Used and abused OWB with pic's. Is it salvagable?

[Gotburned!]

Look very closely at the corrugated black tubing. It may be, and very likely is, drain tile, which will be full of holes because it is meant for draining groundwater out of an area. If they cheaped out at install and bought that, it was probably a tenth (or less) of the cost of proper boiler piping.

I bought my current home about 8 years ago. It had a used and abused boiler about 75' away from the house, with corrugated drain tile that had blue-wrapped pex lines inside it, run about 7' underground. It worked fine the first couple years. Eventually the protection they had put in the ground above the drain tile (basically sheets of styrofoam) failed. At that point the whole in the wall in the basement where the boiler line came in became a drain for all the groundwater in my backyard as snow melted. Water poured into the basement. I spent about 2 weeks awake nearly 24/7 swapping out 5 gallon buckets I had set up under the incoming line to collect the water, with a bucket filling roughly every 30 minutes until the yard was mostly dry, and after that I still had to check it once every few hours until snowmelt was finished.

If that's drain tile, it's gonna fail, no matter what they may have done to protect it with sprayfoam or anything else. When it fails you're going to have a really bad time. It's not just about the heat loss but about that ticking time bomb.

It's solid tubing. It's the same stuff one would use to run a gutter into the ground, to control roof water & get it away from the house. I used it for that purpose in my last house and the builders of this house also used it for that purpose.

 

[maple1]

Even if it is solid tubing, what is inside it is most likely junk. Anything except closed cell foam the entire length will absorb water over time then there goes your heat, into the ground.