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Tyrion_toadstool t1_j2iu0rx wrote

A few years back the area my parents live experienced a drought with no rain for 6 weeks or so. Almost all their grass died, but they noticed some mysteriously green areas in their yard and a small amount of water pooling and they thought their septic tank was leaking.

It turns out the water main that basically ran underneath their property and served the whole neighborhood was leaking. I don’t remember the exact figure, but it was leaking a staggering amount of water - something like 5 or 10 gallons per minute, every minute, all day, every day. Thankfully they live at the top of a large hill, so the water was pulled away from the house and property by gravity and had plenty of ground to seep into.

But without that drought this may have continued for years and years before it was noticed.

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SeriousPuppet t1_j2j4qg4 wrote

Geez. Do you know the diameter of the main? Just curious. Trying to visualize how big it is and how big a crack/break would be to leak that much water.

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Shmeepsheep t1_j2jalc2 wrote

That's really not that much water if you've ever worked around utilities. It's about the equivalent of a half inch copper line.

From a quick googling a residential sprinkler system uses between 12-30 gallons per minute. So about half of what it takes to run a sprinkler system

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SeriousPuppet t1_j2jgjyh wrote

Wow. Then wouldn't the fixtures downstream (ie where the water ends up, faucets etc) notice a big drop in water pressure?

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Shmeepsheep t1_j2jgyk7 wrote

The farther you get from the source the lower the pressure will be. A home only really needs like 40psi to operate correctly and many times has 100+psi that needs to be reduced because of this.

Also a small leak is not going to noticeably drop water pressure in a 6" main

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Tyrion_toadstool t1_j2j7604 wrote

I do not. I remember it was an old main that I believe was made of metal. It was replaced entirely with a main of much smaller diameter made of an entirely different, modern material (I can't recall what, exactly). We were told the new main would perform as well as the old one, despite being smaller, and that seems to be the case as we noticed no difference in water pressure after it was installed.

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Ok_Island_1306 t1_j2koezo wrote

This is similar to how they discovered more ancient Celtic archeological sites in 2018 bc they had a drought and things dried out except certain places and they realized they were henges made of wood and the wood was still below ground retaining water and things were still green above them

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