Pole Barn:Electric and H2O

[Bird]

Richard, I may have misunderstood, but I thought Bill knew where the pipe was; just not where the problem is in the pipe. I have a 4' probe made for the purpose of locating underground pipe. I've had to use it once to find my water line to barn when I had a leak (fortunately only a foot deep), once to find a water main that crosses my property (2 feet deep) when the two guys from the water company couldn't find it, and once to find the main along the road (3 feet deep) when it was 10' from where a neighbor "remembered" it being. It works well in soft wet ground (after a leak or lots of rain), but is impossible to use around here during the summer./w3tcompact/icons/frown.gif

Bird

 

[cowboydoc]

Tdog,
Boy that's a great idea to run another wire for turning on lights before you head for the barn. I will surely be doing that on the new place that I'm building.

 

[DrDan]

I know it's more expensive, but once in Iowa when I was farming there I had a water line freeze that was 36" deep. Fortunately for me and the land owner, the pipe was galvanized and it was simple to unfreeze. A man came with a welder and long cables. Put one lead on each end of a 100' line and fired up the welder. Within 5 minutes all was well. He was gone in less than a half hour. Expense but convenience if ya don't like digging in the winter!

Dr Dan

 

[Bird]

Dr Dan, the first time I ever heard of thawing water lines with a welder like that was years ago when my brothers told me about doing that in Anchorage. Of course, I've lived most of my life where anything 6" underground is safe from freezing./w3tcompact/icons/laugh.gif

Bird

 

[cowboydoc]

Dr. Dan,
Where did you farm in Iowa?

 

[DrDan]

I was about in the middle of the state. Was hired hand and lived on a dairy farm for 2 years while finishing my Bachelors in Dairy Science at Iowa State U. (Lived in Huxley, IA) After I graduated they wouldn't let me into Vet School cuz I was a non-resident. Moved to a 550 acre grain/swine finishing farm in Story City and did field work and half interest in swine finishing. We sold about1200 market hogs a year and grew corn and soybeans. I loved it - wish I had stayed.
Flat fields and the best of equipment to operate.

Dr Dan

 

[WVBill]

Bill:

I used the THWN wire in PVC as a price trade-off, mainly. I couldn't find direct burial cable UF in a large enough size without going to a direct burial service entrance cable at 4-0 Al. I'm pretty sure that black poly is OK for continuous line pressure. That's what they put in to connect my well pump to my house.

If you can go deep enought to get below the freeze line then by all means, do it. I was digging my trench with my middle-buster so went the blow-it-out route.

Another thing I thought about but didn't get around to doing is to bury one of those plastic "caution" tapes (e.g. "police line - do not cross") in the top 4" or so of any trench. Easy to find if you're looking later and a quick warning if you forget.

 

[heehaw]

i'm surprised i haven't read anything about laying a pvc line for compressed air; the only thing i have run into that i would like to have an don't is the air line..pvc is pretty cheap and works fine for compressed air.
heehaw