Is it possible that central heating pipes are concealed in the wall?

[Movinghouseatlast]

All our central heating pipes, leading from the boiler, in our kitchen run along the wall.

The dining room is next door, and the radiator there has pipes coming out of the wall just above the skirting board which the radiator attached to. The floor is solid concrete and we have just put engineered oak on top..

I have suddenly panicked that we shouldn't have had this floor put down, as if we had a leak the boards would have to come up. We had a leak at Christmas in another room.

Is the fact that the pipes don't seem to come up from the floor a good thing? Thanks.

Mmm there's only two options I can think of if under the floor isnt an option - theyre 'boxed in' - i.e put up panelling to hide them sandwiching them between the panel and the wall. Or you'd have to 'chase' the wall - dig out a channel along the wall and they sit inside the channel which is then covered over again. How high up the wall is the pipes?

In the kitchen they are waist height and not even boxed in.

In the dining room the pipes come out just above the skirting board. There is no boxing in.

I have to add that everything in this house is bodged and on the cheap.

I have to add that everything in this house is bodged and on the cheap.

I feel your pain - we've had to undo a lot of bodged work on ours too 🤪

Iirc SIL used to have similar in a house she used to have and she hated them as well. Seeing as its waist height they could possibly be hidden with tongue and groove decorative cladding like pic attached but the depth would be bigger than shown.

Also could do this.

Ours are horrid microbore (tiny weak 8mm copper pipes, which I'm expecting to start springing corrosion leaks all around the house simultaneously one Christmas in the near future!), and are hidden mostly behind skirting and sometimes under the floorboards. They present to the radiators through badly chopped holes in the top of the skirting.

So, yeah, could be.

We had microbore in the house when we bought it. A totally useless system. The wall got hot, sometimes made a noise and the plaster cracked.
Last year we had a completely new, conventional system put in. As we have solid floors on the ground floor we had to have a couple of exposed pipes, which are boxed in. I’d rather have that than bursts under the plaster.

So it is possible that there are no pipes underneath the floor then? I am really hoping so.

My partner has just told me that the boiler is losing pressure. I'm away for work. It is bloody typical.

Oh you too!
Our boiler was loosing pressure during the cold weather but seems to have stopped since it got warmer. Plumber has checked and nothing leaking upstairs so must be down stairs. We have microbore pipes set in the concrete floor- heating firm suggesting thermal imaging.
Wretched builder.

If you can account for all the pipes leading from the main cold water pipe and boiler and you can follow them from source to each radiator along the wall then I'd assume there wouldn't be any under the concrete floor. Don't quote me on this though! 🙈

Could the pipes be coming through the wall from the kitchen? We had that in one place- rads on either side of the wall, pipes coming to one side then going through the wall, then back. (I think the second rad was a later addition...)