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Installing an Underground Wire

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Video Transcript

Do you have a project coming up at your home where you have to get a wire, a cable, a pipe, whatever it might be, something that is kind of small underneath a brick, concrete block top or some hard paved surface and you do not want to be like Steve McQueen and his bodies in the movie "Great Escape" and dig it out, land on your belly with a shovel like this. Guess what? What would you say if you use something like this? It is a chisel cut on a standard PVC pipe and we are actually going to use this to drill a hole underneath the sidewalk.

To try to show you how this works, we have taken a piece of plywood here to try to kind of represent where a sidewalk or a piece of masonry might be. Now the trick is you are going to have to dig a trench perpendicular to the sidewalk so that you can put the piece of pipe down in the trench and then drive it underneath the sidewalk. I got my little temporary trench done and the point is we are going to actually use this pipe as a hyperthermic needle. We are going to put it into the trench and we are going to use this sledge hammer to drive it into the soil just about 2 or 3 inches and then we are going to pull it back out. You just twist the pipe and that twisting motion cuts off the soil inside the hole. You pull it back out and look at that mud inside the hole. That is a good thing. Take a small diameter pipe. Slide it into this pipe and not that soil out.

Now you just keep going. It really is not as hard as you would think it would be. Well you can see how easy it is to actually create this opening underneath the sidewalk. There is really nothing to it. Once you get it all the way through, you might actually want to keep the pipe inside the sidewalk and inside the hole, the reason why it actually creates a future conduit in case you need to run another wire underneath the sidewalk at a later date. I am Tim Carter, AsktheBuilder.

If you want to discover more home improvement tips go to asktheBuilder.com.
Do you have a project coming up at your home where you have to get a wire, a cable, a pipe, whatever it might be, something that is kind of small underneath a brick, concrete block top or some hard paved surface and you do not want to be like... click to read more


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