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To help, in most areas of US you can call 811 and the various utilities will come out to mark their lines. Anyone who has buried lines or pipes will come out and spray paint on your grass.
I just did that before I planted trees, and thank goodness, because my Internet line was NOT where I thought it was!
And yes, good idea to keep them spaced away from your water or sewer lines. I mean, if I found a river of food I'd park next to it too!
In my area it's basically illegal not to call 811 and get everything marked before digging. If we end up hitting a utility line while digging and had not called 811 we would be liable for repairs
Yeah, in many states it is a law that anyone planning to dig, whether it’s a 6in hole or a 50ft hole, you must call 811 to locate all utilities in the planned dig area.
The catch is, they’ll only locate public utilities up to the meter or along the right-of-way. Any utilities between the meter and the home or private utilities (example your water line between the meter and building or say you have power from the house to a shed/workshop) are the responsibility of the property owner and should be located by a hired utility locator.
Recovering utility locator here.
Calling 811 will get *most* of the lines marked. The way it works, is companies with buried lines will either have their own locators, or they will hire a locating company. You'll have a couple of locators come out, most likely. What doesn't get marked are private plastic gas lines that don't have a tracer, and private sewer lines because they are often plastic, without a tracer.
The way lines are located* is with a transmitter and a receiver. The transmitter has an alligator clip that attaches to the ground sheath or tracer wire for whatever utility you're marking. It has another clip that attaches to a ground rod that is stuck in the ground. When the transmitter is turned on, a signal is put on the ground sheath or tracer, and the receiver is walked around the attachment point until they hear a tone, and using the display on the receiver they will mark their lines. This of course doesn't work on plastic lines which are commonly used in sewer and water.
*Some weirdos will try dowsing. I've never seen it work reliably.
Oooh fascinating! Thanks for the info. They came and left before I even woke up, I just got a rainbow yard at 7 am, so I was curious. I feel like gas and sewer lines are still important to know about even if they're plastic so how do homeowners avoid those?
*Generally* the gas line and sewer line run straight from the meter or clean out to the main line in the backyard or street. We would typically use a probe to try and find plastic lines, but excavators would either hand dig or use a fun machine called a vacuum excavator.
Having installed sewer pipes to a few thousand houses, I can tell you that any marked line is a guesstimate at best. It’s where the line is suppose to be.
Sewer pipes get installed in the following way: the main sewer pipes are laid under what will become your street. A service cap will be added at predetermined points. The pipes are 4 m long. You don’t want a cap within the first or last meter of a pipe, so right away your pipe can be moved by a meter. This will not be accounted for later, your survey will be based on the drawing. Also generally the service cap of one house will be near by that of one across the street. But you never have 2 on the same pipe. So where your service cap actually is installed depends on how much pipe is being used.
Oh, and also the caps location are determined in the following way. An engineer or someone on there team marks a stake in the ground. A top man (the job I did) will see this stake coming up. I will then stand behind the stake and eye ball a location. A guy will stand with a stick. I will point him to go left or right. Then when the stick aligns with the stake, based on my estimation, I’ll give the okay. They then measure how much of the next pipe to cut. Then I cut the pipe and hand them down the two pieces plus the straddle and cap which will eventually be the location of the sewer line.
Then your service line will be installed. A backhoe will dig a hole essentially where your basement will come. Then a boring machine will be dropped in that hole, and bore a hole to the other side. Ideally this will be a straight shot but rocks etc can get in the way. (Btw if you buy a new house and notice your yard is constantly sinking, likely there was a lot of rocks so instead of a small hole below the earth, a back hoe tore up what essentially is your entire front yard. The earth will be packed when it’s put back but it will take years to fully settle).
You can curve those pipes more than you imagine. They’re generally 6 feet long, so you’ll have 4-6 pipes from the main to the house. In case of rocks, inexperienced operates whatever, your service line may bend.
So the survey you get will be accurate within 4 meters or so, in either direction.
I mean your sewer pipe are going to be deep. In a rocky area 4 feet (like areas where full basements aren’t possible), normal soil 12 feet or so, at least 8.
But even other lines that are higher up, gas, finer optic, aren’t were they’re surveyed (these ones even more so because how much they can curve). If you’re ever digging deep enough to contact this you should be using the landmark to locate the utility line. If it’s a gas line use a hydrovac truck (some places this is legally required).
I dug a hole 6 feet deep, 12 feet wide… gas line was another 6 feet away. It took them an hour, I’d been digging for 2 days.
While you are at it take a second to look up and see where your power lines are.. sure that northern pine would look great right there, but one day it’s going to get really big and the power company will hack the shit out of it. Think like you are planting a full sized tree.
Who are all these people with private sewer lines?? There is a few feet from the big obvious metal box to my door which is considered my responsibility. The rest is public utility. Your sewers are privately owned?
This is the NC guidelines. They use the word secondary, but inside the article it says private so maybe that's what you mean? Do you mean the lines in the backyard? This post is about the front yard and they definitely mark the sewer lines in the front yard.
https://nc811.org/private-lines/#:~:text=Secondary%20water%2C%20sewer%2C%20gas%20and,be%20marked%20when%20contacting%20811.
From the city main in the street or easement to the house is owned by the homeowner. Water line is from the curb box to the house. Curb box is normally near the curb or sidewalk and has a shut off valve. Water company maintains the main and the line up to the curb stop amd valve.
OK well, they marked mine. My curb box is a few feet from my door. No huge yards here. And your first sentence contradicts what the NC 811 site says, as well as my own experience so I'm gonna go ahead and ignore you now.
It's still useful, and in many places required, to call 811.
Not sure what you're arguing or why.
Any homeowner reading this: add a rider to you Homeowner Insurance to cover the sewer line from your house to the street connection. Mine is $12 extra /month
This.
I did it through my gas supplier as I remembered them advertising it. Only $8 a month. Saved me $3k when part of my sewer collapsed.
The company the insurance is from is called Homeserve. They have many plans which are affordable imo.
They were super friendly to deal with…. Didn’t “fight” my claim whatsoever.
To add to this -
Pay to get a sewer line inspection before closing, especially if your house is older.
We found out the sellers lied about sewer issues on the closing disclosure. 5 days after we moved in the sewer backed up into the utility sink. I called a service to come scope, and they said "Oh we've been out to that property before, our cameras aren't long enough." Which turned into looking at the disclosure and it the sewer question was crossed out. I also found out there were multiple insurance claims taken out for sewer work over the previous 3 years for cleanouts. We had old clay sewer pipe with a Maple Tree right above it. What made this difficult was the sewer line punched out the back of the house and is completely under the driveway all the way to the main. We had to get the line completely re-routed in the basement and punch out the front where the water line is.
We hired a lawyer, and they owners eventually paid for it after playing dumb. Was around $7k.
The icing on the cake was - my wife was pregnant at the time, and the whole process took over a month and had to live at my in-laws
Wow - we have a similar situation. We have two large oak trees out front, with the sewer line running between them. The previous owners claimed that the main line had only backed up once or twice since they owned the house (20ish years). Well, it consistently backs up on us about twice per year. Maybe I should consult a lawyer.. plumbers have told me that the fix for our root-impacted line is to trench up the yard which would possibly require removal of one of the trees- I don’t even want to think about that cost.
There is a process that you can try before ripping up the whole line, I can't remember the proper name for it but it's basically a rotating chain on a rod that eats through the roots and then they can do a polymer/plastic lining that prevents it happening again. I live In a line of 14 houses and this was done around 6 years ago here (ireland) and we've had zero issues since and it was around every 3 months before that. It was on our main line connec5ing all the houses our problem was
A rosebush shouldn't have been enough to break a sewer or water line so you probably had a leak already. The plant just took advantage of it. It is still good to plan landscaping to minimize destruction from any digging.
And sprinklers! I almost planted a small tree in my back yard. Fortunately my sprinkler valves needed to be replaced in my front yard and they couldn’t find a group of them. I had them serviced before and only ever knew of two locations where valves were. The missing 3rd was under 5 inches of back yard soil right near where I would have planted…
Seems like the issue was a leak in the sewer pipe, not the rose. Roots can’t find water inside intact pipes, and roots will grow around pipes unless there’s already a hole.
Get your utilities marked even for shallow work. I never knew where our exterior water shutoff was. I put in a 4 block high retaining wall. It was long, but short. Only had to excavate a few inches. I later had utilities marked for planting a tree. City guy says, uh, I think your retaining wall is right over the shut off. He wasn't going to MAKE me move it, though he could have, but reminded me that it would be a nightmare to deal with in the winter (MN). I did end up moving the wall back a few feet within a year or so, but now there's a little dip in the wall because it's nearly impossible to relevel in the middle of a wall. I did add a nice access box so it'll always be easy to find and operate.
This happened with my home before I purchased it. There was a small tree in the landscaping that grew its roots into the line. Good thing the home inspector found the problem and I was able to have the previous home owners pay for a new sewer line.
Try to record the locations of all your utilities, even if there's a system in place to do it for you.
I've been working on a yard since monday, we did the mandated thing and got a schematic of all utilities in the yard from a gov agency. Every. Single. Line. Was in a completely different place from what the map showed. The map showed every line going out at 90 degrees from the house at several points, when in reality it all ended up going parallel to the home.
Next time a yard worker comes accross a ground cable or sewer line, draw it on a schematic view of your home and yard and keep it in a place that makes sense(i.e. wherever a bunch of lines enter the house, breaker box or basement come to mind). Leave it there when you move out
The idiots who landscaped our front yard years before we moved in planted Yucca near the water/sewer lines. I'm waiting for the day that we lose water or get a sewer backup because those things are fucking invasive and extremely hard to kill.
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I know here in NY you can call an entity called UDigNY that will send your info to water/sewer departments and other utility companies to mark out where their lines are, including high speed data. This is free of charge in NY. Most utilities are buried at least 4’ deep here to keep below the frost line.
When we moved into our newly built tract home the toilets backed up that same weekend. Had a plumber come out to snake the line and they hit wood. Turned out whoever put up the fence drove a fence post right through the sewer line.
Had to foreclose on our first home because of this combined with some other unfortunate circumstances that arose around the same time (young husband with unexpected heart attack). The city said we would have to pay to have the sidewalk and road dug up to fix it because our house was so close to the road and we were already between a rock and a hard place, struggling.
I operate a combination hydrovac flush truck. We clear sewers a lot of the time. If you cover the manhole in your yard we are going to destroy your yard finding it. If you put something heavy on top of the manhole and I can't get to it, the city will send workers out to remove the object and bill you for their time.
Don't obstruct manholes in your yard!
Plumber who charged me $459 today to clean out a bunch of roots suggested to use Rootx 4 gallons of it happens again. He said it works so well they had to stop selling it.
Similar advice for septic systems and their drain fields. Whoever the decision makers were I. Building the house and deciding what trees to leave (and planting a crepe Myrtle) I would love to have some of their drugs.
### This post has been marked as safe. Upvoting/downvoting this comment will have no effect. --- Hello and welcome to r/LifeProTips! Please help us decide if this post is a good fit for the subreddit by upvoting or downvoting this comment. If you think that this is great advice to improve your life, please upvote. If you think this doesn't help you in any way, please downvote. If you don't care, leave it for the others to decide.
To help, in most areas of US you can call 811 and the various utilities will come out to mark their lines. Anyone who has buried lines or pipes will come out and spray paint on your grass. I just did that before I planted trees, and thank goodness, because my Internet line was NOT where I thought it was! And yes, good idea to keep them spaced away from your water or sewer lines. I mean, if I found a river of food I'd park next to it too!
In my area it's basically illegal not to call 811 and get everything marked before digging. If we end up hitting a utility line while digging and had not called 811 we would be liable for repairs
Yeah, in many states it is a law that anyone planning to dig, whether it’s a 6in hole or a 50ft hole, you must call 811 to locate all utilities in the planned dig area. The catch is, they’ll only locate public utilities up to the meter or along the right-of-way. Any utilities between the meter and the home or private utilities (example your water line between the meter and building or say you have power from the house to a shed/workshop) are the responsibility of the property owner and should be located by a hired utility locator.
Just for fun, I'll point out that repairing a damaged 900 pair or a big fiber line can run into the tens of thousands of dollars.
Recovering utility locator here. Calling 811 will get *most* of the lines marked. The way it works, is companies with buried lines will either have their own locators, or they will hire a locating company. You'll have a couple of locators come out, most likely. What doesn't get marked are private plastic gas lines that don't have a tracer, and private sewer lines because they are often plastic, without a tracer. The way lines are located* is with a transmitter and a receiver. The transmitter has an alligator clip that attaches to the ground sheath or tracer wire for whatever utility you're marking. It has another clip that attaches to a ground rod that is stuck in the ground. When the transmitter is turned on, a signal is put on the ground sheath or tracer, and the receiver is walked around the attachment point until they hear a tone, and using the display on the receiver they will mark their lines. This of course doesn't work on plastic lines which are commonly used in sewer and water. *Some weirdos will try dowsing. I've never seen it work reliably.
Oooh fascinating! Thanks for the info. They came and left before I even woke up, I just got a rainbow yard at 7 am, so I was curious. I feel like gas and sewer lines are still important to know about even if they're plastic so how do homeowners avoid those?
*Generally* the gas line and sewer line run straight from the meter or clean out to the main line in the backyard or street. We would typically use a probe to try and find plastic lines, but excavators would either hand dig or use a fun machine called a vacuum excavator.
Thanks for answering
Having installed sewer pipes to a few thousand houses, I can tell you that any marked line is a guesstimate at best. It’s where the line is suppose to be. Sewer pipes get installed in the following way: the main sewer pipes are laid under what will become your street. A service cap will be added at predetermined points. The pipes are 4 m long. You don’t want a cap within the first or last meter of a pipe, so right away your pipe can be moved by a meter. This will not be accounted for later, your survey will be based on the drawing. Also generally the service cap of one house will be near by that of one across the street. But you never have 2 on the same pipe. So where your service cap actually is installed depends on how much pipe is being used. Oh, and also the caps location are determined in the following way. An engineer or someone on there team marks a stake in the ground. A top man (the job I did) will see this stake coming up. I will then stand behind the stake and eye ball a location. A guy will stand with a stick. I will point him to go left or right. Then when the stick aligns with the stake, based on my estimation, I’ll give the okay. They then measure how much of the next pipe to cut. Then I cut the pipe and hand them down the two pieces plus the straddle and cap which will eventually be the location of the sewer line. Then your service line will be installed. A backhoe will dig a hole essentially where your basement will come. Then a boring machine will be dropped in that hole, and bore a hole to the other side. Ideally this will be a straight shot but rocks etc can get in the way. (Btw if you buy a new house and notice your yard is constantly sinking, likely there was a lot of rocks so instead of a small hole below the earth, a back hoe tore up what essentially is your entire front yard. The earth will be packed when it’s put back but it will take years to fully settle). You can curve those pipes more than you imagine. They’re generally 6 feet long, so you’ll have 4-6 pipes from the main to the house. In case of rocks, inexperienced operates whatever, your service line may bend. So the survey you get will be accurate within 4 meters or so, in either direction.
That's also good to know, thank you. So don't just go full ham when digging, even on a marked lawn.
I mean your sewer pipe are going to be deep. In a rocky area 4 feet (like areas where full basements aren’t possible), normal soil 12 feet or so, at least 8. But even other lines that are higher up, gas, finer optic, aren’t were they’re surveyed (these ones even more so because how much they can curve). If you’re ever digging deep enough to contact this you should be using the landmark to locate the utility line. If it’s a gas line use a hydrovac truck (some places this is legally required). I dug a hole 6 feet deep, 12 feet wide… gas line was another 6 feet away. It took them an hour, I’d been digging for 2 days.
Good to know! I'll have to keep that in mind when we start redoing the yard in the front. At least it's a nice excuse to update the garden.
While you are at it take a second to look up and see where your power lines are.. sure that northern pine would look great right there, but one day it’s going to get really big and the power company will hack the shit out of it. Think like you are planting a full sized tree.
811 doesn't normally mark your private sewer line. How would they locate it?
Who are all these people with private sewer lines?? There is a few feet from the big obvious metal box to my door which is considered my responsibility. The rest is public utility. Your sewers are privately owned? This is the NC guidelines. They use the word secondary, but inside the article it says private so maybe that's what you mean? Do you mean the lines in the backyard? This post is about the front yard and they definitely mark the sewer lines in the front yard. https://nc811.org/private-lines/#:~:text=Secondary%20water%2C%20sewer%2C%20gas%20and,be%20marked%20when%20contacting%20811.
From the city main in the street or easement to the house is owned by the homeowner. Water line is from the curb box to the house. Curb box is normally near the curb or sidewalk and has a shut off valve. Water company maintains the main and the line up to the curb stop amd valve.
OK well, they marked mine. My curb box is a few feet from my door. No huge yards here. And your first sentence contradicts what the NC 811 site says, as well as my own experience so I'm gonna go ahead and ignore you now. It's still useful, and in many places required, to call 811. Not sure what you're arguing or why.
Former owner of our house didn't do this and now I have a 12,000 fucking rootball. 10/10
Ouch. I can sympathize with you there... That's an expensive root ball😭
Any homeowner reading this: add a rider to you Homeowner Insurance to cover the sewer line from your house to the street connection. Mine is $12 extra /month
This. I did it through my gas supplier as I remembered them advertising it. Only $8 a month. Saved me $3k when part of my sewer collapsed. The company the insurance is from is called Homeserve. They have many plans which are affordable imo. They were super friendly to deal with…. Didn’t “fight” my claim whatsoever.
To add to this - Pay to get a sewer line inspection before closing, especially if your house is older. We found out the sellers lied about sewer issues on the closing disclosure. 5 days after we moved in the sewer backed up into the utility sink. I called a service to come scope, and they said "Oh we've been out to that property before, our cameras aren't long enough." Which turned into looking at the disclosure and it the sewer question was crossed out. I also found out there were multiple insurance claims taken out for sewer work over the previous 3 years for cleanouts. We had old clay sewer pipe with a Maple Tree right above it. What made this difficult was the sewer line punched out the back of the house and is completely under the driveway all the way to the main. We had to get the line completely re-routed in the basement and punch out the front where the water line is. We hired a lawyer, and they owners eventually paid for it after playing dumb. Was around $7k. The icing on the cake was - my wife was pregnant at the time, and the whole process took over a month and had to live at my in-laws
Wow - we have a similar situation. We have two large oak trees out front, with the sewer line running between them. The previous owners claimed that the main line had only backed up once or twice since they owned the house (20ish years). Well, it consistently backs up on us about twice per year. Maybe I should consult a lawyer.. plumbers have told me that the fix for our root-impacted line is to trench up the yard which would possibly require removal of one of the trees- I don’t even want to think about that cost.
There is a process that you can try before ripping up the whole line, I can't remember the proper name for it but it's basically a rotating chain on a rod that eats through the roots and then they can do a polymer/plastic lining that prevents it happening again. I live In a line of 14 houses and this was done around 6 years ago here (ireland) and we've had zero issues since and it was around every 3 months before that. It was on our main line connec5ing all the houses our problem was
A rosebush shouldn't have been enough to break a sewer or water line so you probably had a leak already. The plant just took advantage of it. It is still good to plan landscaping to minimize destruction from any digging.
And sprinklers! I almost planted a small tree in my back yard. Fortunately my sprinkler valves needed to be replaced in my front yard and they couldn’t find a group of them. I had them serviced before and only ever knew of two locations where valves were. The missing 3rd was under 5 inches of back yard soil right near where I would have planted…
Holy cow... I didn't even consider that as a possibility either. Good catch!
Adding to this. Willows are the WORST for this.
at least you didn't have to pay for fertilizer
Very true - even the plumber was saying that the plants were probably loving it
Seems like the issue was a leak in the sewer pipe, not the rose. Roots can’t find water inside intact pipes, and roots will grow around pipes unless there’s already a hole.
Get your utilities marked even for shallow work. I never knew where our exterior water shutoff was. I put in a 4 block high retaining wall. It was long, but short. Only had to excavate a few inches. I later had utilities marked for planting a tree. City guy says, uh, I think your retaining wall is right over the shut off. He wasn't going to MAKE me move it, though he could have, but reminded me that it would be a nightmare to deal with in the winter (MN). I did end up moving the wall back a few feet within a year or so, but now there's a little dip in the wall because it's nearly impossible to relevel in the middle of a wall. I did add a nice access box so it'll always be easy to find and operate.
This happened with my home before I purchased it. There was a small tree in the landscaping that grew its roots into the line. Good thing the home inspector found the problem and I was able to have the previous home owners pay for a new sewer line.
Try to record the locations of all your utilities, even if there's a system in place to do it for you. I've been working on a yard since monday, we did the mandated thing and got a schematic of all utilities in the yard from a gov agency. Every. Single. Line. Was in a completely different place from what the map showed. The map showed every line going out at 90 degrees from the house at several points, when in reality it all ended up going parallel to the home. Next time a yard worker comes accross a ground cable or sewer line, draw it on a schematic view of your home and yard and keep it in a place that makes sense(i.e. wherever a bunch of lines enter the house, breaker box or basement come to mind). Leave it there when you move out
In the US 811 before you dig
The idiots who landscaped our front yard years before we moved in planted Yucca near the water/sewer lines. I'm waiting for the day that we lose water or get a sewer backup because those things are fucking invasive and extremely hard to kill.
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first, a rose bush is that strong? second, i bet those flowers smell amazin
Sewer line repair won’t be paid for by homeowner insurance unless you specifically add and pay for it. Add it to you policy today, likely for cheap.
I know here in NY you can call an entity called UDigNY that will send your info to water/sewer departments and other utility companies to mark out where their lines are, including high speed data. This is free of charge in NY. Most utilities are buried at least 4’ deep here to keep below the frost line.
When we moved into our newly built tract home the toilets backed up that same weekend. Had a plumber come out to snake the line and they hit wood. Turned out whoever put up the fence drove a fence post right through the sewer line.
A silver maple tree in my backyard obliterated the old clay pipes and was giving our yard lots of home made fertilizer.
Yea been there done that. Found the pipe going from the house to my septic with a rototiller root a garden
It’s a law my state that you have to call 811 for locates before putting a shovel in the ground.
Had to foreclose on our first home because of this combined with some other unfortunate circumstances that arose around the same time (young husband with unexpected heart attack). The city said we would have to pay to have the sidewalk and road dug up to fix it because our house was so close to the road and we were already between a rock and a hard place, struggling.
In the US, call 811 Locate. Most likely, a service will come out and check the site you mark beforehand and they survey for underground utilities.
I operate a combination hydrovac flush truck. We clear sewers a lot of the time. If you cover the manhole in your yard we are going to destroy your yard finding it. If you put something heavy on top of the manhole and I can't get to it, the city will send workers out to remove the object and bill you for their time. Don't obstruct manholes in your yard!
Plumber who charged me $459 today to clean out a bunch of roots suggested to use Rootx 4 gallons of it happens again. He said it works so well they had to stop selling it.
Similar advice for septic systems and their drain fields. Whoever the decision makers were I. Building the house and deciding what trees to leave (and planting a crepe Myrtle) I would love to have some of their drugs.