As a property owner, you have a lot of things competing for your hard-earned dollars. There are things like property taxes, insurance premiums, as well as the costs associated with making upgrades and completing general maintenance. When you decide to make changes to your property, you likely look for ways to keep costs down. You might shop around for materials and service providers to get the job done at the most affordable price, or consider what things you can do without.
When excavating on your property, one thing you shouldn’t skimp on is GPR scanning services. This type of service will tell you what is located below the ground’s surface so you can excavate accordingly to avoid buried hazards. Fortunately for property owners, the adoption of new technology in the underground scanning industry has made locating hazards easier, and more affordable. Ground penetrating radar, or GPR for short, is the most widely used technology in the industry. It allows scanning technicians to easily scan a piece of property and gather important data almost immediately, which a property owner can then use to make informed decisions about where to excavate.
Most savvy property owners would consider investing in GPR scanning services to be money well spent. However, some property owners have to learn the hard way about the value of knowing what’s below the ground’s surface prior to digging. These property owners may not want to spend the money on GPR scanning services, but will likely regret that decision when they hit a buried hazard during excavation, such as a utility line or an underground tank. The cost to repair the damage will likely be far more than what they would have spent on GPR scanning services.
For other property owners, it’s not a conscious decision to not have their property scanned. They might not even know that GPR scanning technology exists! In still other cases, the property owner may have called 8-1-1 to have their property scanned for public utilities and assumed that was good enough to proceed with the excavation. However, many properties also have private utilities on them, which the 8-1-1 service will not scan for.
Unless you have completely raw land that has never been developed, the wise thing to do is to have it scanned prior to performing any improvements that require excavation. You just never know what a previous owner may have buried—until you accidentally locate it while digging. There are probably several GPR scanning services near you, but if there aren’t any, you can likely find one that will be willing to travel to your area to help you with your project. Look for a company or individual that specializes in GPR scanning, rather than just an individual who owns a GPR scanner and does jobs on the side. Some projects require the special expertise of a highly trained technician.
