Barney's Blog

Drain location to depth of 6-8m is relatively easy using a suitable battery powered drain Sonde propelled through the sewer and located on the surface using a conventional pipe and cable locator with a Sonde depth mode like the vLocPro, vLocCam and RD4000. Greater depths to 15m are locatable with a higher powered Sonde, but [...]

The Russian pipeline company security man was wearing just what a Russian security man should wear. Dark Glasses, even though the weather did not require them. A ¾ length black leather jacket, it might not have actually been leather but who cares, as it hid most of the bulge of the weapon under his left [...]

Many towns and cities had their gas utility system installed more than 70 or 80 years ago and will almost certainly use cast iron pipes for the urban low pressure gas distribution system. Gas distribution systems were also using “town gas” at the time. This was gas derived from coal, and required a manufacturing plant [...]

Moscow is a city of extremes; hot summers and cold winters means that utility pipes for water and gas are buried deeper than in more temperate climates to avoid extreme temperature changes. Much of the housing in city and suburbs are large apartment blocks built in a hurry after the war, marginally improved now, and [...]

Public authorities sometimes seem to ignore common sense on construction projects and not consider costs of moving utilities in their plans, or forget that there are utilities underground. Sewers and drains are generally the deepest utility, and the cost to move them due to the deep excavations necessary is high. Discovering them halfway through a [...]

One of the difficulties facing drainage engineers is finding and linking up new drains and sewers to old systems that have acceptable capacity and still function well. Sometimes CCTV inspections show a missing chamber where they can connect, but its cover is missing on the surface so it cannot be located accurately enough to plan [...]