Best option to fix cracks in ceiling with radiant heat?

Question

One of friends recently purchased a house with electric radiant heat in the ceiling. Several rooms have cracks in the ceiling. Currently they are redoing the kitchen which has a large crack which is about 8 to 10 feet long. What are the best options to fix?

The ceiling is textured and they are planning a have a sample analyzed first for asbestos.

I am worried about screwing into the existing ceiling as a do not want to screw into a wire and damage the radiant heating. I don't know too much about radiant heating system in general. House was built in early 1970s.

Some options I have come up with so far:

1. Screw new boards on top of existing. I beleive this will make the existing heating less effective and I am also worried about screwing into the ceiling as mentioned earlier.

2. Fix cracks and skim coat entire ceiling.

3. Fix cracks and respray entire ceiling with texture. They don't mind the texture and could probably hire a professional to respray the ceiling to uniformity.

4. Take down and redo. I don't know if that is even feasible without damaging the existing ceiling and/or heating element(s).

Any advice would be appreciated.

Answer 1

I owned a Condo a few years ago with radiant ceiling heat, similar construction timeframe (I guess warm air fell in the '70s). We did not have any ceiling cracks, but skim coating or texturing the ceiling if you avoid screwing anything in should work fine, based on the experiences of others in our complex.

Our unit had had the heat fail in a few of the rooms, and we simply had wall heater units installed instead of trying to replace or repair the radiant heat. I don't think that the ceiling heat was worth the trouble, because at the floor, it was still always cold in winter, given that we had a ground-floor unit and weren't getting the benefit of someone else's ceiling heat.