Help me with a Groundwork estimate please?

I always seem far too optomistic when estimating jobs.

Before I go doing it again.

Problem is flow rate from customer cold tap is 2 lpm. I removed stop cock and fitted a new one, took a hose from this to the street so bipassed all house pipework, still only 2lpm.

So I called water board they dug up the footpath and found a flow rate at their tap of 100's of lpm. I wasn't there but they showed my customer at the time.

Their stop tap is about 20ft from where customer's stop cock is, across a concete drive belonging to customer, which gives access to garages which my customer lets out. It used to be a garage forecourt and the disused fuel storage tanks could well cross the path I would like to take, we shall find this out when we start the dig.

As far as I can tell the water company's stop tap serves my customer, and seperately his outdoor tap, and another home owner who also has poor water performance. The outdoor tap has perfectly good performance I didn't have my weir guage when I tried it but felt like 30lpm or more.

The outdoor tap is no obviously on route to the stop cock for the dwelling and neither is the neighbour. It is quite probably that there are other stop taps burried during the process of converting this garage forecourt however many years ago, and that one of those has dropped.

It's a difficult expolarion then to discover where we can pick up a good supply for our customer, but additionally he wants to try and help the old dear next door, but would like her to share the bill. If we are only able to provide him with adequate supply but not her, he has offered to have a supply sent to her adjoining property through his loft, because he's a public spirited sort of bloke and she's a vulnerable old dear. Is he allowed to do this? What hapens if he goes to meet his maker and his son rules with a rod of iron, first change he makes is to cut off her supply, leaving her with her old 2lpm supply.

I was thiunking in terms of hiring Still saw, mini digger, road barriers, warning notices, large iron plates, two men for one or two days.

Have I forgotten anything?

I would simply connect to underground pipe on his property near outdoor tap where there is no problem, with 25mm mdpe.

Complications are old fuel storage tanks, unknown routing of drainage gas and electricity services. If I manage to put the tooth of my bucket through this will the standard Corgi insurance cover the cost of getting those services in to fix it?

for what its worth, r.e. services, call each one and ask em to mark their supply routes

if they mark em at x and you dig at Y and hit it then its their problem

you could also hire A CAT, should find everything there

oh and minidigger, make sure you get a driver, pointless having a minidigger for 2 days and a man whos so slow it will take him 4

also for concrete might be worth hiring a breaker attachment for the digger

Can you get a price from a mole boring company?

Well this is a backward town, although the major utilities use moles I don't expect there are any private companies offering the service here, but I'll do a websearch. I had thought of mole, but decided even if I could hire one, the fule storage tanks would confuse it and send it off in a bizarr direction.

Job done. Fortunately I recently fitted a boiler for an Irish Ground worker. Got him to come to job with me this am, so we could plan it, he decided we needed an exploratory hole, so we got my Kango out but the concreat was so hard after two hours we had a 1 ft cubed hole. We therefore went for a proper hired breaker, exploratory hole was great encouragement so since we had already spent the £35 hire charge we did the job.

Can I just say what a great boon the Irish ground worker was, he knew exactly what was needed, what to expect, in terms of skip size, amount of ballast and cement, which shovels picks and tools for breaker we needed. He vertually single handedly dug the trench, my big strong full time worker Stuart handled the big breaker, I managed (which means run around in van for cement mixer ballast cement hire tools ferry cups of tea face off to customers, deal with merchants, arrange necessary pipework and connections, worry about likelyhoods etc etc, and did a little shoveling to keep me fit.

I was amaised what skill a good groundworker has, I would never have expected to have the job explored dug out, piped up filled in and concreted in a day.

There's a lot of great guys out there, and at last, one job took half the expected time instead of double, which is the norm.