Last weekend, as the weather was good and the ground was above freezing we decided to dig. We weren’t just digging any hole, but were trying to find the old waste water/sewer pipe. Paul Sinnott, our plumber, was hoping to connect a new pipe to the existing pipe near where it went under the pavement/sidewalk, thus hopefully saving us from the cost of digging up the road etc. Our aim was to expose about five foot of the pipe so Paul could see what the deal was.
We knew the old pipe ran roughly parallel to the side of the house and rather than dig it up all the way down we dug an exploratory trench about 10′ foot up from the pavement/sidewalk and once we had located the pipe we roughly knew where we should start digging near the pavement.
On Saturday, adjacent to the pavement we went down about 4′ and nothing, then some of the soil under the pavement fell away revealing a terracotta pipe. I had no idea what this was, possibly a sewer pipe, possibly not, either way I’m glad we didn’t damage it. This pipe is shown below. Still no sign of our cast iron pipe, so further digging was required.
On Sunday we another exploratory dig 5′ back from the pavement, went down until we hit our cast iron sewer pipe and worked our way to the pavement and as you can see we revealed about 5′ of pipe, which goes beneath the terracotta pipe by about 18″. There were no obvious holes in the cast iron pipe, but the outside corrosion looked pretty bad and I wouldn’t be surprised if we need a new pipe from the edge of our property to the main sewer which I believe runs down the middle of the road.
In the end the hole was maybe 5′ deep in parts but luckily the soil here is very sandy so the digging could have been a lot worse. We covered the hole with branches and leaves to make sure no one falls in [spfx: evil laughter]
“We covered the hole with branches”, you mean you dug a pit and covered it over to see if someone would fall in it.
Well the supermarket had run out of meat so I figured …