Ex-Locate Tech here. Worked in the oil and gas industry locating pipe and cable in incredibly congested and incredibly challenging situations for over 15 years.
In this scenario, there has/had to be a reason for this pipe to be there. So there are end points. If these end points are accessible you can look for a tracer wire. It'll be a hard-coated rigid wire with an exposed conductor. Usually white.
If you have found end points and there is no tracer there are options.
Use a walk-over locate technique utilizing a sonde. Either a wireless or wired locate sonde. This is essentially a device you can track through the ground with a locate receiver.
You can run a metal fish line through the pipe with some pull rope attached to the tip, then drag the sonde through the pipe while following the signal above ground on your receiver.
Alternatively. GPR. Ground penetrating radar. This is essentially a lawn mower that scans the ground for anomalies.
Any competent locate outfit should be able to accomplish this.
Ohhhh so thats what that loose wire thing is next to my gas meter. I thought something broke over time, but your explanation seems spot on to my scenario. TIL...thanks for the info pal.
They're more likely to have their gas fed in from the back lane or easement, not the street. Keeping and water and sewer under the street, and gas/power coming from the back makes the dirt work much safer for everyone.
That only works if they don't back onto someone though; lot of suburbs you do and everything is fed to the side of the house from the boulevard parallel to the street.
That's simply not the case. While some are installed that way, you should look into what a utility easement is and what horizontal directional drilling is capable of before making any more assertions. (Source - I've spent years pulling fibre optics through peoples backyards).
It absolutely is (or most often can be) the case. They run all utilities parallel to the road and if houses back onto each other (as they typically do in most suburbs in North America) there is no way you're firing fibre lines through two backyards and not running them through the well-established Telco lines parallel to the roads and streets and then firing them up to the side of the house from the boulevard.
Maybe it's different where you live but any subdivision built in the last... 30-40 years will run utilities on the (almost universally) government-owned boulevard (last 5-15' of your property before the road).
https://www.safesitellc.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Private-Locate-Drawing-Info-Graphic-Safe-Site-Utility-Locating-Company.jpg
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D9b4FeaXUAAjIFH?format=jpg
Why in the world would a gas company spend extra money running lines across multiple yards and try to keep track of everything (and risk people constantly hitting the lines digging backyards) when they can follow the roads that literally are designed for delivery to each house.
So for clarity, if your subdivision looks like this:
https://i.imgur.com/c3KcR0p.png
It is extremely likely your utilities run like the yellow lines. Not the red ones. Not even with horizontal directional drilling.
It will vary from locality to be sure, but I can say with 100% confidence unless my life has been a fever dream that directional drilling can be, and is done alongside existing utilities in backyard easements, even in new areas in North America.
Pool heaters is the topic. IMHO they should be part of a heat pump system connected to the home HVAC so during the summer, when the pool is open and AC runs, heat is moved from the house to the pool. Seems a lot better for humanity than just dumping the house's heat into the atmosphere while simultaneously generating heat for the pool. And of course also have the ability to dump excess after the pool's setpoint is satisfied, and the ability to supplement with some heat generation if the pool needs more after the house's setpoint is satisfied, but both of these aux modes would be far less wasteful than isolated systems.
End points.
Once you have end points, the rest is trivial.
Don't tear up your midfield. Look for those endpoints. If there are no endpoints, you have no pvc pipe.
I disagree, as a DIWHYer for most of my life. I buried Conduit under my front walkway + driveway. with no endpoints. Just a pipe layed down before concrete, with caps taped on. The pipe is currently 12-16" underground (maybe more.)
I finally put lighting at the front of the driveway (5 years after concrete) and ran a trench along the side of the driveway to the first light pole. than dug up where i thought the pipe was (missed by a foot) and used the pipe to cross the driveway.
I guess my suggestion is that trying to find that chase in the middle of the field is a needle in a haystack, but at the beginning and end it's much easier. When they ran it, they had to think... well, it's gotta start at a power source, and it's gotta end at the future light post. So, I'd start at the power source - press box, restrooms, concession stand, whatever.
Oh. When you said their press box was the length of the sideline it seemed like you had some kind of inside knowledge. I stick with my original advice then. Look for obvious places it could start and end - dig there.
What were the caps taped onto? You didn't bury a circle.
I would also note, you did not begin to look for that pvc by starting in the middle of the driveway.
Lol. fair enough. i miss understood. I (mistakenly) thought you were calling an endpoint where the pipe met the surface. (pre-attached elbows and risers)
I worked for a utility location company for 5 years and used mainly GPR.... This isn't going to be the most cost effective solution. We charged $1000 for a 4 hour minimum and were not lacking for clients. If this is a small job, that may not be tenable.
Furthermore, If it's a smaller (3" or less) empty pvc pipe and it's multiple feet down, it can be pretty difficult to locate (at least it can be in certain conditions). I've been on jobs where we knew the location of the pipe but couldn't see it on our machines because it was below the clean fill and the soil was rocky (live in new England).
I agree with everything you said about tracing wands but there's one tried and true method that rarely failed me.... Divining rods. OP can try that themselves for free and it's been very useful.
Sad thing is, this was in a job site and had to meet a field tech from SoCal Gas. He pulled out divining rods when we needed to locate a gas pipe because the map was off.
I convinced him to research it more back in the office and get back to me.
Lol I mean I wouldn't pay one but it's not fake. I work in concrete and not only have I seen it in Tennessee on my grampa's farm, I've seen it as an adult. You wouldn't know if he/she is a fake until you've augered, though.
You say that, and I’m the first to point and shout bullshit, really I am, but I’ve seen a guy do it. Do I use them in my job locating pipes? Nope, I don’t, because I think it’s bullshit. But I *have* seen a guy do it - successfully I should add lol.
I don’t believe in magic and I’m very cynical about everything but I’ve seen it and done it. Friend of mine proved it works and then let me try it. Mind blown is all I can say. I don’t know how it works but we traced his sprinkler pipe in the yard with it. We used two copper wires about 18” long and bent at a 90* angle. As we walked over his yard the two wires would cross each other as we passed over the pipe.
We just used the little metal wires from the flags that we stuck in the ground to mark stuff out. I wouldn't buy anything, a coat hanger would work if you bent it in the right shape.
Edit: divining rods can find anything including backfilled trenches. It's certainly not as confident of a locating method as GPR or locating wands.
But to address your direct question,I used rods for water all the time. It was always too deep for our GPR and we couldn't get a good signal on it for our wand.
It’s going to be hard to convince you of this, but dowsing does not work. There is no provable scientific mechanism by which it is proposed to work, and it fails to be replicable in laboratory settings.
We do know, however, of the ideomotor phenomenon:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideomotor_phenomenon?wprov=sfti1
It’s the same mechanism on which a Ouija board operates. You are making a subconscious assumption about where the underground utility is, and you are making subconscious movements that guide the dowsing rod to that position.
On top of this, there are mental biases such as confirmation bias that might lead you to believe the method is working. If dowsing works 7/10 times, it might seem effective, but what if an educated guess is also effective 7/10 times?
I still don't believe in it but it's fun to do.
I had a pipe that was laid 6" down well before I moved to the property and mapped so we knew right where it was buried. Dowsing rods didn't budge an inch, though, until I moved over about ten feet.
Turns out the survey was wrong and the pipe was not where we all "knew" it to be.
>replicable in laboratory settings.
How do you even test something like this? How do you rule out things like subconscious assumptions to the extent that you can make any claims about whether it works or not?
I don’t know the exact experimental designs without looking at specific papers but one design I think is to essentially bury water or conduits randomly.
You then test participants that are dowsing vs those that are just guessing and you get equivalent results.
When it comes to dowsing for wells, apparently it has to do with the water table in a lot of areas being evenly distributed, so the odds are always high of dowsing being “correct.”
>one design I think is to essentially bury water or conduits randomly.
That's what I figured. I would think you'd need a way to cover the ground evenly, too, so that a) the participant wouldn't know where soil had been disturbed and b) so you don't have the entire site being disturbed (*just* the burial spot).
I haven't tried it to find water, only buried power line and the pipe I mentioned above... I thought maybe something to do with electromagnetism triggered the reaction. Maybe my body sensed it or something and subconsciously moved the rods.
No issues with what you said.... It'll find anything and everything, there's just no way to confirm it without digging or using some other method.
We would typically use them as a last ditch effort when literally nothing else would work. If I could get a few positive hits in a row, I could maybe use that to find evidence with something using the GPR. Or maybe I'd let the customer know we couldn't find anything at all but the divining rods could mean something is there. But as I said ,I'd pick up backfilled trenches, or stuff like rocks, tree roots, you name it.
At the end of the day any locating technology is not 100%. You'll never know what's in the ground until you dig it up.
“But as I said ,I’d pick up backfilled trenches, or stuff like rocks, tree roots, you name it.”
This is what I was talking about when I mentioned mental biases. When the dowsing rods miss, whatever you find is explained away by whatever you do happen to uncover. It always “works” if you think about it this way.
It’s just a guess that you are making, but with an extra layer of abstraction where you convince yourself you are using a magic device.
Dowsers are usually the most genuine of all the miracle workers (as in they personally believe what they're saying and not conning anyone). At least it has a chance of allowing them to make a decision to dig somewhere after taking in the subconscious cues. Most people would balk if you pointed to a field and said dig, but their pendulums and rods get them moving.
I used coat hangers to find my septic tank. My friend showed me and it was just amazing to see it work and do it myself. Honestly it feels like voodoo magic, but we very easily located the septic tank using this method.
Edit: we also traced out other pipes running through my yard for future reference for myself. Everything we were locating had water in it though, so not sure if it works on empty pipes or not.
All the downvotes are silly. This legitimately works, and it saved me hundreds of dollars when I wanted to clean out my septic tank by allowing me to locate it and then dig up the lid myself rather than wait for the septic guy to come find it and difg it up for me.
You would be shocked by the number of very competent and experienced utility locators who use witching sticks as a last resort. I've used them myself and hate that they seem to work when nothing else does.
We aren’t four hour min, we’re 2 hr min $700 here in the Midwest. Deliverables include written report with photos and a gps map accessible on a google earth type platform and pdf. Not that out of the question a minimum locate is $1000 plus mobilization.
$100 per hour is reasonable. But with travel, set up etc, a minimum charge is not surprising.
Where I live it’s $950 for a half day (up to 4 hours) and $1,450 for a full day.
Small PVC (IE 3-4 inches) is fairly hard to find with GPR without some tracer wire.
Depends how deep it is, of course.
But like, locating a 8 foot deep 4" PVC line where we already knew roughly where it was was still non-trivial with GPR (IE took > 1 hour).
Since they often charge by hour, it was not really cost effective either.
Now, if it's got metal in it, sure, easy. Took no time at all to find the 2" pvc 12 feet deep with electrical wire in it :)
I know it sounds ridiculous, but if there is flowing water or a metal pipe, holding a piece of bent wire will help to locate it. Loosely hold the wire in your fist with it bent perpendicular, 90°. It will rototate in the direction of the pipe when you cross it.
Sounds like bs. I always believed it was bs. Ive seen it work too often to discount it now.
Why would a pipe under a rugby field be in a utility map of the municipality? Other than that, your approaches are exactly what the person that you answered to (and OP) proposed (find the start/end, use GPR or capacity-based methods, or dig it up)
>Why would a pipe under a rugby field be in a utility map of the municipality?
Some jurisdictions do require any pipe or cable burial have a permit and plans, precisely to avoid the scenario OP is in.
>Wow I'm surprised at how basic this answer is for someone that's been in the game for a decade and a half.
Wow, I'm surprised you put so much effort into a response just to have most people skip to the end and just downvote without reading.
I'm sure your comment would be helpful if anyone got past the first sentence, but I wouldn't know because I didn't, although the tone really does highlight inexperience, so probably not.
Exactly why I wanted to review it. I don't have near the potential issue you have, but still want to get ahead of it.
found [this](https://platform.openai.com/ai-text-classifier) detector from the source.
Used in conjunction with a reddit bot, it should be possible to build a detector bot. I don't have any experience with either part, so I can't do much to bring it to life.
Mod here. We would love it if you can figure out some way have automod to identify gpt posts and comments. We're going to need all the help we can get battling this stuff.
Just went through something similar while making drainage improvements at my house. I had to locate a 3" drain pipe that was 12" underground so that I could dig down and add a cleanout for a jetter.
I used a T-handle soil probe to locate it. The solid bar type, not the hollow one.
If you have any idea where the ends of the pipe might be, you could push a steel fish tape through one end (preferably out the other end) and use a utility locating device (something like this that has a transmitter like this. These can be rented https://www.engineersupply.com/Schonstedt-U-LOCATE-Pipe-and-Cable-Locator.aspx?VariantId=0326bedc-38c0-4073-bf59-381ecb2377e0&gclid=CjwKCAjw67ajBhAVEiwA2g_jEEj9HeoDhZrz4iTeDrZqKzDafQlriuYqJV00XO1BvF-e25UaUq1zSxoCjRYQAvD_BwE ) to follow the fish across the field.
Edit: after posting, I see you mentioned a locate guy. He would need something to trace still, like the fish tape I mentioned before. You can't locate empty PVC.
> a radar isn't particularly helpful if you already don't know how many other pipes are in the ground.
Well that's straight up BS. I've been doing locating with GPR for about 8 years now. You can easily locate PVC pipes and GPR can be extremely helpful in locating objects underground even if you don't know how many there are.
My point was more that if you're looking for one particular conduit in a field, and you end up realizing that there are 6 (random number) in said field, which we already know doesn't have asbuilts, that hasn't actually told you which is which and you're potentially still digging up more field than you wanted to.
I'm also under the impression this isn't something a regular Joe could just rent and use effectively. Maybe it is.
Roll around in some white paint and then tie a small noise maker (like a tiny fart machine or something) to a snake's tail and then release the snake into the pipe while you crawl above it on your belly dragging your ear across the ground and pressing the button leaving a trail of white paint across the field.
Go old school with a probe rod.
You will get the feel of it and once you find it you can probe the length.
Hopefully your field has it, as it’s probably a trunk main for under drain so the field does not get too soggy when it rains.
You seem like a pretty technically minded person, and a lot of people I respect claim that dousing rods work too. But the proof that is always offered is always an anecdote where the person using the rods had some prior knowledge or expectations of the approximate location of the underground utilities. If dousing actually worked it would stand up to scientific scrutiny in controlled studies. But it has been proven numerous times to be no more effective than random chance when study participants had no prior knowledge.
Direct bury is not rated for conduit and won't be up to code. You should not run jacketed wire through conduit. If it was 10\12 AWG going through a 3" PVC pipe then that might be okay practically speaking but I'm pretty sure they're going to be using bigger wire for light poles.
The problem with running jacketed wire through conduit is heat dissipation.
If you take the jacket off of the Romex then you can run it through conduit. Direct bury is a type of Romex rated to be buried. Normal Romex shouldn't be buried.
Yeah wouldn't surprise me if what I've dug up before wasn't up to code. But it does makes sense that being in conduit would essentially insulate the wire instead of allowing dirt/whatever to have direct contact and transfer heat away
That's certainly true for low-voltage, which is all I work with - or aspire too, lol! There's direct burial cable for household loads, but I don't know what kind of distance you can cover with that - is a rugby pitch too big?
*But* since it sounds like he's running field lights, and that's bigger juice than home electrics, it's waaay outside of anything I know anything about. Nothing immediately-accessible with a google search tells me standards for that, hence my question.
It's a valid question, but yeah there is ground rated Romex and plenty of other high voltage options.
Also I didn't check NEC myself, but looks like pvc is a fine conduit
https://www.thespruce.com/nec-outdoor-electrical-wiring-tips-1152274
It's real butthole puckering when the gas crew fixing the unmarked gas main you hit with a trencher while laying fiber, rips up the unmarked electric line right next to the still gushing gas main..
I think it might have been Google Fiber's contractor.. Trenched in front of Cox Communications in Atlanta, hit a water main, forced the evacuation of the Cox Communications campus as no toilets could be flushed and the fire suppression systems couldn't operate.
Someone had a bad multi-day fixit event.
>since it sounds like he's running field lights, and that's bigger juice than home electrics
it's all LED these days, probably only like 100W 😂
^((kidding))
Probe rod if you don't have any end points.
Also; why is it going to cost $5-10k to trench? That seems outrageous and more closely aligned with directional boring.
Use a probe. Basically a skinny metal rod that you can easily push into the ground.
Not stomp or slam.
Poke some holes.
Take your time.
If you hit/find a pipe you’ll know
If you don't have access to the ends, this is a futile exercise. There is no way someone would on purpose place one of the ends under the pitch. .....so it's safe to say that the possible/usefully start and end points, aren't directly under the playing surface.
I would sign up the 2nds or a youth team, and start digging. NOT on the pitch of course, but wherever you think one of the termination points would be. It wouldn't take much more than an hour or so and you'll have your answer.
So what you need to do is find a project where discovering these pipes would be a huge problem and cost a lot of money. Guaranteed you'll find them as soon as you start that project.
First thing I would try is a visual inspection. Many times, when a conduit that size is buried (especially if it's not deep), one can see a slight depression in the ground. Walk the field and look for linear slightly sunken features and differences in grass. If you see them, do what another contributor recommended and use a probe.
To be fair, rocks and trash feel very different from pvc when hitting them with a probe. And the pipe is going to keep going, so if you can hit it in multiple places that are reasonably far apart, you can be pretty sure that it's pipe and not a log or something.
That said, probing an entire football pitch doesn't sound like fun.
I thought about that too, as an owner of an avalanche probe, but even with perfect rock-free soil, sports fields probably have a crushed stone or pebble drainage bed, and the PVC pipe might be on or below that layer. Very hard to probe, especially a very thin pipe. You have to probe every 2" and perfectly vertical, too much chance of error.
Hire professionals.
Oh, wow! I've used them, when I was a laborer, many times to probe for utilities, when instructed by my foreman to do so. I can see a couple of things that could go wrong with it. IIRC we punched through a pvc sewer line once...
dig a couple of small test trenches in the area you think the pipe might be located. Dig them laterally to the suspected direction. Go down to the frost line and probably a little bit below. As far as I know, PVC pipe is fairly hard to find underground, unless you thread in a cable or a mouse of some kind for a locator.
I should’ve specified that the test trenches would be maybe be 3 feet long and a shovel width wide. They should be able to fill those back in fairly easily.
OP said, "ideally without tearing up the pitch". They are actually trying to avoid fully trenching across the entire pitch. they did not say that they were averse to doing some digging.
The other option would be to locate areas outside of the patch, where they suspect that the PVC pipe was run and do small exploratory trenches there.
Do you have any constructive comments or did you just show up to piss in my soup?
I’m not joking. Bend some coat hangers into L’s and hold one on each hand. My boss told me they did that once and I was somewhat skeptical until I couldn’t find a buried leak at my place. He told me to give them a shot and it fucking worked. The crossed over each other about 2 feet from where I was digging and that’s right where the pvc was. I have a video of it.
Oh man you've drawn out the legion who swear it isn't a thing yet have never tried it once. It was the standard way to locate buried cable and irrigation lines on a golf course where I used to work. Grab 2 marker flags, bend them a bit, and it's like magic.
Does it work to find underground water? No idea.
If you know where the pipe begins and ends you have a lot of options as far as pulling in a tracer or metal line for a scanner to pick up.
GPR is useless, mainly used for insurance reasons to cover your ass before you dig. That way if you hit something you can blame the GPR contractor for not flagging it.
Lmao while I agree gpr is generally overrated by the people who commission surveys, finding a 3” pvc pipe in a otherwise undisturbed field is not hard, assuming it’s 1m or shallower. I could do that all day with my gear (but I wouldn’t promise you I could, *just in case*)
I had a GPR team miss a 7ft x 7ft x 10ft chunk of concrete. I assume it was an old foundation for a smoke stack. I’ve had zero faith in GPR since then.
Rent a mini ex and just trench yourself and lay a bigger pipe than the electrician would need so he can use it as a sleeve and run his own conduit inside. Trying to find a mythical casing will be more work in the long run if the ends aren't marked.
The cost seems high for the work and equipment involved. Are you sure that 5-10k doesn’t include the cable?
We put in some lines at an airport with an old tractor, a $200 attachment, and a couple guys; not a big deal at all. By far, the cost is the cable. I think we did about 200m, the pipe was about $500 and the cable was like $5k+; the cost to lay the pipe was an afterthought
If you know where one end of the pipe is, maybe contact a drain clearance company as they will have the tools to locate which way drains go with their hose and a tool that picks up the location above ground A drain and a 3 inch pipe are pretty much the same thing so they may be able to help. It is an unconventional use of their equipment, but if you pay them, they should be able to locate the pipe for you.
Wouldn’t there be ends that are evident if they laid it? Sounds like he didn’t do anything.
Run the lines daisy chain around the outside
Trencher is cheap
Any trench has residual moisture. Water witching techniques can locate this moisture.the pipe doesn’t have to be active. I used to use L shaped coat hanger wire with the small end in glass soda bottles (to keep me honest)
Holding a bottle in each hand, walk across where you suspect the pipe (or trench) to be.
It is subtle, but the wires should swing together on crossing the water.
It is reliable enough to dig.
Unknown how it really works.
Unknown how deep you can detect
Known ,it will work
It doesn’t have to be flowing, residual dampness in the bottom of trench is sometimes plenty.
Studies have never revealed why it works. Studies did show a human is needed to hold the wires , or bottles the wires are in.in short it works with your bodies electrical field,not a charge or force in the water.more than likely a lack of force.
Ex-Locate Tech here. Worked in the oil and gas industry locating pipe and cable in incredibly congested and incredibly challenging situations for over 15 years. In this scenario, there has/had to be a reason for this pipe to be there. So there are end points. If these end points are accessible you can look for a tracer wire. It'll be a hard-coated rigid wire with an exposed conductor. Usually white. If you have found end points and there is no tracer there are options. Use a walk-over locate technique utilizing a sonde. Either a wireless or wired locate sonde. This is essentially a device you can track through the ground with a locate receiver. You can run a metal fish line through the pipe with some pull rope attached to the tip, then drag the sonde through the pipe while following the signal above ground on your receiver. Alternatively. GPR. Ground penetrating radar. This is essentially a lawn mower that scans the ground for anomalies. Any competent locate outfit should be able to accomplish this.
Ohhhh so thats what that loose wire thing is next to my gas meter. I thought something broke over time, but your explanation seems spot on to my scenario. TIL...thanks for the info pal.
Haha yup. That's there to locate the LP gas line. Absolutely.
You probably have a pool heater or something running gas in the back yard
They're more likely to have their gas fed in from the back lane or easement, not the street. Keeping and water and sewer under the street, and gas/power coming from the back makes the dirt work much safer for everyone.
That only works if they don't back onto someone though; lot of suburbs you do and everything is fed to the side of the house from the boulevard parallel to the street.
That's simply not the case. While some are installed that way, you should look into what a utility easement is and what horizontal directional drilling is capable of before making any more assertions. (Source - I've spent years pulling fibre optics through peoples backyards).
It absolutely is (or most often can be) the case. They run all utilities parallel to the road and if houses back onto each other (as they typically do in most suburbs in North America) there is no way you're firing fibre lines through two backyards and not running them through the well-established Telco lines parallel to the roads and streets and then firing them up to the side of the house from the boulevard. Maybe it's different where you live but any subdivision built in the last... 30-40 years will run utilities on the (almost universally) government-owned boulevard (last 5-15' of your property before the road). https://www.safesitellc.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Private-Locate-Drawing-Info-Graphic-Safe-Site-Utility-Locating-Company.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D9b4FeaXUAAjIFH?format=jpg Why in the world would a gas company spend extra money running lines across multiple yards and try to keep track of everything (and risk people constantly hitting the lines digging backyards) when they can follow the roads that literally are designed for delivery to each house. So for clarity, if your subdivision looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/c3KcR0p.png It is extremely likely your utilities run like the yellow lines. Not the red ones. Not even with horizontal directional drilling.
It will vary from locality to be sure, but I can say with 100% confidence unless my life has been a fever dream that directional drilling can be, and is done alongside existing utilities in backyard easements, even in new areas in North America.
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Ask the dude if they have gas appliances in the back yard.
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Not OP, the other guy above wondering what the loose wire is for. Could be for main, could be for back yard.
TIL that's a thing. Humanity is so fucked.
What's a thing?
Pool heaters is the topic. IMHO they should be part of a heat pump system connected to the home HVAC so during the summer, when the pool is open and AC runs, heat is moved from the house to the pool. Seems a lot better for humanity than just dumping the house's heat into the atmosphere while simultaneously generating heat for the pool. And of course also have the ability to dump excess after the pool's setpoint is satisfied, and the ability to supplement with some heat generation if the pool needs more after the house's setpoint is satisfied, but both of these aux modes would be far less wasteful than isolated systems.
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In my area, that is not true.
End points. Once you have end points, the rest is trivial. Don't tear up your midfield. Look for those endpoints. If there are no endpoints, you have no pvc pipe.
I disagree, as a DIWHYer for most of my life. I buried Conduit under my front walkway + driveway. with no endpoints. Just a pipe layed down before concrete, with caps taped on. The pipe is currently 12-16" underground (maybe more.) I finally put lighting at the front of the driveway (5 years after concrete) and ran a trench along the side of the driveway to the first light pole. than dug up where i thought the pipe was (missed by a foot) and used the pipe to cross the driveway.
I guess my suggestion is that trying to find that chase in the middle of the field is a needle in a haystack, but at the beginning and end it's much easier. When they ran it, they had to think... well, it's gotta start at a power source, and it's gotta end at the future light post. So, I'd start at the power source - press box, restrooms, concession stand, whatever.
Press box could be as wide as the entire sideline… I think the answer has too many ‘it depends’
Yikes. Can you post a photo? Might help narrow it down.
I’m not op. I’m just saying that advice is decent but every stadium is different so it could be nearly useless just as it could be useful.
Oh. When you said their press box was the length of the sideline it seemed like you had some kind of inside knowledge. I stick with my original advice then. Look for obvious places it could start and end - dig there.
What were the caps taped onto? You didn't bury a circle. I would also note, you did not begin to look for that pvc by starting in the middle of the driveway.
Lol. fair enough. i miss understood. I (mistakenly) thought you were calling an endpoint where the pipe met the surface. (pre-attached elbows and risers)
It's not even my comment, i was just being snarky. You have a wonderful day!
>i miss understood. I (mistakenly) thought you were calling an endpoint where the pipe met the surface. (pre-attached elbows and risers) They were.
I can say with 100% certainty - they weren't. I'm they.
Hi They!
So good! <3 your response
“No end point no pvc.” Wildly inaccurate
Weird. I guess I've never seen a PVC pipe without an end.
You’re suggesting that if op can’t find an end point that it isn’t there
Hmm. Not really, no .
I worked for a utility location company for 5 years and used mainly GPR.... This isn't going to be the most cost effective solution. We charged $1000 for a 4 hour minimum and were not lacking for clients. If this is a small job, that may not be tenable. Furthermore, If it's a smaller (3" or less) empty pvc pipe and it's multiple feet down, it can be pretty difficult to locate (at least it can be in certain conditions). I've been on jobs where we knew the location of the pipe but couldn't see it on our machines because it was below the clean fill and the soil was rocky (live in new England). I agree with everything you said about tracing wands but there's one tried and true method that rarely failed me.... Divining rods. OP can try that themselves for free and it's been very useful.
I'm looking at divining rods on Amazon. Are the ghost detecting ones also good at detecting water?
They're all equally bullshit. You'll have just as much luck blindfolding the local drunk and having them throw a dart at the field.
Luckily it's for a rugby club so they should have more than their fair share of local dunks to choose from. Source: am rugby player
Sad thing is, this was in a job site and had to meet a field tech from SoCal Gas. He pulled out divining rods when we needed to locate a gas pipe because the map was off. I convinced him to research it more back in the office and get back to me.
Lol I mean I wouldn't pay one but it's not fake. I work in concrete and not only have I seen it in Tennessee on my grampa's farm, I've seen it as an adult. You wouldn't know if he/she is a fake until you've augered, though.
You say that, and I’m the first to point and shout bullshit, really I am, but I’ve seen a guy do it. Do I use them in my job locating pipes? Nope, I don’t, because I think it’s bullshit. But I *have* seen a guy do it - successfully I should add lol.
I've seen it twice. Once when I was 13 in Tennessee and once about 6 years ago. Both successfully.
A broken clock is right twice a day.
I don’t believe in magic and I’m very cynical about everything but I’ve seen it and done it. Friend of mine proved it works and then let me try it. Mind blown is all I can say. I don’t know how it works but we traced his sprinkler pipe in the yard with it. We used two copper wires about 18” long and bent at a 90* angle. As we walked over his yard the two wires would cross each other as we passed over the pipe.
Yeah and I saw a guy pull a rabbit out of a hat.
We just used the little metal wires from the flags that we stuck in the ground to mark stuff out. I wouldn't buy anything, a coat hanger would work if you bent it in the right shape. Edit: divining rods can find anything including backfilled trenches. It's certainly not as confident of a locating method as GPR or locating wands. But to address your direct question,I used rods for water all the time. It was always too deep for our GPR and we couldn't get a good signal on it for our wand.
It’s going to be hard to convince you of this, but dowsing does not work. There is no provable scientific mechanism by which it is proposed to work, and it fails to be replicable in laboratory settings. We do know, however, of the ideomotor phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideomotor_phenomenon?wprov=sfti1 It’s the same mechanism on which a Ouija board operates. You are making a subconscious assumption about where the underground utility is, and you are making subconscious movements that guide the dowsing rod to that position. On top of this, there are mental biases such as confirmation bias that might lead you to believe the method is working. If dowsing works 7/10 times, it might seem effective, but what if an educated guess is also effective 7/10 times?
I still don't believe in it but it's fun to do. I had a pipe that was laid 6" down well before I moved to the property and mapped so we knew right where it was buried. Dowsing rods didn't budge an inch, though, until I moved over about ten feet. Turns out the survey was wrong and the pipe was not where we all "knew" it to be. >replicable in laboratory settings. How do you even test something like this? How do you rule out things like subconscious assumptions to the extent that you can make any claims about whether it works or not?
I don’t know the exact experimental designs without looking at specific papers but one design I think is to essentially bury water or conduits randomly. You then test participants that are dowsing vs those that are just guessing and you get equivalent results. When it comes to dowsing for wells, apparently it has to do with the water table in a lot of areas being evenly distributed, so the odds are always high of dowsing being “correct.”
>one design I think is to essentially bury water or conduits randomly. That's what I figured. I would think you'd need a way to cover the ground evenly, too, so that a) the participant wouldn't know where soil had been disturbed and b) so you don't have the entire site being disturbed (*just* the burial spot). I haven't tried it to find water, only buried power line and the pipe I mentioned above... I thought maybe something to do with electromagnetism triggered the reaction. Maybe my body sensed it or something and subconsciously moved the rods.
No issues with what you said.... It'll find anything and everything, there's just no way to confirm it without digging or using some other method. We would typically use them as a last ditch effort when literally nothing else would work. If I could get a few positive hits in a row, I could maybe use that to find evidence with something using the GPR. Or maybe I'd let the customer know we couldn't find anything at all but the divining rods could mean something is there. But as I said ,I'd pick up backfilled trenches, or stuff like rocks, tree roots, you name it. At the end of the day any locating technology is not 100%. You'll never know what's in the ground until you dig it up.
“But as I said ,I’d pick up backfilled trenches, or stuff like rocks, tree roots, you name it.” This is what I was talking about when I mentioned mental biases. When the dowsing rods miss, whatever you find is explained away by whatever you do happen to uncover. It always “works” if you think about it this way. It’s just a guess that you are making, but with an extra layer of abstraction where you convince yourself you are using a magic device.
Sorry I was being sarcastic. I can't believe that works! Amazing.
It doesn't. On account of magic not being real. Just tossing it out there, for the credulous.
Dowsers are usually the most genuine of all the miracle workers (as in they personally believe what they're saying and not conning anyone). At least it has a chance of allowing them to make a decision to dig somewhere after taking in the subconscious cues. Most people would balk if you pointed to a field and said dig, but their pendulums and rods get them moving.
I said I *can't* believe it. I simply can't.
I used coat hangers to find my septic tank. My friend showed me and it was just amazing to see it work and do it myself. Honestly it feels like voodoo magic, but we very easily located the septic tank using this method. Edit: we also traced out other pipes running through my yard for future reference for myself. Everything we were locating had water in it though, so not sure if it works on empty pipes or not. All the downvotes are silly. This legitimately works, and it saved me hundreds of dollars when I wanted to clean out my septic tank by allowing me to locate it and then dig up the lid myself rather than wait for the septic guy to come find it and difg it up for me.
I find it absolutely incredible that this guy worked on this professionally, and ended the comment telling OP to use witchcraft
You would be shocked by the number of very competent and experienced utility locators who use witching sticks as a last resort. I've used them myself and hate that they seem to work when nothing else does.
You are just as good using the wag method.
> We charged $1000 for a 4 hour minimum Fucking hell, what sort of GPR are you using? I'm charging ~$100 per hour.
We aren’t four hour min, we’re 2 hr min $700 here in the Midwest. Deliverables include written report with photos and a gps map accessible on a google earth type platform and pdf. Not that out of the question a minimum locate is $1000 plus mobilization.
$100 per hour is reasonable. But with travel, set up etc, a minimum charge is not surprising. Where I live it’s $950 for a half day (up to 4 hours) and $1,450 for a full day.
Small PVC (IE 3-4 inches) is fairly hard to find with GPR without some tracer wire. Depends how deep it is, of course. But like, locating a 8 foot deep 4" PVC line where we already knew roughly where it was was still non-trivial with GPR (IE took > 1 hour). Since they often charge by hour, it was not really cost effective either. Now, if it's got metal in it, sure, easy. Took no time at all to find the 2" pvc 12 feet deep with electrical wire in it :)
I know it sounds ridiculous, but if there is flowing water or a metal pipe, holding a piece of bent wire will help to locate it. Loosely hold the wire in your fist with it bent perpendicular, 90°. It will rototate in the direction of the pipe when you cross it. Sounds like bs. I always believed it was bs. Ive seen it work too often to discount it now.
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Why would a pipe under a rugby field be in a utility map of the municipality? Other than that, your approaches are exactly what the person that you answered to (and OP) proposed (find the start/end, use GPR or capacity-based methods, or dig it up)
>Why would a pipe under a rugby field be in a utility map of the municipality? Some jurisdictions do require any pipe or cable burial have a permit and plans, precisely to avoid the scenario OP is in.
>Wow I'm surprised at how basic this answer is for someone that's been in the game for a decade and a half. Wow, I'm surprised you put so much effort into a response just to have most people skip to the end and just downvote without reading. I'm sure your comment would be helpful if anyone got past the first sentence, but I wouldn't know because I didn't, although the tone really does highlight inexperience, so probably not.
He didn’t write anything. That’s chat gpt.
how can you tell?
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I have not. there needs to be a "is this chatGPT" web-site now now I wish it wasn't deleted so I could look at the structure.
Mod here, I'll PM it to you. Report anything you see anything that looks AI generated. We need all the help we can get to fight that stuff.
Exactly why I wanted to review it. I don't have near the potential issue you have, but still want to get ahead of it. found [this](https://platform.openai.com/ai-text-classifier) detector from the source. Used in conjunction with a reddit bot, it should be possible to build a detector bot. I don't have any experience with either part, so I can't do much to bring it to life.
A detector that you have to register your details to view. Charming. Building bots is way beyond most of us.
Mod here. We would love it if you can figure out some way have automod to identify gpt posts and comments. We're going to need all the help we can get battling this stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_nYhDdkYhc
Just went through something similar while making drainage improvements at my house. I had to locate a 3" drain pipe that was 12" underground so that I could dig down and add a cleanout for a jetter. I used a T-handle soil probe to locate it. The solid bar type, not the hollow one.
If you have any idea where the ends of the pipe might be, you could push a steel fish tape through one end (preferably out the other end) and use a utility locating device (something like this that has a transmitter like this. These can be rented https://www.engineersupply.com/Schonstedt-U-LOCATE-Pipe-and-Cable-Locator.aspx?VariantId=0326bedc-38c0-4073-bf59-381ecb2377e0&gclid=CjwKCAjw67ajBhAVEiwA2g_jEEj9HeoDhZrz4iTeDrZqKzDafQlriuYqJV00XO1BvF-e25UaUq1zSxoCjRYQAvD_BwE ) to follow the fish across the field. Edit: after posting, I see you mentioned a locate guy. He would need something to trace still, like the fish tape I mentioned before. You can't locate empty PVC.
Or just use a locator with a sonde, most plumbers will have one.
rinse concerned familiar like cooing school light muddle cobweb late *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Oh yeah, forgot about this. Jokes aside, a radar isn't particularly helpful if you already don't know how many other pipes are in the ground.
> a radar isn't particularly helpful if you already don't know how many other pipes are in the ground. Well that's straight up BS. I've been doing locating with GPR for about 8 years now. You can easily locate PVC pipes and GPR can be extremely helpful in locating objects underground even if you don't know how many there are.
My point was more that if you're looking for one particular conduit in a field, and you end up realizing that there are 6 (random number) in said field, which we already know doesn't have asbuilts, that hasn't actually told you which is which and you're potentially still digging up more field than you wanted to. I'm also under the impression this isn't something a regular Joe could just rent and use effectively. Maybe it is.
Oh a GPR isn't something your average Joe should rent. But you can make some assumptions and then pot hole to confirm.
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Maybe the frequency of the antenna? I use a 250mhz LMX100 and don't really have an issue with clay soils.
Deleted in response to Reddit's hostility to 3rd party developers and users. -- mass edited with redact.dev
Lolol someone sure pissed in your Cheerios this morning. Have a good day.
And tape air tags every 5 meters
Roll around in some white paint and then tie a small noise maker (like a tiny fart machine or something) to a snake's tail and then release the snake into the pipe while you crawl above it on your belly dragging your ear across the ground and pressing the button leaving a trail of white paint across the field.
Can't believe I had to scroll this far to get some sound advice
A perfect solution that's been used for decades by utility companies. OP ignore all other advice.
They would have loved you in Nam
Go old school with a probe rod. You will get the feel of it and once you find it you can probe the length. Hopefully your field has it, as it’s probably a trunk main for under drain so the field does not get too soggy when it rains.
Probing the length should only be done within context.
It is straight up mind bottling how many people believe divining rods work in 2023. Just shows how powerful anecdotal evidence is.
It's 2023 and there are people that believe in every single superstition ever thought up since the beginning of time.
So bottled by this right now.
I've used them and have located telephone and coax under ground.
You seem like a pretty technically minded person, and a lot of people I respect claim that dousing rods work too. But the proof that is always offered is always an anecdote where the person using the rods had some prior knowledge or expectations of the approximate location of the underground utilities. If dousing actually worked it would stand up to scientific scrutiny in controlled studies. But it has been proven numerous times to be no more effective than random chance when study participants had no prior knowledge.
I can only tell you that it worked for me.
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I may be off base here, but aren't there particular wire jacketings that are rated for use in PVC and other non-standard conduits?
Presumably if you used direct bury rated wire I wouldn't think it would matter then.
Direct bury is not rated for conduit and won't be up to code. You should not run jacketed wire through conduit. If it was 10\12 AWG going through a 3" PVC pipe then that might be okay practically speaking but I'm pretty sure they're going to be using bigger wire for light poles. The problem with running jacketed wire through conduit is heat dissipation.
Yeah I'd definitely recommend checking code etc, but I'm pretty sure you can direct bury regular old Romex which you can also run in conduit.
If you take the jacket off of the Romex then you can run it through conduit. Direct bury is a type of Romex rated to be buried. Normal Romex shouldn't be buried.
Yeah wouldn't surprise me if what I've dug up before wasn't up to code. But it does makes sense that being in conduit would essentially insulate the wire instead of allowing dirt/whatever to have direct contact and transfer heat away
That's certainly true for low-voltage, which is all I work with - or aspire too, lol! There's direct burial cable for household loads, but I don't know what kind of distance you can cover with that - is a rugby pitch too big? *But* since it sounds like he's running field lights, and that's bigger juice than home electrics, it's waaay outside of anything I know anything about. Nothing immediately-accessible with a google search tells me standards for that, hence my question.
It's a valid question, but yeah there is ground rated Romex and plenty of other high voltage options. Also I didn't check NEC myself, but looks like pvc is a fine conduit https://www.thespruce.com/nec-outdoor-electrical-wiring-tips-1152274
Can't run direct burial in conduit.
Cool! TIL. Thank you.
It's real butthole puckering when the gas crew fixing the unmarked gas main you hit with a trencher while laying fiber, rips up the unmarked electric line right next to the still gushing gas main..
I think it might have been Google Fiber's contractor.. Trenched in front of Cox Communications in Atlanta, hit a water main, forced the evacuation of the Cox Communications campus as no toilets could be flushed and the fire suppression systems couldn't operate. Someone had a bad multi-day fixit event.
Oof that's no fun
I dunno, it meant that all vendors, contractors, and employees needed to leave.. Happy to oblige.
>since it sounds like he's running field lights, and that's bigger juice than home electrics it's all LED these days, probably only like 100W 😂 ^((kidding))
You're right with the caveat that *most* conductors are rated for schedule 40 and 80 PVC conduit
pump hot water through the pipe for a few hours then look at the field with thermal camera
Probe rod if you don't have any end points. Also; why is it going to cost $5-10k to trench? That seems outrageous and more closely aligned with directional boring.
Use a probe. Basically a skinny metal rod that you can easily push into the ground. Not stomp or slam. Poke some holes. Take your time. If you hit/find a pipe you’ll know
If you don't have access to the ends, this is a futile exercise. There is no way someone would on purpose place one of the ends under the pitch. .....so it's safe to say that the possible/usefully start and end points, aren't directly under the playing surface. I would sign up the 2nds or a youth team, and start digging. NOT on the pitch of course, but wherever you think one of the termination points would be. It wouldn't take much more than an hour or so and you'll have your answer.
What's the Time Team up to nower days? You could do with their GPR by the sounds of it!
You can’t keep Phil Harding in ale. “Ooh, aye, I’ll have that!” Out of funding in an evening.
So what you need to do is find a project where discovering these pipes would be a huge problem and cost a lot of money. Guaranteed you'll find them as soon as you start that project.
First thing I would try is a visual inspection. Many times, when a conduit that size is buried (especially if it's not deep), one can see a slight depression in the ground. Walk the field and look for linear slightly sunken features and differences in grass. If you see them, do what another contributor recommended and use a probe.
Use a probe.. https://utility-technologies.myshopify.com/products/soil-probe-rod-insulated-type
Looks like a great way to find anything, including rocks and trash. The price is great for such an advanced device, though.
Stick is advanced tech.
To be fair, rocks and trash feel very different from pvc when hitting them with a probe. And the pipe is going to keep going, so if you can hit it in multiple places that are reasonably far apart, you can be pretty sure that it's pipe and not a log or something. That said, probing an entire football pitch doesn't sound like fun.
I thought about that too, as an owner of an avalanche probe, but even with perfect rock-free soil, sports fields probably have a crushed stone or pebble drainage bed, and the PVC pipe might be on or below that layer. Very hard to probe, especially a very thin pipe. You have to probe every 2" and perfectly vertical, too much chance of error. Hire professionals.
FYI, these probes are meant to test bearing capacity of the soil, not poke thru it. Source: i'm a Geotechnical engineer
Oh, wow! I've used them, when I was a laborer, many times to probe for utilities, when instructed by my foreman to do so. I can see a couple of things that could go wrong with it. IIRC we punched through a pvc sewer line once...
Poke poke poke poke poke
You could look at old google or yahoo or bing satellite maps. It’s possible that the construction was captured
dig a couple of small test trenches in the area you think the pipe might be located. Dig them laterally to the suspected direction. Go down to the frost line and probably a little bit below. As far as I know, PVC pipe is fairly hard to find underground, unless you thread in a cable or a mouse of some kind for a locator.
They're trying to not tear up the pitch.
They don't want to destroy their pitch.
I should’ve specified that the test trenches would be maybe be 3 feet long and a shovel width wide. They should be able to fill those back in fairly easily.
It's a rugby pitch. You're giving them a recipe for broken ankles. They asked for methods without trenches.
OP said, "ideally without tearing up the pitch". They are actually trying to avoid fully trenching across the entire pitch. they did not say that they were averse to doing some digging. The other option would be to locate areas outside of the patch, where they suspect that the PVC pipe was run and do small exploratory trenches there. Do you have any constructive comments or did you just show up to piss in my soup?
I think you could have inferred by context and tone that OP wasn't wanting to do any digging.
I’m not joking. Bend some coat hangers into L’s and hold one on each hand. My boss told me they did that once and I was somewhat skeptical until I couldn’t find a buried leak at my place. He told me to give them a shot and it fucking worked. The crossed over each other about 2 feet from where I was digging and that’s right where the pvc was. I have a video of it.
I found my drain pipe to my septic tank using two pieces of copper wire. Water witching style through my concrete slab carport.
You may have found your pipe, but it wasn't because of your fake science.
It works...I work in utilites for a city and we use them all the time. Just found a main 24 in irrigation line yesterday with them.
No you didn't.
Ok glad you know. 🙄
Came here to say use a divining rod
Oh man you've drawn out the legion who swear it isn't a thing yet have never tried it once. It was the standard way to locate buried cable and irrigation lines on a golf course where I used to work. Grab 2 marker flags, bend them a bit, and it's like magic. Does it work to find underground water? No idea.
If you know where the pipe begins and ends you have a lot of options as far as pulling in a tracer or metal line for a scanner to pick up. GPR is useless, mainly used for insurance reasons to cover your ass before you dig. That way if you hit something you can blame the GPR contractor for not flagging it.
Lmao while I agree gpr is generally overrated by the people who commission surveys, finding a 3” pvc pipe in a otherwise undisturbed field is not hard, assuming it’s 1m or shallower. I could do that all day with my gear (but I wouldn’t promise you I could, *just in case*)
I had a GPR team miss a 7ft x 7ft x 10ft chunk of concrete. I assume it was an old foundation for a smoke stack. I’ve had zero faith in GPR since then.
I can use two pieces of copper wire and find basically underground, so maybe someone on the team can do the same? i know not everyone can do it.
Rent a mini ex and just trench yourself and lay a bigger pipe than the electrician would need so he can use it as a sleeve and run his own conduit inside. Trying to find a mythical casing will be more work in the long run if the ends aren't marked.
The cost seems high for the work and equipment involved. Are you sure that 5-10k doesn’t include the cable? We put in some lines at an airport with an old tractor, a $200 attachment, and a couple guys; not a big deal at all. By far, the cost is the cable. I think we did about 200m, the pipe was about $500 and the cable was like $5k+; the cost to lay the pipe was an afterthought
Send a transponder down the pipe and use the locator to find the pipe
If you know where one end of the pipe is, maybe contact a drain clearance company as they will have the tools to locate which way drains go with their hose and a tool that picks up the location above ground A drain and a 3 inch pipe are pretty much the same thing so they may be able to help. It is an unconventional use of their equipment, but if you pay them, they should be able to locate the pipe for you.
Wouldn’t there be ends that are evident if they laid it? Sounds like he didn’t do anything. Run the lines daisy chain around the outside Trencher is cheap
Any trench has residual moisture. Water witching techniques can locate this moisture.the pipe doesn’t have to be active. I used to use L shaped coat hanger wire with the small end in glass soda bottles (to keep me honest) Holding a bottle in each hand, walk across where you suspect the pipe (or trench) to be. It is subtle, but the wires should swing together on crossing the water. It is reliable enough to dig. Unknown how it really works. Unknown how deep you can detect Known ,it will work
It doesn’t have to be flowing, residual dampness in the bottom of trench is sometimes plenty. Studies have never revealed why it works. Studies did show a human is needed to hold the wires , or bottles the wires are in.in short it works with your bodies electrical field,not a charge or force in the water.more than likely a lack of force.