Any contractor who is going to become involved in any sort of excavation or digging must be aware that there is always the chance of striking an underground cable, gas pipe, water pipe, sewer, and more. These utilities can be absolutely anywhere, even in places that on the face of it seem very unlikely. Fair enough, if you are digging in a street full of shops or in a residential close, it is fairly obvious that there will be electricity cables, sewer pipes, water pipes, and so on, but they can be literally anywhere.
What that means is that it is necessary to take every precaution in order to ascertain if there are utilities where you are going to dig, and if there are to locate exactly where they run. Fortunately, there are several tools that can help to locate underground services such as the Cable Avoidance Tool, or CAT, the signal generator, known as the Genny, and so on.
One tool that is frequently used is the Vivax Metrotech vScan which, according to the manufacturers, has been designed to make buried utility detection simple and cost-effective. They say that you don’t need to be an electronics expert to get the best out of it, as the main controls and features are in keeping with industry standards. However, as with all these tools you really do need training in how to use them in their various modes, and vScan training is no different.
Part of the problem is that you need to understand the limitations of these tools – and they DO have imitations. For instance, one thing which seems obvious when you understand why is that you may get a negative reading and believe there is nothing there. However, if the tool can only read to a certain depth and the utility is below that depth you will get a negative reading!
No comments:
Post a Comment