I do mostly residential new construction. We have to dig down a little for the driveways to place stone. Do you guys just assume the utilities were placed deep enough? I've gotten my Shovel out many times and do a test hole to see how deep gas is. Doing homes now where there's gas, cable, and electric lines in front of property. It would take me all day to hand dig down.
I get locates always. Get your own as somebody else's does not cover you. The call has to be made by you for you. Once I get used to how they do their work I tend to assume they do it right, but not before doing some checking. Cable TV is never deep enough. Phone is never deep enough. Just assume that from the start. Power, water, and gas are typically 18" + down, but what if there was a regrade there? That can bite your ass quick.
Oh I call for locates all the time. But they don't tell you how deep the utilities are, unless happen to catch the fellow and ask him.
The first time you hit fiber gas or a primary line you will forget all of the time spent potholing. One thing you have to ask yourself whenever doing anything is - "Am I willing to accept the worst possible scenario / do I have the means to correct it?"
It helps to dig slow and carefully with a smooth edge bucket and have a guy standing in front of you watching every swipe. Never a bad idea to carefully pothole with a shovel where the utility is marked. Be watching for a change in material.. ie if you are digging in clay and start hitting a darker patch of buried topsoil, or even beer cans and jobsite scraps, guess what... If you are mucking out a roadside ditch where utilities cross it for example, never assume the utilities were dug deep enough to compensate for the ditch depth for proper coverage at the bottom, ask me how i know....
Always call for locate, but even then it's not an exact science, as in "there's utilities here, oh, there it is!" Locate at least let's you know where to tread softly.
@MCE1993 , that is one of those regrades I was talking about. It might have been OK at one time
yes sir...seen some goofy stuff, was mucking out a ditch once just to be nice after replacing a culvert and low and behold the water service was in the muck and weeds at the ditch bottom... i cant see how they could have cut the ditch after the water line without hitting it... I think whoever put the water line in was just extremely lazy... power line for the house was also directly under the culvert pipe touching it... regardless that's how I became pretty good at splicing poly
I'm not sure if anybody locates cable lines. They can be down less than 4 inches. I imagine phone lines could be similar. I once did a job where the customer wanted his front yard dug about 4 inches deep. I forget why, I think he wanted to put some low maintainance rock or something down. Right along the edge of the sidewalk I found the cable wire. Apparently a neighbor was watching a football game and his cable went out. He wasn't too happy. Thankfully the line pulled apart at a connector and the wire could be pushed back in. It was loose and needed repair but at least it restored cable service. All other utilities were checked and there were none in the front yard.
Dave, they locate everything. It either has a signal they can follow or they'll throw a trace signal into it at the junction box. I did a water service job the other day where they just failed to do their work and I dug up all sorts of fun stuff and it was all on them. I only broke one customer's cable service, and it happened to be from the company they were not using so they came out and patched it anyway just in case they do the switcheroo to the other service.
It could have been someone being lazy or just forgetting about the cable line. The way it was so close to the surface and right along the sidewalk made me think it was an add on to existing cable. I'm not sure if cable requires a separate locate from other utilities up here. Think I remember hearing that. It's not particularly dangerous but more of a nuisance if you hit it. Got a scare one time drilling post holes. Hit a piece of steel gas line and we all kind of panicked at first but there was no leak. We were quite a ways away from all the flags marking the gas lines so were puzzled about this line. We dug it up some more with shovels and discovered it must have been a hole they threw the scraps in when the did the hook ups to the apartments. It was about 2 1/2 feet long.
Any of you guys use a locator? I had bought a used radiodetection locator years ago, and still haven't gotten to learn how to use it lol.
I deal with utility conflicts every day, I have my own radiodetection rs4000 that has paid for itself over and over again.
I have an RD4000. Know of an easy way to learn it?
Correction, mine is an rd4000 as well. You tube helped me out quite a bit, but shadowing the 811 guy on my tickets and asking a lot of questions formed my working knowledge of the locator. I trace fibers at 8k hz and telephone at 32k hz, may not be correct but has provided best results for me. No tracer is needed on power and you can detect most working telephone on radio mode as long as signal is flowing through the line. Tuning the gain correctly really helps against false reads
Do you find the depth function to be somewhat accurate?
The depth function only works when you are putting your own signal down the line. It does not work in radio mode. It is accurate to within 4" as long as your gain is turned up just enough to detect the line, too much gain produces a wonky depth. OJT was the only way we figured this out with a lot of potholing
Worlds most reliable locator - excavator bucket finds them every time haha
I have the Rigid locator available to me, the one that is paired to our pipe camera unit. It also has a power box so you can energize whatever. I have run an electrician's fish tape up dry conduit to put a signal in it. That worked well.
Good idea!
We just had a job where we had 6 or 7 utility crossings on our trench. We went out and hand dug straight down 6-7 feet my head was under ground and hands covered in blood (lots of glass, also found someone’s horse so that was cool/ disturbing). Never found any of the utilities they had marked all we’re much deeper then what we were doing we dug 4 or 5 test holes not all 6 feet deep but saved company money didn’t need hydrovac this time. It sucked but emergency repairs are waaay worse.