Underground Cable Tracing.

Go to the hire shop and get a CAT tracer and generator. Attach to the conduit and job done.

Quite seriously, make a couple of divining rods from some steel wire or similar and give them a try.

You will need an electricians spade to dig down to confirm the location ?

Zoom you ask what is the best method of detecting underground cables.  That in my humble opinion would be ground penetrating radar. 

CAT and genny is good but not as good as GPR.

Connecting the cable to the genny when it is enclosed in steel conduit will effectively screen the cable. Connecting the genny to the steel conduit will be better but it is contact with ground so would attenuate the signal. The CAT will work without the genny to detect metal depending on depth. I saw a CAT detect a besa box lid  in a soil back fill. 

Have a look at the Wiring Matters article on TT earthing shows a suction method for excavation which I have seen done to great effect. Other than that careful hand digging with an insulated shovel.

Sparkingchip: 
 

Quite seriously, make a couple of divining rods from some steel wire or similar and give them a try.

You will need an electricians spade to dig down to confirm the location ?

Chap I know who was a real sceptic witnessed it done and could not believe it worked, he was gobsmacked that it did work.

Must admit I wonder how on earth it can possibly work

Dowsing usually has an arrangement where tiny movements in the hand are amplified - e.g. holding out horizontal rods where a slight tilt of the fist will cause the rod to swing, or a forked stick under tension.

This then means that slight subconscious movements or slight changes in the terrain will cause a signal. So for example if the dowser thinks they may be passing over a pipe or whatever, they may tense slightly, which causes a signal.

So it “works” by a combination of the dowser's expertise (concious or subconscious), luck, selection bias (you forget all the times it failed), and the fact that in England if you pick just about any random spot and dig down, you'll find water or at least something of interest.

Under controlled conditions, dowsers usually perform no better than that expected by chance.

?

Sparkingchip: 
 

Quite seriously, make a couple of divining rods from some steel wire or similar and give them a try.

You will need an electricians spade to dig down to confirm the location ?

I await the arrival of the men in white coats.

Napoleon XIV - They're Coming To Take Me Away - Bing video

Z.

 

Have a look at the Wiring Matters article on TT earthing shows a suction method for excavation which I have seen done to great effect. Other than that careful hand digging with an insulated shovel.

I had better not borrow an electrician's insulated shovel as some of the run is under thick concrete. I imagine that the owner of the shovel will not be best pleased when I use it.

Z.

I had an interesting interlude back in the summer.

Having driven down to to a job on Salisbury Plain I pulled into Woodhenge, the site of the timber version of Stonehenge.

So I was sitting in the middle of Woodhenge drinking a mug of coffee when a lady arrived and started dowsing with a crystal pendant, I was wondering what it was she thought she would identify, presumably ley lines?

There was a bit of polite conversation and she said she would really like to try some rods, I said I had some in my van that Ron from the Dowsing Society had sold me whilst I was at the Rollright Stones on the way home from another job.

Wandering around the Rollright Stones with dowsing rods was an odd experience, both the lady and myself tried them at Woodhenge, but they were no where near as responsive.

Just because you cannot explain something doesn’t mean you should dismiss it.

I dismiss them not because I can't explain explain them, but rather because

a) I can explain them - they are explicable in boring mundane terms, as I have done above.

b) because people like James Randi have performed controlled tests where dowsers have consistently failed. In one experiment they  buried 10 parallel plastic water pipes in a big wide pit. After first allowing each dowser to examine the ground for any anomalies, they ran water though one of the pipes selected at random. The dowsers consistently failed to identify which pipe had the running water better than chance.