Moxi wrote: ↑Wed Dec 14, 2022 3:40 pm
I haven't checked yet but common sense suggests that the owner of the highway needs to know whats under it to a given depth at least so in my case this would be the local council dept.
I did recently look for and find a civil contractor in my area that does ducts etc and they deal with all the planning notifications etc - I am yet to commit but the reason was that with the EV6 due soon and with the car parked over the road it makes sense to have a charging point installed over there for that and any subsequent EV and as you say while doing that get two or three 100mm ducts laid in for spare.
I could even install extrasolar panels across the road then ?
all plans that seem to gently be coming closer to fruition but as JB and others acknowledge its essential to bring the better half along gently with the concepts to avoid strife.
Moxi
It's all a bit vague, in my experience, and I fully accept that thing may well vary wildly from one council to another, but my experience of running things across roads may be of interest. I needed to run a length of MDPE wate drain pipe from my sewage treatment plant pumped treated water outlet, under the lane and into the stream. I also needed to re-direct a telephone cable (multicore one) under the edge of the lane, because it ran overhead and I needed to remove one of the poles (would have been where our drive is) and I wanted to get rid of the overhead cables.
I didn't mole under the lane, as at the time I had two big diggers on site and a ground works crew of four, so it was cheaper and easier to dig trenches. The ground works company held the required street works licence, but this only covers resurfacing the lane to the local authority standard (really just means he knows how to make a long lasting road surface repair I think). Road surface digging also needs a fee to be paid to the council and may need an (expensive) road closure order. Going under a road without disturbing the surface just seems to need a check to see what else might be under there - there was no fee to be paid I think. I did not need to get consent, wayleave or anything from anyone to run a pipe across the lane, all they were bothered about was that the surface was properly repaired (sent a bloke out specially to check, afterwards).
I found that no one actually knew what was under the lane at all either. There's a service you can sign up to that is supposed to collate all the records and tell you whether it's safe to dig, but I found it was hopeless. Same goes for all the utility companies. Before digging the council made me contact dozens of utility companies (I think it was around 50 in all) that were on their list as possibly having services in our lane. At least two thirds of them never responded. Of those that did respond the water company (Wessex Water), the DNO (then SSE PD) and did BT OpenReach (eventually) all confirmed they had no services at all in the area (they were lying, but never mind).
As it happens our ground works chap was familiar with the absence of records from the utility companies so didn't trust them. He used the digger to take the surface off, then started hand digging across the trench to check if there was anything there and found an ancient and very rusty water main, still live. The water company knew nothing about it, had told us there was no mains water here, so I'd already spent a few thousand on digging a well by then! I was not at all a happy bunny. The water company came out with a CAT and traced the pipe up the lane, then supposedly updated their records to show that they had a pipe there. In reality they didn't, the pipe burst a few days ago, they came around and denied any knowledge of having any water main under the lane and accused me of creating the leak in the lane. Sometimes you really couldn't make this stuff up.
My take would be that if you wanted to run a cable duct under a road, then the approach I would take, in light of what I know now, would be to hire a CAT and do a check for services under the road, do a visual check for things like manholes and access points for any services, then just mole across at a depth below where any services are likely to be. With the exception of public sewers, services generally won't be deeper than about 800mm down at the most, most are around 700mm usually. Sewers can be a lot deeper, but can be checked by lifting manhole covers usually.
Not hard to dig a mole entry and exit hole either side, on your land, making sure it's about a metre down, then I reckon you should be fine. The process is so quick that it's unlikely to even be noticed, except by nosey buggers like me that are fascinated by the way this stuff gets done.
25 off 250W Perlight solar panels, installed 2014, with a 6kW PowerOne inverter, about 6,000kWh/year generated
6 off Pylontech US3000C batteries, with a Sofar ME3000SP inverter
The Solis has some weird logic - out of curiosity I didn't realise that the Techview app allowed full change of all settings - all I could see when I finally managed to get the password was some hardcore settings for stuff like volts and phase and grid settings rather than the higher level stuff in the menu?
- a mist has descended in the East after a bright start - not that it would help as my battery is stuck at 5A charge rate :/
