In article ,
Stephen writes:
Hello,

I have discovered that I have a lead water pipe and that it is shared
with my neighbour. I have contacted the water company and they have
told me that I will have to change the bit on my property.

Why are you wanting to change it?
If you are in a hard water area, it will have an internal scale
coating by now.

I have a concrete path down the side of the house, so hiring a big
drill to dig it up could be fun.

I was going to ask how deep should the water pipe be but the recent
post "replacing services to the property" gave me some useful
information. In that thread, 30 inches was given as the depth and it
was suggested to use the largest MDPE pipe allowed (32mm).

I think it's actually 750mm depth.
If you can't make it that deep, there are insulated sleeves you
can use. I couldn't go that deep because the supply wasn't that
deep, so I taped a length of 1mm T&E along the pipe with all
conductors (including the earth) crimped and soldered together
at the far end. If it ever froze, I would pass a heating current
along the cable. IIRC, it was 15m long, and I found a 12V
electronic lighting transfer with 250W output would dump something
over 200W into the cable (you can't just work it out using resistance,
because the skin effect predominates given the high frequency supply).

That thread also talked about running ducts for various things. Would
you run the water in a duct. It would make it easy to replace in
future but you would lose the colour coding as the blue pipe would be
hidden.

Nowadays, it gets run in ducts through things like concrete
foundations, although not normally the ground. The duct might
well carry any leak into the house, which might not be desirable.

My main worry is hitting another service. How do you avoid hitting the
gas and electricity: just dig slowly and carefully?

Yes, and have an idea where they are.
I had to tunnel under the gas pipe to make it deep enough.
Gas pipe was bright yellow plastic covered steel, although they
can just be plastic (exactly same as the water pipe, but yellow).
Although I crossed the path of the mains cable, I did not find it,
presumably it was deeper. Old ones can be quite fragile.

I do see two problems if I go ahead and replace the pipe.

1. My neighbours might not want the expense of having their branch of
the lead pipe removed. How would I cap the pipe? I've never worked
with lead, so I might need someone to do this for me.

I bought an MDPE to lead coupler - there may be similar caps.
You are not suppose to leave a deadleg on a water supply pipe,
as it will become stagnent water, and might trickle bacteria
back into the supply.

2. My house is slightly higher than the neighbour's house. There are
about five steps up from the street to my house. Could this mean the
pipe is very deep? Would it be 30" below street level, rather than 30"
below house level, or would the pipe just have to follow the slope and
steps and be 30" below the surface.

I'm hoping the water company is sending someone out to have a look and
chat with me about this.

Thanks,
Stephen.

--
Andrew Gabriel
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