Weird Pipe Found Buried in Yard

[-MIKE-]

I'm getting ready to build a "Florida Room" on the back of our house. I'm clearing out some bushes and plants to make way for the addition. I found a 1.5" sch.40 PVC pipe running straight away from the house, next to the driveway pad, in between the pad and where all the vegetation was planted.

On the far end out near the vegetation, was a PVC threaded end cap with a pipe-thread adapter and a pneumatic male coupler tool connector. The nipple hole of the coupler had been sealed with what I think is pipe solder. I drilled it out and it had the same consistency.

I sent a plumbing snake up the pipe towards the house and it hits right near the foundation, but not any further in.

Any ideas what this was used for? First thing I thought was some sort of hand watering quick connect. But why 1.5" sch.40?

By the way, the inside of the pipe was bone cry and fairly clean.

Weird.

[Keith Nuttle]

Could it have been the conduit for an electric wire to some sort of light at the end of your driveway

Have you tried to find the point that it enters hits the foundation of the house? If you have a basement you may be able to find where it comes through the basement wall.

In one house we had, there was an electrical line that came out of the vent in the foundation of the house and disappeared under the ground. I know they had a water feature in the front yard and assumed it was for the pump.

[-MIKE-]

I dug it up at the foundation of the house and it has a 90° elbow coming straight up, with a dry-fit cap, just a couple inches under the soil.

Mystery to me why it was put there, but here's the funny part. I need to run electric out to my Sharn and am dreading having to get it past the concrete driveway. The path of this pipe isn't the spot I wanted to go, but since it's already under the patio pad, I might use it. :-)

[Keith Nuttle]

See; I told you that it had an electrical cable;-)

[Puckdropper]

-MIKE- wrote in news:pesbu8$jqo$ [e-mail]:

That air hose fitting makes me wonder if it was for a sprinkler of some sort. In the winter, they could hook a compressor up to blow the pipes out.

Puckdropper

[pyotr filipivich]

-MIKE- on Fri, 1 Jun 2018 16:39:30 -0500 typed in rec.woodworking the following:

Ah yes - "Before we start this project, lets take a look at what we have, and we'll design it from there."

[krw]

Hey, that's better than "Before we figure out what we want to do, let's take a look at what we have.".

[Jack]

Other than the "pneumatic male coupler" I'd guess it was put there in case they wanted to run electric or water under the patio. Also, are your sure it's a Pneumatic coupler and not a high pressure hose or water quick connector? They look almost the same but are not. Regardless, it would appear to me whatever it's purpose it was not used so most likely put in "just in case".

[Jack]

Last summer I dug up a clogged gutter drain pipe 50' from my house. When I pulled out the pipe, there was a 14 gauge electric wire crossing under the pipe. Luckily I missed chopping up the wire by about an inch. No idea what it was for, probably an old, long gone driveway lamp. Later digging next to the house, I found a line coming out of the house about a foot under ground going who knows where, but I think it is still live.

[-MIKE-]

I agree. My guess was some sort of handheld watering system, but 1.5" sche40 is not the way to go for that.

[-MIKE-]

Funnier part... finding this pipe under the pad distracted me so much that I forgot that I had already figured all this out. :-) I can't use that path because it I would have to take a hard right turn and then another left to go around the end of the septic system's leach field. I don't like the prospect of pulling #6 through those bends on a

100'+ run.

On the far edge of the driveway is a row of 80ft Poplars. Because I don't want to dig through their major roots, I can't use a ditch-witch to trench that path.

At the corner of the garage where I intended to start the underground conduit, there is an expansion joint in the parking area pad with asphalt expansion joint filler. The path along that joint is far enough away from the leach bed and far enough from the tree roots that I can go straight back along that expansion joint. All I have to do is rent a concrete saw and make one cut a few inches from the existing expansion joint and then fill it back in with Quickcrete when I'm done laying the conduit.

That will be easier than hand digging a trench around 3-4" tree roots and trying to weave the conduit over and under them.

[Puckdropper]

-MIKE- wrote in news:peu87s$cli$ [e-mail]:

My most recent wiring project was running outdoor rated CAT6 out to the garage. You're already digging for one set of cable, might it be worth digging for another? (Cat6 is easy to terminate, just use a punch down connector and a decent punch tool.)

You can't run network cable close to power cable, though, unless you take certain precautions. Parallel runs are a bad thing, but if you must go close to power cables you can enclose the cable in a grounded pipe. I didn't run in to these problems with my cable run, so I didn't research them further.

Puckdropper

[OFWW]

Nowadays it is far wiser to Wifi to the garage.

grounding issues are always a problem, and I am speaking about the earth ground differences. It can create a capacitance that will blow out a NIC and sometimes the whole computing device electronics.

Even on high rise bldgs over a large footprint the grounding may be different from one side of the bldg to the other and so you cannot directly link devices for that reason. I have seen serious signal degradation even on a 60 ft underground run that really slowed down communications. Enclosed in water tight conduit and verified it was dry and no shorts due to scuffing when the cable was pulled.

Just a thought.

[-MIKE-]

My buddy is an IT guru and he told me to run CAT10 with the AC and I'd be fine.

[pyotr filipivich]

[e-mail] on Fri, 01 Jun 2018 23:01:51 -0400 typed in rec.woodworking the following:

Done that too.

[DerbyDad03]

Would you have to pull through the bends in one pull? Could you do it in se ctions before you glue(?) the connections? That's how I did the power and cable (TV) out to m y shed.

Pull it through a bend into the open air, then slip on a length of straight pipe, twist to glue, wash, rinse, repeat until the destination is reached.

[-MIKE-]

That's an option, yes. I'd rather not do that. My friend is an electrical engineer with AEP and he's advising me on the best way to do it. We discussed that option and for varies reasons, decided against it.

[OFWW]

I am Cisco certified, it is not recommended.

[-MIKE-]

60 cycle interference?

[J. Clarke]

The important issue is what code says and I believe that code says that data cable must be in a separate conduit from power cable.

The crosstalk issue, while real, is much overblown--AC is 60Hz, Ethernet today is 100-250 Mhz. Any 250 Mhz transcierver that can't reject 60Hz is crap. The overvoltage issue is also overblown with Ethernet--modern Ethernet is transformer-coupled and in any case the actual risk if you blow both ends is under a hundred bucks worth of hardware.

It was more of an issue with phones--nobody wanted to answer the phone and get a load of high voltage for his trouble.

The big issue though is that somewhere down the road some moron is going to assume that there is only data cable in the conduit, run a fish tape down it with the power on, zap himself, and possibly burn down the building.

In the early 1980s the Hamilton-Standard factory in Windsor Locks CT (roughly a million square feet, roughly 10,000 employees) was shut down for a day because somebody tried to pull a phone line through a power conduit. He got himself electrocuted (he survived mostly due to the fast action of one of the engineers) and set the building on fire. Part of the factory was shut down for a week due to no power while the conduit was replaced and the wiring pulled and tested, this time sans data cables.

This is the big reason to keep them isolated.