If you want your home to have a great exterior appearance, you need to put your utilities underground. Otherwise, you’ll have unsightly pipes, wires, and cables crisscrossing over your landscaping and your home’s exterior. Although buried utilities are highly preferable, they are more difficult to install than their above-ground counterparts. With the right tools and procedures, though, you’ll be able to successfully keep your property looking great.
Make sure to keep your utility lines separate, minimize disruption, survey the ground, think about weather hazards, and hire and expert for dangerous work. By following these tips, you will be able to install underground utilities in the best way.
Keep Them Separate
First, you will want to be careful to keep your utility lines separate from each other and know where each one is. When it comes to installing different utilities, it’s important to know that you can’t keep everything in the same trench. After all, you don’t want your sewage and water pipes too close together, as that could risk cross-contamination. Therefore, it’s important to dig separate trenches for water, sewer, phone, electrical, and other types of utilities so that they can perform correctly for many years to come.
Minimize Disruption
Although using a backhoe is an effective method for digging a trench, it can be quite disruptive to your property. Plus, if the lines you need to tap into run under your street, you’re looking at a major expense if you have to break through the asphalt. Find a residential drilling company that offers directional drilling, and you’ll be able to minimize the impact on your landscaping while still gaining the necessary trenches.
Survey the Ground
In many areas, there is a vast network of pre-existing underground utilities. The last thing you want to do is damage one or more of these utilities while you’re doing work for your home. That’s why it’s vital to have the entire area surveyed prior to beginning your project so that you know exactly which areas to avoid. Otherwise, you could be in for major fines if you happen to cause damage to a major utility line.
Think About the Weather
When laying underground lines, you need to be sure that you install them to help prevent any problems with them during their lifecycle. After all, you won’t be able to easily access them to perform repairs after they’re buried. That’s why, especially in the case of water lines, you need to bury utilities deeply enough so that they won’t be affected by changing weather. You’ll also want to protect the underground lines so that burrowing animals don’t find them and destroy them.
Hire An Expert
Although burying your own utilities is something that you can technically do yourself, it makes much more sense to hire a contractor to do the job. With so much heavy equipment and careful organization required, a professional will help you save time and money on the project, even when factoring in the cost of the contractors. This will help you to move on to other home projects that are better suited for a do-it-yourselfer.
