How to find underground utility lines before digging
Get your lines marked and flagged before digging in your yard to plant trees so you avoid damaging shallowly buried cords. Messing with exposed cables risks breaking them and forcing a call to a technician from your provider.
What the numbers show
Counted from the threads quoted below. How we count
- This comes up 26.9× more often in r/Landscaping than across the site as a whole.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
Found another way around this?
Share your steps and trade-offs so fellow engineers don't have to reinvent the wheel. No account required.
- 1Getting lines marked and flagged before digging.Did this help you?
- 2Calling internet customer supportDid this help you?
- 3Trying to manually trace buried cordsDid this help you?
- 4Leaving exposed portions of utility lines unburiedDid this help you?
- 5Planting trees further away from utility linesDid this help you?
- 6Checking for utility easements before landscapingDid this help you?
- 7hand dugDid this help you?
- 8Choosing shallow root system plants like gardenias, boxwood, azaleas, or Dwarf Nandina.Did this help you?
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“I got word that there is a gas line 3 feet below the surface where I was planning to plant arborvitae trees for privacy.”source ↗
“Thanks, first time home owner and I didn't know this.”source ↗
“Previous owners planted some (maybe quince?) bush right over the gas line. I can't get rid of the goddamn thing. It sprouts all over the area, I can't dig it up because the root system is too invasive and probably intertwined with the gas line, and I can't get a stump grinder in there without probably blowing up the neighborhood.”source ↗
“Make sure you get your lines marked and flagged before you start digging around in your yards to plant trees.”source ↗
“I would say my preference is about 1 foot from the red line.”source ↗
“worked with a locator who marked our trench line six feet off, we hand dug for an hour before realizing the flags were just decoration”source ↗
“Just hit a cable line today that was 25’ from the flags. Not sure why they even bother.”source ↗
“We are planning to put pavers along our side yard since (apart from the moment I chose to take these photos 😅) the sun doesn’t hit this side area well, so only weeds seem to grow consistently.”source ↗
“1) a confirmation that running a conduit from the different boxes on the side of the house, under where the pavers will be, would be sufficient in the case that the buried cords are damaged or for whatever reason need to be replaced and”source ↗
“2) where the hell the other end of the orange cord goes from our internet box after it’s buried? It wasn’t buried super well as two portions of it are sticking out, but we don’t want to start messing with things and suddenly we’re need a tech from our internet provider to fix it.”source ↗