How do I locate underground pipes?

They basically just do the running around for you, if your busy then a service like this is good, if you have time then you can do all this yourself and save your money.

 

yeah better to just dit it up most times! finding house storm water would be a pain.
ive done sewer and stormwater relining, a lot easier when the pipe is bigger than 150mm and you have a dirty big pit to work with!

do you use GPR for house stuff?? that wouldnt be cheap i imagine
I was on a big sewer joba nd we bought one! not cheap and the monkeys could work the thing! i named it "the lemon", but in the right hands can be very useful for gas with no wire mostly id think.

 

yeah exactly! Depending who we are working for we will decide if we bother trying to find them or not. If it is an old lady say putting up a fence, then we will try and find them for her. But if it is someone that we think seems to be pretty handy and hands on then we tell them if they break them to just go to Bunnings and buy some joiners and fix them themselves, because that will be cheaper than us spending 45 minutes trying to them, especially when we charge per hour.

hahahhaha, yeah there were a few dodgy salesmen selling them to anyone and then not giving them any training so the poor guys would have no idea what they were doing.

Our first one cost us $50k and I flew over to America to where it was actually built to do training with it, because I tried a few different guys over here, but none of them could offer us proper training to really understand how to use the gear properly. I then sent one of my guys over as well so that he would know all the little detail to get the most out of it. So because of that we did charge more per hour and didn't really do any residential with it.

But since then the price has come down a fair bit and the technology has improved making them more user friendly. The last one I bought cost just $30k, so we now decided to have one in every vehicle and we don't charge any extra to use them, this way when we go to site we can try and find everything.

Because I'd hate it in the past, you would go to a site, find the underground power and the phone cables but say to the client, sorry but the water main is PVC so I can't locate it, but I can come back with the GPR and find it for you if you like, and he would be there on the machine ready to start digging and would normally say, nah don't worry about it we will be right and you would always leave with this feeling of, ohh I hope he doesn't damage it.

But now at least we know we have all the gear with us, so regardless what there is onsite we should be able to find it.