Removing radiators to decorate behind them . . . . any plumbers out there?

[Notquitegrownup]

We made a huge mistake, I think, in getting our central heating put in ten years ago, and not stripping the old wall paper off/redecorating first. I now want to get behind them, but the plumber used quarter inch piping - easier for him to feed through when installing, but is it really safe to lift off radiators to redecorate, when there is only a quarter inch pipe which will be bent/strained once the radiator is off the wall? Am I going to end up with an expensive plumbers bill, if we try to get access behind the radiators, or can we just lift them off and lean them forward on something, whilst we decorate?

We did it once on fil's suggestion - ended up with horrid black stains on the carpet and couldn't align it properly afterwards so had a leak and called out a plumber. Turned out he'd never actually done it that way himself ...

Have you tought about just painting the walls and getting a Radiator Roller to do behind the radiators so you do not have to move them at all?

We've had to replaster most of our house and in a couple rooms we failed to get the radiators off first so the plasterer had to work round them. It really bugs me as it looks so bodged! I think we're going to end up getting radiator covers as a compromise, though I'm not convinced they look that stylish.

don't you need to drain the system before removing a radiator? My dad always does it for us as dh not got a clue!

No, you can just shut off the valve and cap them, ideally. The valves on ours were bust though, so dh didn't fancy capping them "live" as it were.

Tip from my uncle is to plug each end of the rad when you've disconnected it, that stops the sludge from running out as you move it.

I've never removed radiators when decorating. If you paint behind them with a brush as far as you can, it will normally be as far as the eye can see, so no need to remove them.

We used our recent renovations as an excuse to replace most of our radiators. Gone are the big white monstrosities and we have nice anthracite modern ones that bang out heat.

I've always managed to decorate behind radiators without removing them, including papering. There are loads of handy tools available to help you. As a previous pp says, you can't see all the way down the back anyway. I always manage to paper or paint enough down the back and in at the sides for it to look fine. If you fiddle you can probably get at least half way down from the top and a quarter of the way in from the sides, that really should be sufficient. It is not really cost effective to remove radiators when you simply want to decorate.