Exterior water leak.

[Bogart]

Have a leak on the pipework coming from the water meter to the property. I need to find the position of the leak. The leak is definitely outside the property.
All I can find are general builders /plumbers who have no experience of this type of work. I know there are dedicated firms who deal in this matter but I wondered if I am missing the obvious
person to contact.

 

[noj]

How long is the run from the meter to the property?
And how easy is it to access?
It may be quicker and cheaper to simply replace the whole run...

 

[a twig]

If you put “Outdoor Leak Detection” into your favourite search engine you should find a range of companies that will help in this situation

 

[Lacan07]

Its a shame its not your meter thats leaking (quite common), even off your property, as it would be the responsibility of the Water company.

 

[Bogart]

Run is some 40m with 10m under a patio. There is a 'T' somewhere which could be the culprit but again no idea that it is.

 

[Bogart]

Watches all the YouTube videos about trying to find the leak. Even resorted to water divining. You may laugh but there is something in it. I was very sceptical at first.
I used a couple of welding rods and with some sucess have found some underground pipes. Not the ones I wanted but hey ho works to a degree. The journey continues.
A few more holes in the ground will matter as I have quite a few now.

 

[Toby Newell]

Watches all the YouTube videos about trying to find the leak. Even resorted to water divining. You may laugh but there is something in it. I was very sceptical at first.
I used a couple of welding rods and with some sucess have found some underground pipes. Not the ones I wanted but hey ho works to a degree. The journey continues.
A few more holes in the ground will matter as I have quite a few now.

Water dowsing 100% absolutely does not work and I even believe in quantum physics, which is a billion times crazier. Unlike quantum physics, by dint of which you are able to read this on your device, there is no proof or even mechanism of explanation of how dowsing works, it is simply quality, old fashioned woo.

However. It seems like fun!

 

[Toby Newell]

All observation in the known universe involves interraction with EM radiation, ie, photons.

Your eye balls are observing the divining rods / sticks movement by processing the photons bounced off them from either a torch, or from the sun.

What are your divining rods observing? Where are the photons? Unless your water contains a large amount of radioactive isotopes, it does not emitt anything. Thus there is nothing for your rods to see unless they are emitting their own photons.

Ground Penetrating Radar creates microwaves that bounce back to a detector, these are hand held close to the ground and can cost less than a thousand. Magnetic Resonance detectors create HF radiation that excite H protons in water, like a medical MRI, are bigger and cost a lot more.

Water is not magnetic or paramagnetic, it is diamagnetic. It doesn't create a magnetic field, it repels them. Even if you were able to detect subtle changes in magnetic field, like a bird, dog or shark, you would still need to fire some photons in order to initiate information transfer. That's how the MR scanner works. But it has to send out high frequency photons to excite the protons in the water's hydrogen atoms in order to detect the peturbation.

A man who can detect water with a stick should also be able to see inside someone elses skull. MRI scanners would be a lot cheaper.

Unless your eyeballs, or divining rods are radioactive, then that is not the case. Apparently Thames water still use them. Thames water are a joke company that leak 60% of the product they transport. These two things may be connected.

It's not that humans cannot assimilate skills and abilities that are extra ordinary, some blind people have learnt to echo locate, it's more that instantaneous information transfer without the movement of photons violates general relativity and quantum physics.

As such it would open up the possibility of faster than light travel, teleportation and telepathy.

Seems like a bloke randomly finding water, some of the time is somewhat missing out on greater opportunities...

 

[Toby Newell]

Sorry, I like magic, I also like science, because at a fundamental level it is even crazier than magic.

Try this experiment.

Go out into a field, in winter, in the middle of the night, on a moonless night, in a dark sky area, like the Isle of Sark, in the pitch black.

Now look at your divining rods.

That's exactly what they see.

 

[CliffordPope]

I can just about believe that an old countryman attuned to all the various happenings in nature can make a shrewd guess where there might possibly be water, by noticing trees and variations in patterns of natural growth, etc. He may possibly not be fully aware of precisely which features he is aware of, and may perhaps just have a "nose" for things that townspeople do not see. Similarly he might "read" the weather, sensing the whole picture of wind, clouds, humidity, sky patterns, clouds, and so on.
His divining rods might simply be a device for aiding concentration, a bit like beads on a rosary. Also he is perhaps aware that observers might expect the standard tricks of the trade. He would be less convincing if he was careless about what he used, and waved a bit of junk out of the dustbin.

All that said, the accuracy bar is not very high, and there is water all over the place. I could dig a hole practically anywhere on our property and guarantee to hit water, perhaps at 1 foot, perhaps not till 10.

 

[Toby Newell]

There is more sub surface water on the planet than all the rivers and lakes in the world. Free water that is. Water that is bound up in rocks, then there is more than all the seas.

 

[Bogart]

They did not pick up surface water or sodden underground soil but pipes carrying water, now explain that? I love black magic and the fact the earth is flat!

 

[Toby Newell]

They did not pick up surface water or sodden underground soil but pipes carrying water, now explain that? I love black magic and the fact the earth is flat!

Lol. They may indeed have 'found' pipes, especially if pipes were expected to be found nearby.

It's just that like claims of telepathy, when tested, they don't do any better than random chance.

And locally the earth is flat.

 

[Bogart]

Me thinks you are a sceptic.

 

[Toby Newell]

Me thinks you are a sceptic.

Possibly.

I just think that if people are going to usurp Einstein, Bohr and Planck with a non photonic instantaneous information transfer theory then it would be more useful to humanity for them to concentrate on codifying a theory of quantum gravity first, before they nip out to the back garden with the twigs.