Lol! you obviously haven't been out in the real world or reading the posts on this forum about all the plebs calling themselves builders recently.The thing is, pipes and cables are not put in the walls in random places. I seem to have managed without one for, well, forever.
There have been conventions about pipes and wiring for decades. Unless installed by a complete moron you can normally reckon that things run vertically or horizontally away from, for example, an electrical wall socket.
Hey Opps,
In case it helps all the capping in my house is ferromagnetic (if that's the right word). I find a decent Neodinium magnet is an essential part of my toolkit (no, not the puny ones like in the picture here, but a decent one for about a fiver off Ebay) which I use not only for detecting capping but also for finding dry-wall screws in joists. Very handy particularly for getting the joist position for a light fitting (if you don't want to use PB fixings). You just locate a few of the screws, then draw a pencil line through them and join them, chances are if you screw through somewhere on the line you'll catch the joist unless your plasterers put the screws all over the bloomin' place performing 'exploratory' scewings because they couldn't be bothered to mark up the joist on the adjacent PB. I told mine to stop doing that .
Try to find a magnet with a hole in the middle that you can stick a pencil through, that's also handy.
I know it relies on the capping being there and I don't think capping is required by law, but for the 2 seconds it takes you to wave the magnet it may be worth it.
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