Spent $180 on a ground-penetrating radar rental, found a buried cistern before it ruined my dig

Honestly, I almost skipped the rental and just started trenching at my site near Flagstaff. My buddy who works on utility locates told me to stop being cheap. We ran the GPR over a 40x40 foot grid and flagged a weird round anomaly only 3 feet down. Turns out it was a 19th century cistern full of collapsed rocks and old bottles. If I had dug through that blind, I would have lost a day and probably broken my shovel handle. Anyone else ever had a rental tool pay for itself that fast?

1 comments

1 Comment

the_mia5d ago

Wait, did you find any of those old bottles intact? I once spent a whole weekend hauling a rental metal detector around my grandma's old property in Ohio because she swore there was a buried treasure from her uncle who ran moonshine during prohibition. All I found was a rusty horseshoe and a bunch of old nails, but the weird part was the detector kept going off near this one oak tree for hours. Turned out there was a massive underground root system with a bunch of metal tags from when the county surveyed the land back in the 40s, so I get how a tool can totally change your whole plan. The cistern thing is way cooler though, at least you got bottles out of it, I just got a lesson in how roots grow.