Inexpensive Repair For Leaking Water Lines

Inexpensive Repair For Leaking Water Lines BUILDINGS Houses 23-6-39 Desperate situations call for innovative solutions. That's how Carroll Kallevig managed to repair a leaking buried water line without having to spend hours trenching to dig it up. At the same time, the owner of Kallevig Pump Service, Irwin, Iowa, also saved his customer hundreds of dollars. "To get the water back on in a hurry, we simply slid smaller diameter plastic tubing into the leaking pipe," he says. He's made this repair dozens of times since then with great success. One satisfied customer, Marlin Petersen, Kirkman, Iowa, alerted FARM SHOW, saying it was a great way to avoid expensive trenching. Says Kallevig: "If the leaking pipe isn't full of hard deposits and is otherwise still intact, we can push rolled plastic pipe through it for several hundred feet." If the original water line was 1 in. steel, he uses 1/2-in. rolled black plastic pipe. For 1 1/4-in. steel pipe, he uses 3/4-in. plastic. For a longer line, Kallevig says some excavation may be necessary. "You can push the plastic line only so far and then you need some help," he says. So if the repair will be more than 200 ft. or so, he digs up the old line in one or two spots and cuts out enough pipe so a worker can help feed the plastic line through. The longest distance he's run one of his repair lines is about 500 ft. That was a line that ran under a highway and buried power lines to a house. "Replacing the line would have taken hours, and we'd first have had to have the utility company come out and mark their lines for us. And going under the highway would have been very costly." Kallevig says there's no real trick to making this kind of repair. "I always taper the end of the line so it will slide past any obstructions in the line. If there are elbows in the line, you can't push the plastic line through them." But, Kallevig says," you can dig them up and make a curve in the line or push a new line in at the corner and then connect the two." If water lines run under pasture or alfalfa fields, Kallevig recommends using heavy sheet metal or 1 1/2 or 2 in. angle iron to make a covering over any bare plastic tubing where you've dug up the line to make a place to push or connect to another line. "Gophers have a tendency to dig into the trench and may chew up the plastic line if it's not protected," Kallevig says. Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Carroll Kallevig, Kallevig Pump Service, 106 Cora, Box 302, Irwin, IA 51446.

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