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Professional well contractors may use electromagnetic mapping to look for places with a high likelihood of water. Water access can vary significantly, even on the same property, so it can be difficult to know where to drill if you don’t have specialized tools to look for water.

Prior to excavation, you should prepare the dig site and call 311 before you sign anything.

To get your site ready for excavation, you should move anything in the area that isn’t affixed to the land. You can save money on the excavation by removing hardscaping, including walkways, decks, concrete patios, and paver patios.

Before you carry out any digging, you should call 311 to confirm that there are no utility lines running through your excavation site. Skipping this step could lead to severe injury and property damage if your excavator hits a water, sewage, or gas line.

Soil testers and licensed excavators are often the professionals you hire if you need a perc test. In some cases, structural engineers will also be able to conduct the test for you. In many municipalities, you’ll need your professional on-site to dig and fill the holes with water, as well as a representative from your local building department or health department. That representative is the individual who will determine whether your test passes or fails.

The small lines on the tape measure either indicate inches, fractions of an inch, or centimeters and millimeters. On the imperial unit side (aka the inches side), the longest lines indicate inches, followed by the next shortest lines that indicate a half-inch, and then the quarter, eighth, and sixteenth-inch. On the metric side, the lines break down meters, centimeters, and millimeters.