06-12-2025, 06:06 PM
According to the old geezer survey crew chief I posted about above, he said anyone could do it. There was no magic in the person, it was the copper rods which did the dowsing. According to him, you just needed to hold the rods level and loosely enough to let them do their thing.
I tried it once with some brass brazing rods bent similarly. It 'sort of' worked, but I had a pretty good idea where the water was so I would say I was biased. There was no bias in the experience I described above. There was no way to bias anything, and it was the first time any of us had been to that property.
I neglected to mention something in my previous experience. When I said we tried all sorts of different techniques, I was being serious. We had some other instruments, one of which was a laser which we could shine down the known pipe. Once we acquired the laser at the far end we could measure the signal strength and deflection. Another pipe in the line would affect the deflection, but this only really worked if there was a large volume of water moving through the pipe when we did this test (which there wasn't). The other test we ran was effectively a sonic test. It worked along similar lines, but used ultrasonic sound waves to measure intensity on the receive end. Inside diameter and pipe length would let us compute expected values, and any values different from this would indicate an anomaly. From there, we could zero in on where the anomaly was occurring. Neither of these tests revealed anything conclusive. This is what led to the dowsing attempt.
According to the old surveyor, dowsing needed water (or liquid) to work. However, there wasn't much water (if any, in some locations) inside this pipe. My conclusion from this was that volume of open space or different density had something to do with the phenomenon. I know there are many, many, doubters, and I understand, but like I said...I've seen it work, in person.
I tried it once with some brass brazing rods bent similarly. It 'sort of' worked, but I had a pretty good idea where the water was so I would say I was biased. There was no bias in the experience I described above. There was no way to bias anything, and it was the first time any of us had been to that property.
I neglected to mention something in my previous experience. When I said we tried all sorts of different techniques, I was being serious. We had some other instruments, one of which was a laser which we could shine down the known pipe. Once we acquired the laser at the far end we could measure the signal strength and deflection. Another pipe in the line would affect the deflection, but this only really worked if there was a large volume of water moving through the pipe when we did this test (which there wasn't). The other test we ran was effectively a sonic test. It worked along similar lines, but used ultrasonic sound waves to measure intensity on the receive end. Inside diameter and pipe length would let us compute expected values, and any values different from this would indicate an anomaly. From there, we could zero in on where the anomaly was occurring. Neither of these tests revealed anything conclusive. This is what led to the dowsing attempt.
According to the old surveyor, dowsing needed water (or liquid) to work. However, there wasn't much water (if any, in some locations) inside this pipe. My conclusion from this was that volume of open space or different density had something to do with the phenomenon. I know there are many, many, doubters, and I understand, but like I said...I've seen it work, in person.