How do you find water/power lines

Hi all. I will be demolishing a 50+ yo shed soon to make way for a new ip. This shed has water and power but no plans showing the lay of these lines.is there any tricks to finding how they travel underground apart from digging and looking for the water fountain surrounded by sparks.

Thanks all
 
Propertunity, That wont work with a shed,

Don't know the answer to that except make sure the power is off and the water is disconnected before you bulldoze.

Not unless you know someone with a FLIR Infrared Camera?
Pest inspectors have them,could be worth the price of a pest inspection?
 
digging and looking for the water fountain surrounded by sparks.
Works for us! :D

We were finding all sorts of weird cables, pipes, the works. There was a shed out the back but it was demolished before we got the house. Dug around a bit, pulled off some wall linings etc until we worked out where they went. Most of them didn't go anywhere.

The water on the other hand ... OMG crazy pipeworks. Mucho digging and yanking up of rusty pipes with taps on the end. Most of it was guesswork ... ie there's a tap here, the pipe should go there. Dig a diagonal trench until we hit it. Swear a lot when we don't.

Backyard has just been completely ripped up with heavy machinery so there's nothing left out there to find anymore. I now own a house with completely brand new wiring, plumbing and sewer. Yay!
 
Other option is to get a guy in with cable locating gear. They can attach their device on copper water lines and trace their position and depth, I believe it's possible for the power too.
 
Other option is to get a guy in with cable locating gear. They can attach their device on copper water lines and trace their position and depth, I believe it's possible for the power too.

This is what I was thinking . Who would you contact for this sort of thing ?
Have to do a net search I think
 
I have some equipment in my van that does this sort of thing for copper work....it's a Radio Detection equipment so I suppose it would be under somethng like that. I also work on the railway and quite often they use these guys to come in and located buried cables before carrying our digging in the area.
 
Can those guys find plastic or ceramic pipes? Most of our pain was trying to locate plastic sewer pipes - those are several feet underground too. The easiest pipe to locate was the copper one buried 1cm underground - I literally tripped over it :rolleyes:
 
We do that sort of work too...It's very easy. We have a camera that has built in Sonar device to transmitt it's location. We send the camera into the sewer line and trace it path as we move it along. It gives us a depth figure also!

Trying to dig for sewer lines without knowing their exact location or depth is a pain!

Note: Alot of plumbers these days have this sort of equipment, but make sure if you need the work done that they have a camera with sonar detection!
 
My plumber this week literally bulldozed the entire backyard between the last inspection point and the connection out to the mains. I have a strange feeling he didn't bring one of those cameras ... but that does seem the most logical way to find the buggers. Bulldozers are a bit brute force, but it certainly worked in this case.

Add to the confusion with this old house we found a lot of wiring encased in galvanised pipes, which were the same as the old water pipes, and both going in about the same direction. At my old house they had plastic water pipes and sure enough, the power to the shed was in the same damn plastic pipes. Argh!

ETA: we were telling the difference between the two kinds of pipes by turning on the tap, sticking an ear on the pipes and listening for the water going through them.
 
Sometimes the drainage can be pretty straight forward. I suppose if you have a IO and know where the connection to the main is, then it's easy!
 
know where the connection to the main is
Oh, we knew with a high degree of accuracy. The old bloke behind our house said it ran "just on our side of the fence" because they wanted to put the mains line in a week after he got a brand new fence built (this fence is ancient, really rotten and about to fall down and we're actually negotiating replacing it) so he got them to put it on our side. Recent history :rolleyes:

Turned out to be a metre on our side. They uncovered a concrete marker while they were scrabbling around out there. I had no idea they put concrete dooflackies in people's backyards over the sewer mains :confused:

I've spent far too much time on this. I'm subdividing and had a prerequisite to remove all the plumbing that crossed the proposed border. There was rather a lot to find and remove, there was no garden to ruin, we're cheapskates, so we did it all ourselves. All I've learnt from the experience is to never expect any kind of undergrounded thing to take the path you expect it to take.
 
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