Our street is getting the crap torn out of it. The gas lines are being replaced. Every house with a manhole cover is getting the yard torn up.
We have two houses per meter. So the manhole covers (with the water meter) skip every other yard. I feel so bad for the neighbors with those damn things in their yard. The guy two houses down has huge dozer tracks in his yard. Half his yard is ripped to shreds. I didn’t realize until now that the Gas pipe follows the water.
Thank the Lord I lucked out and got a house that didn’t have a manhole cover. I do have a sewer/storm drain manhole in the backyard along the fence. They come by several times a year to pump it out. But, that doesn’t damage anything.
If you’re buying a house. Pay attention. Notice if there’s one in your front yard. Eventually, there will be dozers digging up the yard. You can kiss all your hard work on the grass goodbye. I pay chem lawn several hundred bucks a year for a nice yard.
Yes, the gas company will throw down some dried out sod. Guess who has to work his ass off watering it and trying to get it established? Yup, the property owner.
I can’t understand why anyone would buy a house with a manhole cover in the front (or back) yard anyway. I’ve never heard of that in my life; they belong in the street.
You want the water meter reader to die? :eek: The meters are in the yard by the curb so they can be read safely. The cover is there so someone doesn’t break a leg stepping in the hole.
Ours are different from my previous residence. At the old place, the water meter was covered by a rectangular cover about 12 inches x 8 inches. My current neighborhood had full size manhole covers about 2 feet in diameter.
I work for a sewer utility. We try to put manholes in the streets, but this is not always feasible. The most important concern is ensuring that the sewers flow properly to the treatment plant with the least amount of pumping.
Sorry, it’s two water meters together in the hole. that way every other house has a manhole with the meters. Saves the meter reader time, since he gets two readings per stop. That’s also my only shut off for the house. I’ve had to turn off the water there a few times for repairs.
Apparently they ran the gas lines in the same trench as the water lines. This is the first time they’ve replaced all the gas lines since I’ve lived here. I guess it’s something they only do every thirty or forty years. The neighborhood was built in the 1950’s.
Are we talking a small cover that you lift off and there is a meter under it or honest to goodness manholes that someone can go down? Because I think you mean the first and people are picturing the latter.
My parents have an honest-to-goodness manhole in their front yard. We used to stand on it to wait for the school bus. There also used to be a sign next to it on a rusty metal pole. Just a little white rectangle with a red line across it. I think it was there to warn snow plows to be careful.
They also have a natural gas access thing in the ditch behind the manhole.
I don’t think their lawn has ever been torn up due to them having a manhole. It is about 3" from the street tho so maybe the street gets torn up? I honestly don’t remember.
There are no sorts of meters in my parents’ manhole (heh heh heh)
I’ve seen neighborhoods where they buried the overhead utilities as a retrofit, and I’m not convinced trading wires on poles for a mushroom forest of metal boxes in the front yard was a good idea.
They tried to balance it out so everyone had just one, but for every person who had a cable TV “pedestal” (a cylinder about the size of a loaf of bread) someone else had either a power transformer bigger than a clothes dryer or a manhole cover on a raised concrete ring. “So they’d be easier to find when it snows” was the reason I’d heard.
I think it’s a standard size manhole cover. I know it’s a bitch lifting up when I have to kill the water to the house. It could take off a couple fingers if it smashed down on them. Underneath are the two water meters. You can’t go down inside it like one in the street. It’s only a shallow pit that’s maybe 15 inches deep. Just enough to keep the meters from freezing.
The house I rented years ago, had one like your picture. That was very easy to open when I needed to kill the water to the house.
Our water meters have always been inside the house, in the basement. In the house I grew up in and in my own first house, the guy would come every month, go downstairs, and read it. In my current house he reads it remotely, from the street. I’ve never heard of a meter in the yard, under a manhole.
that is a warm climate thing. where i’ve been in ground freezing winter climates the water lines were below frost depth and the meters inside the houses in the basements.
My thoughts exactly! At first I thought “whoa, the OP must be Barbie or Ken.” It took me several readings to finally get that aceplace57 meant meter as in the thing that measures usage.
The meter is the usual point of demarcation between the utility’s property and the homeowner’s property. Everything downstream of the meter is owned by the homeowner and replaced onthe homeowner’s dime.
It would be a good time to replace them though - the lawn is already torn up, and if the pipe is steel and 50 years old, they probably need replacement.
Yup, the property owner.