apache23
Member
My neighbor has a water leak after the meter under a 20ft, 10 year old tree. The main line is copper and was installed 37 years ago. He first noticed the leak seeing water run across the sidewalk, which is about 15 ft from the tree and the yard slopes towards the sidewalk, so the tree is about 1 ft or so higher than the sidewalk. Since I couldn't tell where the water was coming from, I turned the water off at the meter and hooked my air compressor up to an outside faucet nearest the leak and put 50 psi through the system. The sound was the loudest almost at the property line to the left of the tree where I dug the 3 holes. But that's about 5 ft off of where the main line would be at if it were to run straight up towards the house and not at an angle like it looks coming out of the meter. I guess my main question would be, would they run a main line at an angle or did they correct the pipe's angle and run it straight towards the house? Is there an easy way to find copper pipe that's 24" deep in heavy clay soil? It's been leaking for at least 10 days because we had to wait for utilities to get marked. Sure wish the water dept. would have came and marked the line for us...lol. And btw, there is no sprinkler system or anything else, so the main goes directly into the house. Below is an eerily accurate photo of the yard and my works so far...lol!....yeah.....not an artist in the slightest....