Cob Hot water pipes in cob walls?

[Ersson Family]

Dear Mike,
Your comments about consensus notwithstanding, I plan to place my heating
pipes for our family's straw bale house with cob/earthen plaster finish in
the perimeter wall with probably 3/4" copper pipe. My thinking is that this
will be much easier than floor imbedded pipes, and equally as effective. We
will likely employ a normal domestic natural gas or propane fired hot water
heater and a small circulation pump. Admittedly, I have no prior experience
in such an installation. In the unlikely event that they do spring a leak
in the future, this would be much easier to confirm and repair than pipes
in a floor.
The only real question for me is whether it will be better to use the same
kind of plastic piping normally used in floors rather than copper. Once the
cob/plaster finish is dry I won't be too worried about cracking.
If you have information about real experiences that turned into disasters
using this method, please share it with the list.
Regards, Ole Ersson

At 10:55 PM 12/13/98 -0800, you wrote:
>Well, the general concensus is: Asolutely Not!
>
>Makes sense, too, since they would likely spring a leak at some point in
their
>life. I'm sure that you could make such a system work by carefully designing
>your walls, but it's probably not worth the hassle, & no matter how well
>designed, there's still a chance of it failing.
>
>Oh, well... It was a nice try.
>
>Mike
>
>mpayson at eskimo.com wrote:
>
>> I'm curious... It seems that an easy way to distribute heat throughout a
cob
>> house would be to run metal water pipes through the walls, & centrally heat
>> the water in a fireplace. Obviously, there are logistical things to be
>> considered, but in general, would this work? You'd need a lot of pipe, but
>> my main concern would be that the pipe would expand when heated, possibly
>> cracking the wall...
>>
>> I'm just curious if anyone has tried this or anything like it?

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experiments in sustainable urban living: rainwater harvesting, strawbale
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