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 people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
- 1Getting lines marked and flagged before digging.
- 2Calling internet customer support
- 3Trying to manually trace buried cords
- 4Leaving exposed portions of utility lines unburied
In their words
Unedited, most upvoted first, each linked to the thread it came from.
“Make sure you get your lines marked and flagged before you start digging around in your yards to plant trees.”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 ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
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- 20Electrician installed an outlet instead of a generator inlet box