How to find underground water line. Digging up your backyard can be tricky if you don’t know where your water pipes are. If you get down on your knees and look at your property map, you’ll be able to spot them.
Construction done without this knowledge will likely damage the pipes and possibly flood the house, which will cost a lot of money.
How to find underground water line
Underground sewage pipes are embedded in the ground and therefore cannot be seen until they’re unearthed during construction.
The best way to do this is by using an EM (electromagnetic) cable locator, which is basically equipment that can detect electrical signals at great distances.
Transmit a signal into a pipe, so you can use your locator to scour the surrounding area for its position.
Buy a Pipe Locator
To find your water pipes, you could always hire someone to do it for you. This will likely be very costly and time-consuming though. Instead of hiring a pro, why not try locating them yourself with a pipe locator?
A pipe locator is fairly inexpensive and can be purchased at most local hardware stores. Your pipes (metal or plastic) will have to be exposed before you can locate them.
Placing the locator on the floor next to where you suspect they may be is a good place to start; work your way out from there if need be until the devices indicate that underground piping has been located.
Make use of Electromagnetic Conductivity (EM)
Taking this approach requires more advanced equipment, and it is also more expensive. When used properly, it may be able to find underground piping, but not in all cases. Using some special instruments, it can only identify metallic piping.
The Glass Fibre Reel
Using the Sonde’s glass fiber tracking reels is an efficient and accurate way to track a supply line, such as a non-conductive mains water supply pipe, drainage pipe, or service ducting.
The reels contain an optical fiber device that is fed into the line through a T-tap on the reel shaft/wand for safety (such as our 15mm ‘jumbo reel’ with its 25mm diameter glass fiber tubular sonde) while a signal receiver unit tracks the repo by via the sonde attached to the reel head.
This system can help identify where faults lie such as water leaks in water supply mains, drains, or heating and air conditioning systems.
The use of Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR)
This is an effective method for locating underground pipes because it can locate both metallic and non-metallic objects.
However, the fact that it requires you to remove the water hydrant’s cap, place a leak detection device correctly, and then pressurize the device means that it does require a little more effort than using LDR or RBD equipment.
Using ultra-high radio frequencies
Several types of soils can benefit from this method, including wet, tough, and rocky ones. In order for the device to work effectively, it needs to penetrate solid surfaces that might hinder other methods.
For this method, a unit is initially swept across the surface, and then different indicators are read from it.
The CCTV Drain Camera
In a CCTV drain camera, a special type of camera is attached to a rope of 70 meters, similar to what you would use in a playground.
By sending this rope into your pipes, we are able to see what’s happening below ground as well as trace the path of your pipes in order to pinpoint any problems.
By doing so, it is easier to find any potential problems and deal with them.
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