Hit my plastic oil pipe with a spade .....

[Rollerball]

While doing a spot of gardening today I managed to hit my plastic oil pipe with a spade - I always wondered where it ran underneath the garden, now I know ......

Curiously enough, whoever installed it (over 15 years ago) used a blue water pipe (it has WATER printed in black on the side).

From the point where it connects to the (copper?) pipe that enters the side of the house and connects to the boiler I can see that the pipe is about 2.5mm thick, yet the nick that the spade put in it is less that 0.5mm deep and about 6mm long). The diameter of the pipe is about 2.5cm

Being something of a worrier I can't help but wonder if anything needs to be done on the back of this - there's nothing leaking from it as the nick is so very shallow, but over a period of time will the integrity of the pipe be affected and maybe mean that area becomes a weak spot?

I'm pretty sure that it's not a problem but thought I'd get some advice from the experts here.

 

[oilhead]

Are you sure that the blue pipe is not just a sleeve?

 

[Rollerball]

That's a very good point, it may well be - I can see the copper pipe entering the part of the blue plastic pipe that comes out of the ground besides the house and had just assumed that the copper length was short and was somehow connected inside the plastic pipe, but your suggestion makes a lot more sense.

Thank you, I believe you've hit the nail on the head (or, in this case, hit the pipe with the spade).

Edit: An additional thought - bearing in mind that copper pipe buckles when it bends, how was this plastic covered copper pipe bent to go around corners? From looking at where it goes to/comes from there should, in theory, be two or maybe three 90 degree bends. It would be hard to put such a bend in the copper pipe once it was inside the plastic pipe (due to the risk of buckling) and if it was carefully bent beforehand it would be hard to get the thick plastic pipe over the bent copper pipe or even over a right angled connector. Maybe the bends have a very wide arc to avoid buckling of the copper pipe, therefore it could consist of a number of large S-bends.

I'm just curious how it would be done.

 

[Terrywookfit]

10mm Soft copper tube.

Should be 450mm deep with a warning marker above it.

 

[oilboffin]

Yup