Key takeaways
- Locating is a fraction of the cost of exploratory digging, and it decides how small the excavation can be.
- Depth, hardpan, boulders and groundwater are what make Kitsap excavation slow.
- What's over the pipe matters as much as what's under it: lawn is easy, concrete and pavers are not.
- A spot repair on sound pipe and a full replacement of an end-of-life line are very different jobs, and the pipe itself decides which you need.
Locating
The locate is the least expensive part of the job and the part that controls everything else. A pinpointed leak means one small excavation. A guess means a trench, and in Kitsap hardpan a trench is a long day. The locate's scope depends mostly on the length of the line, whether its route is known, the pipe material, depth, and background noise. A short copper line on a city lot is quick; a 400-foot plastic well line through forest takes longer and leans on the correlator.
Excavation
The excavation is where the range is widest. The first factor is depth: a line eighteen inches down in a planting bed is a hand-dug pit; a line three feet down under a gravel drive is machine work. The second is soil: topsoil over outwash digs fast, hardpan with cobbles and boulders digs slow, and clay sticks to everything. The third is water: in the wet months a pit on a Kitsap lot often fills as fast as it's dug and has to be pumped. The fourth is access: a mini excavator that can drive to the spot saves hours over hand work, and a lot that it can't reach means shovels.
Surface
What's on top of the pipe gets removed and restored. Lawn is simple. Bark beds are simple. Gravel is simple. Pavers come up and go back down. Concrete and asphalt have to be cut, broken, removed and patched, and on a long run under a paved driveway it is sometimes better to re-route the new line around the slab than to cut through it.
The pipe
A spot repair on a sound line is a cut, a coupling and a test. A full replacement of a line that has failed before or is made of polybutylene, old galvanized or brittle poly is a trench or a pull from end to end with new continuous pipe. The pipe exposed in the first excavation is what decides which you need, and a candid contractor will show you.
Restoration
Backfill in compacted lifts, regrading, seeding or sod, gravel raked back, beds rebuilt. The scope of restoration follows the scope of the excavation, which is another reason the locate matters.
Written by the crew at 360 Leak Finders
We locate, excavate and repair buried water lines and exterior drains across Kitsap County, 24 hours a day. If this guide raised a question about your property, call (206) 354-9906.