Private Utility Locating

What Private Utility Locating is

Private utility locating is the search for buried lines that belong to the property owner rather than to a utility company. A one-call ticket notifies the member facility owners, and they mark the public lines they own, free, typically ending at the meter, the pedestal, or the edge of the right-of-way. Everything past that point is private: the water service running to the building, the gas run out to a shop or generator, site lighting and sign circuits, irrigation mains, sewer and septic laterals, and the power and fiber feeding a second structure. Those lines are the property owner’s responsibility, they appear on no one-call map, and in most cases no as-built drawing survives either. A private locating company is hired by you rather than by the utility, and it sweeps the whole site: the lines you know about, the lines nobody remembers, and the abandoned runs left behind by previous owners.

How it works

Most of the work is done with an electromagnetic pipe-and-cable locator, a paired transmitter and receiver. The locator energizes the target line by direct connection at a water meter, valve, riser, pedestal, or panel — never directly to live gas piping, where the tracer wire is clamped or a signal induced instead — by clamping an inductive coupler around it, or by inducing a signal from the surface when no access point is available, then walks the receiver over the ground and traces the field radiating from the line. Non-conductive pipe needs a different approach: a sonde, meaning a small transmitter on a push rod or camera head, is fed through a plastic water line, sewer lateral, or empty conduit and tracked from above, or the installer’s tracer wire is traced in its place. Ground penetrating radar covers what the electromagnetic side cannot reach, since plastic pipe with no access point, septic tanks, vaults, and voids appear in the radar record as reflections rather than as a traced signal. What the locator finds goes on the ground as paint and flags in the APWA uniform color code, blue for potable water, yellow for gas, red for electric, orange for communications, green for sewer, purple for irrigation and reclaimed water, and is normally backed by a field sketch with measured offsets to permanent features so the marks can be re-established after rain or traffic.

When to choose Private Utility Locating

Choose private utility locating any time the digging is on private property and the one-call marks stop at the meter: building additions, footings and foundations, fence and sign posts, tree planting, geotechnical bores, light and flag pole bases, and trenching across a parking lot or a campus. It is the right call before demolition, before closing on a property whose buried infrastructure is undocumented, and after a strike when you need to know what else is in the ground before work resumes. Facilities and plant managers use it to rebuild site knowledge that walked out the door with the last person who knew where things ran. Call 811 or your provincial one-call center first, since that notification is free and is required by law before excavation across the US and in much of Canada, then bring in a private locator for the rest of the site. If the answer needs to outlive the paint, ask for the locate to be delivered as a drawing or a GPS file rather than surface marks alone.