Radiant Heating Repair, Done Right.
Radiant floor heat is the best-kept comfort secret in the Hill Country, warm floors, silent operation, no dust, right up until a zone goes cold and every contractor you call goes quiet. Radiant repair is loop logic, manifold work, and controls, and it can almost always be diagnosed without touching your slab or your floors. That is the part most people are relieved to hear first.
Heating · Burnet & Central Texas
No, We Do Not Have to Tear Up the Floor
The fear that keeps radiant owners from calling anyone is the jackhammer scenario: a leak somewhere under the slab and a contractor shrugging toward demolition. Real radiant diagnosis works from the mechanical room outward, and the great majority of radiant failures never involve the tubing at all. Cold zones trace to circulator pumps, zone valves, actuators, airbound loops, or control failures, all of them serviceable at the manifold and boiler without disturbing a single tile. Even genuine tubing leaks, which are rare in properly installed PEX, get located with pressure isolation and thermal imaging before anyone discusses opening anything.
The system logic is what makes radiant repair a specialty. Heat source, pump, manifold, loops, controls: a cold floor can be any link in that chain, and each failure feels identical from the living room. We isolate systematically: is the source making hot water, is the pump moving it, is the manifold distributing it, is the zone calling for it. Instruments at each stage, supply and return temperatures at the manifold telling the story loop by loop. It is methodical, it is fast in experienced hands, and it ends with the actual failure named instead of a guess.
Most radiant repairs finish the same visit: pumps, actuators, zone valves, air elimination, thermostat and control faults. The rare big one gets the honest conversation, with every alternative explored first, because we treat opening a floor as the last resort it should be.
Everything about this service gets tuned to where you live. The same failure looks different in a lakefront place at Horseshoe Bay, a nineties ranch house outside Bertram, and a five-year-old build in Leander, because humidity exposure, duct design, and equipment grade differ at each address. Ten years of radiant heating repair calls across Burnet County and the corridor mean we usually know the local pattern before the panel comes off: what the builder-grade systems in the new subdivisions do at year five, what lake air does to outdoor coils, and what a Hill Country attic does to anything asked to work inside it in August.
Heating
Radiant Failures and Their Real Causes
Cold floors have a short list of usual suspects. This is it, roughly in the order we find them.
One zone cold, rest fine
A stuck zone valve, dead actuator, or airbound loop. Fixed at the manifold, floors untouched, usually same visit.
Whole floor cold
The pump or the heat source. Circulator bearings seize, especially after the long summer idle. We measure rather than assume.
Floor lukewarm, never warm
Mixing valve trouble, scale in the exchanger, or balancing drift. The system needs tuning, never demolition.
Pressure loss on the radiant loop
Usually a manifold, valve, or fitting seep, findable and fixable. True slab leaks are rare and get located precisely before anything opens.
Rooms heating unevenly
Loop balancing at the manifold. Long loops steal from short ones until flows get set properly. A patient afternoon of adjustment cures years of annoyance.
Thermostat calls, nothing happens
Controls, transformers, or relay logic. The quiet failure with the easy fix, once someone actually traces the circuit.
Same crew, any hour.
The name is the joke, the 24-hour line is not. If this problem cannot wait, call now and the on-call tech picks up, quotes the visit straight, and rolls a stocked truck.
Why Off Duty
Why Radiant Owners Call Us
Because the alternative is grim: general HVAC outfits that see a manifold and start talking about replacing everything with ducts. Radiant is worth saving, it is arguably the best residential heat there is, and saving it just requires a shop fluent in hydronics. That fluency came down a generation here and got sharpened on the boilers, loops, and slab systems scattered through the Hill Country’s custom homes and ranch properties. When we walk into a mechanical room, the manifold layout reads like a sentence, and that literacy is most of the repair.
The same visit that fixes your zone also leaves the system healthier: loops bled, manifold flows checked, chemistry eyeballed, controls verified. Radiant systems reward that attention with decades of silence. And if your radiant is aging toward bigger decisions, source replacement, manifold rework, you get the straight multi-year picture rather than a scare quote, so the choices happen on your schedule.
The process here never changes, whether the job is radiant heating repair or a full system swap. Step one, you call (512) 925-3090 and a human answers, around the clock. Step two, we test until the real cause is proven, because parts-swapping on a hunch is how invoices grow. Step three, you get the failure, the fix, and the exact number explained to the point before we touch a thing. Step four, we do the work to spec and prove it under load before we leave. Our customers keep writing reviews about exactly this rhythm, which tells us to keep it.
A straight word on money. We do not print teaser prices on this website and we do not do surprise math on invoices. Call, describe the problem, and we will tell you what the visit costs before a truck rolls. When the diagnosis is in, you get the full repair price out loud, before the work starts, and you decide with the real number in front of you.
A word about waiting it out. Central Texas weather does not leave much grace period, and a system limping in May is a system down in July, when everyone else’s is down too and the schedule is at its tightest. The early call gets the easy appointment and, usually, the smaller invoice. The July call gets the queue. Texas rewards the prepared, and so does our schedule.
As for who shows up: this is an owner-operated shop, so the tech at your door is usually Bryce himself, a second-generation HVAC man with ten years on the tools, licensed, insured, and photographed doing exactly this kind of work in the job gallery. No commissioned salesman rides along, and nobody at this company earns a bonus for talking you into more than you need.
Coverage is the same as everything else we do: Burnet at the center, about 100 miles in every direction. That means the lake towns, Marble Falls, Kingsland, Horseshoe Bay, the corridor through Leander, Cedar Park, and Georgetown, plus Austin, Bell County, and the outer ring through Waco, San Marcos, New Braunfels, Fredericksburg, and Boerne. The full sixteen-county list lives on the service areas page, and if you sit just past the edge of it, call anyway and get an honest answer.
Diamond Contractor
Mitsubishi’s top ductless credential, earned with factory training.
Second Generation
Raised in the trade, ten years on the tools before the name went on a truck.
Warranty Authorized
JB and Mitsubishi warranty work: we file the claim, you skip the fight.
Open 24 Hours
A real person answers the phone at any hour, every day of the year.
The Standard
How This Work Gets Done Here
Here is the standard this work gets held to, spelled out. First, no guessing: the cause is proven with gauges, meters, and eyes on the actual equipment before a single part is recommended. Second, no padding: the fix that goes on the quote is the fix the system needs, sized and specced properly, with no mystery add-ons riding along. Third, no shortcuts: torque specs, code clearances, and manufacturer procedure all get followed even where nobody will ever look, because that is precisely where corners usually get cut.
And when it is done, it gets proven. Systems get run under real load, temperatures and pressures get checked against spec, and the numbers get recorded so the next visit starts from data instead of memory. You get the plain-English version of what was done and why, the workspace gets cleaned, and the price on the invoice is the price you heard before the work began. Hold us to all of it. Our neighbors in the reviews already do.
Radiant Heating Repair Questions
Asked Before We Roll a Truck
The ones the phone line hears most for this service, with the answers given at full length instead of sales-brochure length.
My floor has a cold zone. Is the tubing shot?
Almost certainly not. In-slab PEX and quality tubing fail rarely, and cold zones overwhelmingly trace to the serviceable parts: valves, actuators, pumps, air, and controls at the manifold and mechanical room. We diagnose from there outward, and the odds are strongly in favor of a repair that never touches your floor. Even when pressure testing does implicate a loop, precise location comes first, isolation plus thermal imaging, so any opening is surgical rather than exploratory. The jackhammer scenario you are dreading is the rarest outcome, and never the first move.
Can you find a leak under a slab without digging?
Yes, that is the point of doing it properly. Zone-by-zone pressure isolation tells us which loop, if any, is actually losing water. Thermal imaging then reads the heat signature through the floor and narrows the location to a small area. Only with that map in hand does anyone discuss opening anything, and the opening is a targeted patch rather than a trench. Most pressure-loss calls end even better: the leak turns out to be at the manifold or a fitting above the slab, fixed in an afternoon.
Why is one room never as warm as the others?
Loop balancing, almost always. Radiant manifolds feed loops of different lengths, and water takes the easy path: short loops run hot while long loops starve. Installers are supposed to balance flows at commissioning, and many never do, so the imbalance gets lived with for years. The fix is measurement and patient adjustment at the manifold, setting each loop’s flow so every room gets its share. No parts, no demolition, just an afternoon of tuning that usually transforms how the whole house feels.
The radiant worked fine last winter and is dead this fall. What happened?
The summer happened. Radiant systems sit idle through the long Central Texas off-season, and idleness is hard on rotating and moving parts: circulator bearings seize, zone valves stick, actuators freeze in place, air migrates into high points. The first cold snap then reveals all of it at once. Most of these wake-up failures are quick fixes, and an early-fall radiant checkup, run before you need the heat, catches them on purpose. If your system just failed its wake-up call, the repair is usually simpler than the silence suggests.
Do you work on all radiant types?
The range that exists around here, yes: in-slab hydronic fed by boilers or water heaters, staple-up systems under wood floors, radiator and baseboard hydronic loops, and the manifold hardware from the common European and domestic makers. Electric radiant mats are a different animal, we will tell you honestly if yours is one and whether we are the right shop for it. If you are unsure what you have, a photo of the mechanical room and manifold answers most of it before anyone books a visit.
Related work: Radiant Heating Installation · Boiler Repair · Boiler Maintenance · see real jobs in the gallery
Warm Floors Again, No Jackhammer
Describe the cold zone and get a straight answer from a shop that actually speaks hydronics. Prefer to write it out? Send the form and we call you back.
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