Utility Locating Guides
Practical, vendor-neutral guides on how locating works, what each instrument can and cannot see, where 811 stops, and the decisions that keep a shovel out of a live line.
What Private Utility Locating Costs, and What Moves the Price
Nobody publishes a rate card for locating, and the ones you find online are guesses. Here is what a locating company is actually pricing when it quotes your site.
7 min readRead guideGPR vs Electromagnetic Locating: What Each One Can Actually Find
These are not competing products, they are two instruments that cover each other's blind spots. Knowing which one your job depends on tells you what to ask for.
8 min readRead guideWhen to Hire a Private Utility Locator
One-call is free, required, and incomplete. Here is how to tell whether it covers your job or stops short of it.
6 min readRead guide811 Call Before You Dig: What It Covers and What It Misses
Call 811 — or your provincial one-call centre in Canada — before every dig. Then understand precisely what the ticket did and did not cover, because that gap is where most private-property strikes happen.
8 min readRead guideUtility Strike Prevention: A Working Playbook
Strikes are overwhelmingly preventable, and the causes are boringly consistent. Here is the sequence that removes them.
8 min readRead guideSUE Quality Levels Explained: QL-D, QL-C, QL-B, and QL-A
A line on a drawing tells you nothing about how it got there. Quality levels are the standard that fixes that.
8 min readRead guideUtility Locating Equipment: What Is Actually on the Truck
In locating, the instrument is the constraint. What a crew can find on your site is decided before they arrive, by what is in the van.
7 min readRead guideHow to Read Utility Marks on the Ground
Marks are a language, and most of the people digging near them were never taught to read it. It takes ten minutes.
6 min readRead guideHow to Locate Plastic Pipe and Empty Conduit
The hardest problem in locating is a plastic service with no tracer wire and no open end. Here is what gets tried, in order.
7 min readRead guideConcrete Scanning Before You Core, Cut, or Drill
A core barrel through a post-tension tendon is a structural repair, not a patch. Scanning is the ten minutes that prevents it.
6 min readRead guideMarks, Sketches, or a Map: Choosing a Locating Deliverable
Paint is gone in a few weeks. Whether that matters is the whole question, and it decides what you should be buying.
7 min readRead guideResidential Utility Locating: What Homeowners Need to Know
On a residential lot, most of what is buried belongs to you — and none of that gets marked by the free ticket.
6 min readRead guide
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