ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade General Discussion Area Finding underground conduit?

I've used the following trick successfully to trace an in-ground, empty conduit:

Since the pipe (or part of it) is metal, you cannot attach the toner unit of the tracer to your fish tape, as the tape will make ground with the pipe and negate the tracer readings, so what you do is tape a scrap roll of insulated wire to the end of the fish tape and feed both into the pipe. Once you hit the end of the run (either the break or the next box), you cut the wire and attach the toner to it, then the other side of the toner to a large screwdriver and stick it in the ground. Now trace the wire in the pipe.

It's important to make sure the wire is insulated from the fish, so it's a good idea to wrap the cut end with a little rubber tape before you attach it to the fish, just to be sure.

Follow the trace until you loose it, and that should be pretty close to the end of the run. If the readings at the end of the run seem funny, you can just paint your line as far as you can, then use the length of the wire and/or fish that come out of the pipe to give yourself a pretty accurate distance.

If you don't own an in-ground tracer, you probably want to think about picking one up if you're going to be doing this kind of work. I didn't think I needed to own one until I bought one, and it's probably one of the best investments I've made. It paid for itself after 1 or 2 jobs, and it's made and saved me quite a bit of money since.

Good luck!

Found it!!!! I went to the last resort and rented a locator. The owner said she didn't want to use the "gate circuit" so I had no option. I started out thinking the conduit was pvc, so I rented the locator thinking I could trace my fish tape through it. After a very confusing morning with the locator, I find out that it is rigid coming out of the 6x6x4 j box, so I just had to touch the conduit with the fish tape with the prob hooked to the fish tape. It led me to the old pipe that was already there. Thinking It may have led me wrong, but hoping for the best, I started digging down to find the old conduit on the other side of the driveway, then to my great surprise, there were both conduits side by side about 18" deep. Well, the conduits were about 8 ft. from the front wall of the house, and went under a bunch of hedges. We started digging again at the wall of the house, and went as far as we could go without taking up her 6ft. hedge:( One last try, I went back to the other side of the hedge at the driveway, and tunneled under the hedge as far as I could go, and Wow!!!!I seen the conduit we were looking for making a 90 up, so I new I had found it. Started pulling the dirt and mulch away, and found another 6x6x4 j box buried under the mulch with both conduits terminated in it and the existing wire that was going out to the other j box in the grass. I stuck my fish tape back in and pulled the circuits I needed out to the j box in the grass. What a relief. I was about to have to "scratch" this project, if I couldn't find it. This was my last option. I think I will make a rough layout of the j box and leave it at her electrical panel in her basement, just in case someone else runs into the same problem down the line. I will have to cover the j box back up under the hedges, I guess, for "looks", but I may stick something there to mark it someway:) Thanks for the input. I guess it was the remark about renting the locator that sent me in the right direction. It pays to share our ideas here. Thanks a bunch for all the input. Steve.....

Thanks for sharing the outcome, Steve. It's impressive that you chose to be so persistent where many others would have thrown their hands up and walked away. While we appreciate the magnitude of your efforts, I sure hope that your customer did too. Far too often, they don't have a clue and since they don't have a point of reference, they have nothing to compare your efforts to.

Ed, it was a combination of things that made me persistant.
#1. I don't like to start a job that I can't finish
#2. I didn't want to let the customer down
#3. I NEED THE MONEY
Steve....

I smell what you're cookin'. I guess we all feel that way in various forms.

Most gate openers I've seen run on 12 volt batteries with a trickle charger.

They run on the battery but the power supply is usually big enough to run them without the battery. When my wife took over her community all of the batteries were dead and unplugged.