I live in an apartment and have baseboard heaters that are heated by hot water running through them. At the bottom of the heaters are long, brass (I think) bars that run the length of the heaters. One bar has slipped out of the brackets that hold it up and so now it’s sitting on the carpet.
Can I lift it back into its spot or will I end up electrocuted?
I doubt it, but why take a chance? Flip the breaker for the heater and move it to your heart’s content.
Yeah, I guess I could do that :smack:
How can you get electrocuted by hot water?
Personally, I think that one of the benefits of living in an apartment is letting management deal with things like that.
Some baseboard heaters have just the heating element some others have the heating element and the return pipe. What you’re looking at is probably the return pipe so it’s unlikely that it will electrocute you.
Well it’s been an hour, I think it’s safe to assume our dear FloatyGimpy is no longer with us. Who’s going to be the first to say some words about him?
I didn’t do it yet. I have to move the budgie cages away from the heater first so I can get in behind there and I’m still in my pajamas eating a bowl of cereal.
So not dead, just lazy.
It sounds like you are describing a hot water baseboard as opposed to an electric baseboard. IF that is correct, just lift up the pipe and replace it in the holding bracket.
If it’s electric, call the landlord unless you know with absolute dead certainty how to kill the power.
Can you post a photo?
Yeah sure I’ll take one right now. I’ll post it in a minute.
Picture:
**Gimpy **died, like so many young men of this generation, before his time - like the bright, flowering young men who died, face down in the muck, in Khe San and Hill 364. Gimpy, who loved to bowl. In Your wisdom, Lord, You took him from us.
And so, Floaty Gimpy Karabatsos, in accordance with what may very well have been his dying wishes, we commit his ashes to the bosom of the Pacific Ocean, which you loved so well.
Good night, sweet Gimp
It looks like just a water pipe, so yeah, you can move it.
Usually pipes like that don’t move without a leak though - the pipe is rigid. I’m not sure what was supposed to be holding it.
Actually, I think he’s just pining for the fjords.
sniff
Well, OK, I’m baffled by the photo. I see a copper (not brass) pipe, and some kind of heat transfer fins on something partly hidden above it, and some wires.
I think baseboard heat sources would be either hot water, or electrical, but not both. That pipe is not the thing releasing heat into the room; whatever has fins on it just above is what releases the heat into the room. I guess there could be copper pipes going both ways, the upper one with fins to release the heat and the lower one to bring the water back so that (for whatever reason) the plumbing enters and leaves the scene in two adjacent locations.
The wire is baffling, if it is serving an electrical function. But you’re not going to have loose wires like that in any typical heater. Could the wires have been placed there for a mechanical purpose, such as to hold up the non-finned copper pipe? Maybe they fell apart and dropped the pipe and became visible for that reason?
In any case, if it were in my house, I think I would look at the ends to try to figure out what is connected to what, and fiddle with the wires to see if they are just there as a tie, but unless I saw something surprising I would feel free to grab the copper pipe (just poking it once first to see if it was hot enough to burn).
I really need some closure on this one - it seems like I’ve been watching it forever
the wire could easily be a thermocouple or temperature sensor - or it could go to a solenoid that ‘turns on’ the hot water flow for that baseboard based on signal from a thermostat
that pipe is there because when they installed it, one of the plumbers had that left over from something he recently installed and couldn’t think of any good use for it, so he just tucked it under the baseboard hoping that by the time anyone found it, he would only be a faint, vague memory
Ok, I’m going to touch the pipe.
I touched it. I didn’t die, it is quite hot. I guess I should turn the heat off so it cools down, then lift it back into the brackets?
You’re scaring me man.