Is it for real or not? I've just paid a douser to look for underground water on my little farm. He says there is there is water at a certain depth at a certain location. The information seems to be too good to be true. I wasn't keen on getting a douser but the driller I am dealing with said they always get a douser in to scout out the best location.

There is a lot of skepticism about dousing. I'm not keen on spending a few thousand dollars to have a hole dug that is dry.

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Mobydisc said..
There is a lot of skepticism about dousing. I'm not keen on spending a few thousand dollars to have a hole dug that is dry.

What about prayer?
You could employ one of those newly monks that pray for miracles.Specificcally those recent for cave resque have a plenty experience with water.

PM33 - here's one for you!

Maybe the answer is to make these people accountable in that if they douse (is this the right term) water in a certain location, a bore is sunk and there is no water there, then they are held accountable for the cost. Also if there is water there, they get a bonus.

Maybe is a sewer line forgoten about

I watched an episode of 'outback gold hunters' or whatever it is called, and they wanted to get water for their wash-plant. They just chose a spot that they wanted because it was near their plant.

They just drilled, and got nothing, so they kept drilling until they hit water. Given that it was very unlikely in the beginning, I wonder if its just a matter of drilling deeper until you hit the water table? Come to think of it, it does sound unlikely that water would be available only in a particular spot. I doubt it would be running like a river.

But, I don't really know.

I did see some discussion about taking a property back to its natural water flows instead of building channels and dams where it suits the farmer. I think this might have more to do with where the clay is in the ground and preventing the water leeching away... but again, this is for surface water.

Yes keep digging and eventually something will be found. If the dowser's finding is true it would be wonderful in that I could retire to the farm and grow many vegetables and plant many fruit and nut trees.

A small farm farm can produce a lot. Even now I grow a lot of food on one 2x1 meter raised garden bed and a few planter boxes. I really enjoy gardening.

I worked for the CSIRO in Namibia in the desert in
Hereroland doing geophysical soundings which were used to map the water table.

The local government official was not happy with the time it took, very tedious and excruciatingly boring, so he brought a driller in who also happened to be what they call a deviner over there.

He was also a driller and when I met him he had already begun drilling and had found water. Nothing miraculous in that as there were already quite a few productive bores around although the quality of some was a bit suss.

Point is is that he gave me a demonstration of how he went about finding water using a forked stick from which he had stripped the bark. He held it so that the two forks were in either hand protruding from the little finger end of his palms and the single branch pointing upwards.

He then oaced over where where it was that he had found water and the branch visibly bent down toward the earth. If it was a trick I cannot think how he did it and I was equally convinced that he believed in it.

I know he was also very keen to show up our six man crew and all our sophisticated equipment with his forked stick!

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Mobydisc said..
Yes keep digging and eventually something will be found. If the dowser's finding is true it would be wonderful in that I could retire to the farm and grow many vegetables and plant many fruit and nut trees.

A small farm farm can produce a lot. Even now I grow a lot of food on one 2x1 meter raised garden bed and a few planter boxes. I really enjoy gardening.

Read Peter Andrews book back from the brink and check out some of Geoff Lawton's permaculture work in the Dead Sea. His water harvesting and conservation work has produced astonishing results.

Ground water is great for plants Moby , you get free Calcium and Magnesium generally. Saved my bacon plenty of times.
If your analysis comes back with iron above 0.05 mg/L it can cause problems to membranes for osmosis filtering.
Bruce Dey from Vertex hydropore in Hornsby is incredibly knowledgeable and talks lamen

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japie said..
I worked for the CSIRO in Namibia in the desert in
Hereroland doing geophysical soundings which were used to map the water table.

The local government official was not happy with the time it took, very tedious and excruciatingly boring, so he brought a driller in who also happened to be what they call a deviner over there.

He was also a driller and when I met him he had already begun drilling and had found water. Nothing miraculous in that as there were already quite a few productive bores around although the quality of some was a bit suss.

Point is is that he gave me a demonstration of how he went about finding water using a forked stick from which he had stripped the bark. He held it so that the two forks were in either hand protruding from the little finger end of his palms and the single branch pointing upwards.

He then oaced over where where it was that he had found water and the branch visibly bent down toward the earth. If it was a trick I cannot think how he did it and I was equally convinced that he believed in it.

I know he was also very keen to show up our six man crew and all our sophisticated equipment with his forked stick!

Long time back, an old chap who was a water driller, also showed me and two others how he ran the water divine process similar to your description with a supple thin forked branch from a gum tree. I was still in high school and skeptical as most.
One thing he swore on was the finger prints one ones fingers. Those with circular prints majority fingers, had better results than those that had just swirls (I know you are now looking at your finger tips )
So he had reasonable idea of lays of the land being a long time local driller, and a very good success rate, according to local farmers he sunk bores for.
He set about marking where he thought the best prospects were in a particular location. He didn't tell us (three young blokes) where, and then gave us instructions on how to hold the forked branch to try our luck.
We wondered about for a few hours, with unusual results, the branch gently pulling down in certain areas.
The end results he drew a mud map and marked where he felt was correct, and asked us all to keep separate and also draw mud maps where we thought we felt it indicated water.
I was, and still to this day stunned that we all marked close too and to some extent within 25 meters or so where he had indicated on his mud map
And yep, he sunk a bore, and plenty of water
He did tell us that he had his bad drills, and no water, but these were few and far between.
He has passed many years back now, but locals still chat about his uncanny ability

Thanks for sharing.

After receiving the divining results I contacted the driller & asked if the information provided by the diviner is enough to drill in a certain place. He said usually it is and this diviner gets good results. The diviner is quite old and quite busy with divining. The drilling company seems to get good results getting water too.

If the information is half as good as what has been diviners, then it's great.

get 2 pieces of wire ,put a right angle bend so you have 300mm on the long side.hold them sticking out front and walk across the area .you might surprise yourself. if they swing out ,or in then walk ahead turn around ,walk back and they will do the opposite. It freaks you out. I use it to find water and retic pipes in customers gardens ,and it blows people away, then you get the customer to have a go. its really simple.

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landyacht said..
get 2 pieces of wire ,put a right angle bend so you have 300mm on the long side.hold them sticking out front and walk across the area .you might surprise yourself. if they swing out ,or in then walk ahead turn around ,walk back and they will do the opposite. It freaks you out. I use it to find water and retic pipes in customers gardens ,and it blows people away, then you get the customer to have a go. its really simple.

I'll give it a go when I head back to the farm. Since my last post my nephew who is in the army told me he can divine too but he doesn't know how one divines what depth water is nor its quality or source.

I've decided in the meantime to try to improve the water supply differently. There is a shed with a roof area that I'd estimate to be around 200 square meters all up. Currently the rain falling on this roof is not collected. There is a 20,000 litre water tank that can store rain falling on most of this roof area.

I will try and clean up and repair the gutters on this shed and then fit a downpipe to the tank. I'll see if I can pump water from this tank uphill to either the main house tank or a smaller holding tank. This should be fairly doable and at a much lower cost than drilling a bore. Of course its dependent upon the rain coming. The rain will come sooner or later. If it all works out and water can be pumped automatically to the top tank with the pump controlled by one or two float switches I will then look at installing more water tanks down the bottom so the water capacity can be increased.

Knowing my luck it will be pissing down rain when I go up there and I won't be able to do this work.

Top tip: Yelling hallelujah on top of your lungs while you are doing it increases the wow factor for your gullible audience

It's crap.
My business does locate works for water and sewer, burst pipes etc and I come across people that say they can do it. They have never been on target once in my 25+ years of doing it.
But they always say they were close (not really close at all) or find an excuse.

I think there have been tests on water divining and it's accuracy. Basically they all find it is rubbish with no accuracy above random chance.

I'd like to believe because I'm drunk.
But it's not going to happen.
I remember watching a tv show , it was a English university offering big dollars to anyone who could show anything spooky , call it want u want , in a controlled environment . Hundreds attended , from spoon benders to read the one in four card , not one came even close .
Cos it's a load of imagination fuelled crap.
I want to believe ,all I need proof .
Proof should be easy if it were true.

Its going to rain later this weekend, yay!

Hopefully this current dry spell is coming to an end. Though dry spells are the norm in most of Australia.

I used to operate trenching machinery. We would divine to locate water & other services. It works for that. Try it with a garden hose on top of ground and 2 bent pieces of copper wire. (Fencing wire will do). Walk back and forward holding wire loosely; and it will straighten up direction of hose. Some people are more sensitive at it than others. Artesian water is more inaccurate; as you are just as likely to pick up tree roots.

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pearl said..
I used to operate trenching machinery. We would divine to locate water & other services. It works for that. Try it with a garden hose on top of ground and 2 bent pieces of copper wire. (Fencing wire will do). Walk back and forward holding wire loosely; and it will straighten up direction of hose. Some people are more sensitive at it than others. Artesian water is more inaccurate; as you are just as likely to pick up tree roots.

So what you're saying is, you can see the hose and you're getting a positive? A surprise.

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Kamikuza said..

pearl said..
I used to operate trenching machinery. We would divine to locate water & other services. It works for that. Try it with a garden hose on top of ground and 2 bent pieces of copper wire. (Fencing wire will do). Walk back and forward holding wire loosely; and it will straighten up direction of hose. Some people are more sensitive at it than others. Artesian water is more inaccurate; as you are just as likely to pick up tree roots.

So what you're saying is, you can see the hose and you're getting a positive? A surprise.

No. I'm saying I can pick up underground pipes... and for you guys to do it with a hose on top of the ground to see it does work. We used electronic finders for copper water pipes, electrical and telecommunications. Poly pipes we would divine. Admittedly you generally have an idea they are running between sheds or dams; so you are looking to cross at a right angle for a good position. They'll (divining rods) straighten to run direction of pipe. It's not accurate with artesian water. You just get 1 rod moving or both in different directions, which as I said could be a tree root or other stuff

Dousing is about as reliable as any other pseudoscience quackery like homeopathy or Ouija boards.

There's no empirical evidence it's any more reliable than chance.

That said, I respect the experience of people who do experience their craft as a definable phenomenon. It's just that the phenomenon is more likely sub-conscious micro nervous feedback rather than any physical connection between buried objects and some sticks of wood and metal.

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pearl said..
it does work.

no it does not!

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pearl said..

Kamikuza said..

pearl said..
I used to operate trenching machinery. We would divine to locate water & other services. It works for that. Try it with a garden hose on top of ground and 2 bent pieces of copper wire. (Fencing wire will do). Walk back and forward holding wire loosely; and it will straighten up direction of hose. Some people are more sensitive at it than others. Artesian water is more inaccurate; as you are just as likely to pick up tree roots.

So what you're saying is, you can see the hose and you're getting a positive? A surprise.

No. I'm saying I can pick up underground pipes... and for you guys to do it with a hose on top of the ground to see it does work. We used electronic finders for copper water pipes, electrical and telecommunications. Poly pipes we would divine. Admittedly you generally have an idea they are running between sheds or dams; so you are looking to cross at a right angle for a good position. They'll (divining rods) straighten to run direction of pipe. It's not accurate with artesian water. You just get 1 rod moving or both in different directions, which as I said could be a tree root or other stuff

You're picking up underground pipes...on developed land? In the obvious locations? And false positives all the time? A surprised.

In other words -- it doesn't work.

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Dawn Patrol said..
I think there have been tests on water divining and it's accuracy. Basically they all find it is rubbish with no accuracy above random chance.

with doesn't explain to me why the wires move, and move opposite in the other direction, they just do

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landyacht said..

Dawn Patrol said..
I think there have been tests on water divining and it's accuracy. Basically they all find it is rubbish with no accuracy above random chance.

with doesn't explain to me why the wires move, and move opposite in the other direction, they just do

It's a magical force called tilting.

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landyacht said..

Dawn Patrol said..
I think there have been tests on water divining and it's accuracy. Basically they all find it is rubbish with no accuracy above random chance.

with doesn't explain to me why the wires move, and move opposite in the other direction, they just do

its windy?

How is it that this thread is not in "Heavy Weather", alongside it's close relative "Flat Earth Fun" ?

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Harrow said..
How is it that this thread is not in "Heavy Weather", alongside it's close relative "Flat Earth Fun" ?

It should be merged with the anti vac thread

My Friend reckons he can do it he also reckons he's American Indian