What we locate
Find the Lines Nobody Marked
Private utility locating covers the buried lines on your side of the meter: water, gas, electric, sewer and septic, fiber and telecom, and irrigation. Pick the one you need found and describe the site once. We send your request to locating companies that cover your area, and local companies send you their own quotes.
Not sure which one it is, or dealing with more than one? Say so in the request. A locator sweeping a property finds what is there rather than only what you asked for.
By utility
What locating companies find and mark
Each one hides differently underground, so each one is traced differently. Pick the closest match and the locating company confirms the approach on site.
Water Line Locating
Find the water line before the excavator does.
Locating and marking potable service lines, irrigation mains, private fire loops, and well lines in APWA blue. Modern plastic water pipe carries no signal, so the job usually comes down to tracer wire, a sonde, acoustic tracing, or ground penetrating radar.
Get quotesGas Line Locating
The highest-stakes line on the property.
Gas line locating finds and marks buried natural gas and propane piping in APWA yellow before anyone digs. One-call covers the utility’s side up to the meter for free; the run past the meter to a house, shop, generator, or fire pit is the owner’s, and that is what private locating covers.
Get quotesElectrical Line Locating
Live power is easy to find. Dark conduit is not.
Electrical line locating finds buried power on a site: the utility service up to the meter, and everything past it that a one-call ticket does not cover, from parking lot lighting to EV charger feeds and generator runs. Loaded live circuits trace in minutes, while de-energized, spare, and conduit-only runs need active tracing or ground penetrating radar.
Get quotesSewer & Septic Locating
Laterals, tanks, and drain fields with no map.
Sewer and septic locating finds the lateral running from a building out to the main or the tank, along with the septic tank, distribution box, and leach field. These lines are nearly always privately owned, rarely documented, and outside the scope of a one-call ticket in most jurisdictions.
Get quotesFiber & Telecom Locating
Glass carries no signal. Locate before you bore.
Fiber and telecom locating finds buried communications cable and conduit in APWA orange before excavation, boring, or coring. One-call marks carrier plant up to the demarcation point at the building; campus backbone, building-to-building links, and every owner-installed data run past that point are private and are what a locating company is hired to trace.
Get quotesIrrigation Line Locating
Plastic pipe, no map, and a wire worth following.
Locating sprinkler mainlines, laterals, drip zones, valve boxes, and controller wiring in APWA purple. The pipe is non-conductive PVC or poly with no tracer wire, so the practical trace path is usually the solenoid valve wire running in the same trench.
Get quotes
Public lines stop at the meter
Call 811 in the United States, or your provincial one-call center in Canada, before any excavation. The ticket costs nothing, it is required by law before digging in most jurisdictions, and it notifies the member facility owners so they can mark the lines they own. That coverage ends where their ownership ends, which in practice is the meter, the curb stop, or the property line.
Everything past that boundary belongs to the property owner: the service run into the building, the yard hydrant and hose bib, the irrigation mainline, the feed to a shop, a barn, or a pool, the septic lateral and drain field, and whatever a previous owner buried without recording it. No one-call member marks any of it, because no one-call member owns it. A private locating company is who traces that side, which is why the two are booked together rather than one instead of the other.
Marks from either service are a guide, not a guarantee. Keep hand or vacuum excavation inside the tolerance zone even when the paint looks unambiguous, and treat depth from any surface method as an estimate until the line is exposed.
How locating companies find them
- Private Utility LocatingEverything past the meter, found and marked.
- Ground Penetrating RadarRadar imaging that finds plastic pipe and voids.
- Utility MappingTurn a locate into a permanent CAD and GIS record.
- Line MarkingAPWA color-coded paint and flags on the ground.
- Subsurface Utility EngineeringASCE 38 quality levels, sealed and survey-grade.
- Leak DetectionPinpoint the leak, dig one hole instead of the run.
- Concrete ScanningScan the slab before you core, cut, or drill.
- Vacuum PotholingThe test hole that turns an estimate into a measurement.
Private utility locating by state and province
- Alabama568 cities
- Alaska249 cities
- Arizona388 cities
- Arkansas506 cities
- California1461 cities
- Colorado407 cities
- Connecticut200 cities
- Delaware76 cities
- District of Columbia55 cities
- Florida941 cities
- Georgia619 cities
- Hawaii251 cities
- Idaho206 cities
- Illinois1364 cities
- Indiana657 cities
- Iowa869 cities
- Kansas551 cities
- Kentucky541 cities
- Louisiana469 cities
- Maine429 cities
- Maryland739 cities
- Massachusetts501 cities
- Michigan690 cities
- Minnesota820 cities
- Mississippi356 cities
- Missouri898 cities
- Montana304 cities
- Nebraska447 cities
- Nevada110 cities
- New Hampshire247 cities
- New Jersey616 cities
- New Mexico377 cities
- New York1391 cities
- North Carolina735 cities
- North Dakota240 cities
- Ohio1175 cities
- Oklahoma637 cities
- Oregon361 cities
- Pennsylvania1819 cities
- Rhode Island59 cities
- South Carolina386 cities
- South Dakota284 cities
- Tennessee436 cities
- Texas1608 cities
- Utah325 cities
- Vermont172 cities
- Virginia562 cities
- Washington610 cities
- West Virginia391 cities
- Wisconsin792 cities
- Wyoming157 cities
- Alberta30 cities
- British Columbia28 cities
- Manitoba18 cities
- New Brunswick14 cities
- Newfoundland and Labrador12 cities
- Nova Scotia13 cities
- Northwest Territories5 cities
- Nunavut4 cities
- Ontario40 cities
- Prince Edward Island8 cities
- Quebec32 cities
- Saskatchewan20 cities
- Yukon4 cities