care, there are already enough countries that have that. Wouldn't it be easier to move there then try to change north America?
Of course there is a few less then there was ten years ago 'cause a few went bankrupt. And for those that haven't yet, your tax money is keeping some of them afloat.

Consumers have be told for years to check out their builders yet many still put more effort into pick out their electronics then their builder. Unethical contractors survive because home owner keep hiring them. It is easier and a lot cheaper to starve them out then to legislate them out. I would be happy with legislation to put people who take money and then take off without doing the work in jail or better, in stocks and pillories, in the public square. For the rest, check them out before you hire them.

Consumers have be told for years to check out their builders yet many still put more effort into pick out their electronics then their builder.

They don't know how to. Even if they did, it is too troublesome and time-consuming for most people. Most of the people I see doing independent contracting would make marginal employees at best. There may be an argument for letting them loose on consumers where they eat what they can kill as opposed to carrying them on the state disability and unemployment systems. Buyer beware, remember.

Posted By ICFHybrid on 19 Jan 2014 12:46 AM

Consumers have be told for years to check out their builders yet many still put more effort into pick out their electronics then their builder.

They don't know how to. Even if they did, it is too troublesome and time-consuming for most people. Most of the people I see doing independent contracting would make marginal employees at best. There may be an argument for letting them loose on consumers where they eat what they can kill as opposed to carrying them on the state disability and unemployment systems. Buyer beware, remember.

It brings a tear to my eye. Keep it up... Personal responsibility; what a concept.

Posted By ICFHybrid on 18 Jan 2014 07:51 PM
Put your thermal breaks directly under the garage door. That way there is nearly no exposure to the outside for the garage slab.

Exactly. No different than any FPSF. We have designed hundreds of steel buildings and pole sheds with various doors and windows including full glass, sliding and garage doors. Few have use glycol since it cost more to install, maintain and operate. With the advent of WiFi thermostats the risks are much lower than they were and we have insurance. This is a legitimate insurance claim. Get three bids to replace your radiant floor as it was installed. If you like, add glycol. If you are afraid of freezing slabs, install a radiant ceiling...and put glycol in that. My grandfather wore suspenders and a belt. He was a great old guy!

Posted By sailawayrb on 15 Jan 2014 09:08 PM
As I seem to recall Badger, you are a strong advocate of just stapling PEX to insulation. As such, I would fully expect that you have seen many of your slabs damaged by freezing water in MN. I also expect that you have seen many of your Weil-McLain boiler installations fail too.

Weil-McLain Boilers

Petty and trite, even for you. I have consulted and personally repaired many frozen PEX jobs across the the US and Canada while distributing and manufacturing radiant heating products, only one was my own snow melting application. The cause was a poor mix of glycol. I tell folks what happened and how we "fixed" it; torn out and replaced in total. In most cases the concrete slab only partially constrains the PEX and the ice forms a plug punching the cleanest little holes into the unavoidable air pockets formed in the typical slab. This will occur regardless of PEX placement.

In most cases the concrete slab only partially constrains the PEX and the ice forms a plug punching the cleanest little holes into the unavoidable air pockets formed in the typical slab.

So the mode of failure is that the PEX has a little blowout into voids in the concrete?

There are unlicensed, incompetent and unethical companies that provide HR design/installation services that cause all manner of problems. These companies also often sell HR products and thus profit from these failures too. I often wonder if these companies intentionally spread misinformation on forums like this just to cause more of these problems and further profit from it. Cold weather HR system failures should never happen. Antifreeze must be always used in any HR application that is at risk of freezing.

Garages are often heated intermittently and at lower temps than living spaces. Garages are also often not monitored as well as living spaces. As such, a garage HR system is at risk of freezing. Therefore, a garage HR system must always use antifreeze. If the garage happens to be just one zone of a larger multi-zone HR system, then only the garage zone should use antifreeze to minimize system efficiency loss caused by using antifreeze. This is accomplished by supplying the garage zone through a heat exchanger so it becomes an independent closed piping circuit. As such, the garage zone should have its own dedicated expansion tank, air separator and pressure relief valve. There should also be an aquastat installed on the primary side of the heat exchanger to ensure that the subfreezing temp hydronic fluid on the secondary side will not cause hydronic fluid freezing on the primary side. This is not just our position. It is John Sigenthaler’s position too.

How about a slab sensor? Familiar with these.
Our designs more often than not will include a Tekmar slab/air sensor.
Especially good for larger warehouse areas, the sensor unit can be set on slab sensor only and located up to 500 feet from the control T stat.
Not saying I am anti Glycol, we sell proper boiler glycol in 30&50 gallon units.
Dan

Slab sensors are basic and should be used for all HR applications. We consider any HR design/installation that does not use slab sensors to be defective. Nevertheless, there is no shortage of companies that still don’t always use them:

Slab Sensors

Yes, small voids. As for slab sensors. We rarely use them and they most certainly are not needed in most residential or light commercial applications. Nice to sell if that's what you do. Indispensable, if that's what you need. I feel some officious types who have read "the book" often refer to certain "good practices" as the gospel without really appreciating their proper application. A slab sensor certainly can't hurt, unless it is installed or set up wrong. But the added cost is seldom justified. Risk is a matter of statistical data and opinion. We do not require anti-freeze in every "garage" design and when we do, we specify the glycol for the required protection or operation criteria. Adding a complete sub-system for an attached garage is easy to specify, but much harder to pay for, often resulting in the questionable use of glycol in the entire system or the alternative gas-fired unit heater installed replacing the more expensive radiant slab. No radiant, no problem. It is one of the few areas where Ziggy and I disagree. For our systems to freeze and burst several factors would have to coincide at once, the first being homeowner neglect. The very idea that anyone would fail to specify glycol for a system "at risk" in order to sell another is absurd. To quote Ziggy: "The only good thing about anti-freeze is that it doesn't freeze." I would suggest that mine is not the only intelligence being insulted here. Is this really working for you? Does the "free design software" make up for the tiresome derision?

Garages are often heated intermittently and at lower temps than living spaces.

I'm not too surprised at that. I tried for a heated garage primarily because I will have electric vehicles in there and I wanted to keep them warm. However, I could see right away it was going to be difficult. When I ordered the garage doors, I had to work hard to get something that was even R-10, and that was clearly something the door company did not handle much. Since then I have seen offerings up to R-12 or slightly higher, but you can guess what the heat loss is out of a room that has nearly an entire side made up of "R-10" wall.
Then, there is the issue of air sealing. I don't think garage door seals have progressed very far in the last 30 years. The installers showed nearly no understanding of what the seals are for. As long as it stops the wind from whistling through, I guess. I also told them I wanted the bottom seal to go across the entire opening, to which they acted like I was crazy for implying they wouldn't cover the distance. Sure enough, when they finished, there were 2-inch gaps at both sides. They didn't bring enough seal and felt that a second trip to fill the tiny gaps was completely unreasonable. It would be interesting to do a blower door test on a garage that was otherwise well built in order to see how leaky the seals are.

Last, but not least, I got resistance on putting a thermal break across the threshold. Apparently, no one wants a "bump" when they drive into the garage. Another builder asked why I didn't just extend the garage slab outside as everyone likes that threshold to be "smooth". Facilitates sweeping? I can guess at what happens to other homes, and went to an evening party at a fine "executive" home just the other night, noting that the slab did, indeed, extend outside. That garage was heated with forced air and did not have insulated doors.

I just turned the radiant down to 59F until I can address my sealing issues, and I may even change out the doors for something with more insulation.

Agreed ICF, a HR garage always sounds nice and certainly is nice when you actually use it. However, it does struggle to pass muster with regard to ROI and practicality. As you indicated, you really need to go to great lengths to keep the operational cost from being excessive if you intend to use it a significant amount of time. Even so, you can’t avoid the stark contrast between the garage space performance and your highly insulated and sealed living space performance.

As I illustrated a while back in another post, we use the grated drainage channel approach within the heated space to provide the thermal break while allowing the garage slab to extend beyond the garage door. As you know, having this thermal break significantly reduces the garage HR operating expense. Of course, like properly designing/installing a HR garage system to ensure you don’t experience cold weather failure, all these additional details increase the overall cost of a HR garage making the ROI very difficult to justify on a purely cost basis.

While my husband spends a considerable amount of time in our garage/shop working on various vehicles, doing metal work/fabrication in our machine shop (hydroelectric crossflow turbines and water wheels), and reloading ammunition for his many rifles/shotguns, he elected to forgo the HR garage and uses electric radiant heaters like you might see in a Costco warehouse. Our garage/shop has plenty of electrical power harvested directly from our property, so this was the best option for us.

We heat many garages here in Minnesota, in many different ways. The space is usually small and fairly tight as there are fewer windows and doors than the typical house. Modern, insulated, garage doors are quite tight including properly installed and maintained seals. My own two-car garage with 2x4 walls, fiberglass insulation R11, ceiling R-30 and R-10 door is heated with 20' of fin-tube run at 140°F SWT and holding nicely at 50°F, while the ODT is steady at zero. No special attention to the 6" exposed apron and no sub-slab insulation, as the house was built in 1978. 16'x6", I get 8 sq.ft. with about the same resistance as a 2x2 single pain window.

Much ado about nothing...

We have been answering a lot frozen pipe calls for both plumbing and heating. If those folks would just fill those hundred-year-old radiators with the proper mix of propylene glycol those old radiators would NEVER freeze and we would make a lot of money selling anti-freeze. After all, with the radiator sitting right under single pain, double hung windows with sash-hangers still in place, no insulation in the walls and storms in rough shape, the heating system doesn't have to be off for long to crack a radiator, or all of them, as is often the case. Now there is an idea...but I wouldn't want anyone to think I was self-serving, or spreading false information for profit.

We installed radiant floors and snow melting for a little $800,000 addition 8 years ago. The garage was attached, as are most, and we didn't use glycol since they use there cars everyday and would certainly know if the heat had failed. 8 years; the sky is still up there.

The new shop door was installed today, R-19.4. With a thermal break this will produce a true R-19, better than most of the homes in the US. The PEX tubing for shop and office will be stapled directly directly to XPS (just like almost all of the slab systems installed in the US) and wire laid on top. No anti-freeze will be wasted on this project as the building will be tighter and the mechanical systems more reliable than any of the old houses we work on, and many of the new as well. Of course these design criteria are drawn from decades of experience, the majority of it spent in the real-ville, I mean, in the field and only a few thousand hours of reading books on the subject.

Radiant floors in residential applications has never been about ROI. The loads in a typical garage, given the lower IDT are usually very modest and the construction of most modern garage mirrors the rest of the house sans extra window, vents and leaky doors. The "performance" is more the adequate since cars don't complain. We heat our houses and cars so we will be more comfortable in cold weather.

Here is a real clue. The floor drain goes in the center of the space, either under each car or between them so the melting snow does not obstruct the door when it refreezes at the edge.

Badger, you seem to be displaying the same belligerent attitude that the OP described and indicated may have been one of the factors that created their problem. Anger, depression and hostility are not healthy and can keep a person from reaching grateful, insightful and wise on the mood elevator. There are good anger management classes that you might want to consider taking.

Most people know this, but it likely worth a reminder and repeating. Bringing and keeping cold vehicles that were wet/frozen into a heated garage is not the best thing for vehicles. The metal corrosion and rust chemical process is greatly accelerated by warm temps and high humidity. This is exactly the environment you create within every nook and granny of your vehicles when you bring wet/frozen vehicles into a heated garage. This situation is also significantly worsened if you live in a location that gets ice and snow where salt is used to address this. It is best to remove ice, snow and salt residue from vehicles BEFORE bringing them into heated garage. Obviously, this isn’t always possible or convenient, but it is something to keep in mind and consider with regard to having a heated garage or not, and how best to heat the garage if you elect to do so.

Speaking of corrosion and rusting of metal items, we have found the best product for preventing this to be Eezox. We have found that it works significantly better than other products on our firearms, cameras, etc.

Corrosion Prevention Products