Two of the UK's water companies are still using dowsing to find leaks | Hacker News Reader

Two of the UK's water companies are still using dowsing to find leaks

newscientist.com

Some of it is the old horoscope trick of if you have enough leaks, you can just throw a dart and be correct. Much like most people meet enough people every day that a horoscope claiming "you'll meet someone today" is accurate most of the time although the process to get that result was nonsense.

My guess is if you observed a highly enough experienced and successful dowser for long enough you'd find out diagnostic work depends on a lot more unconscious knowledge than most give it credit. As an engineer I know to look for a slight depression in the ground, maybe so slight most can't notice, and the smell of wet dirt is different, and pipe comes in coils or segments of length X so even unconsciously I might eventually learn to detect at spots multiples of X away from the water main. I imagine I could unconsciously become a highly skilled dowser just by working it hard enough for enough years and storing enough data.

I know for a fact I can repair old ham radio equipment this way. I can "smell", or something, failed electrolytics far better than using an ESR meter by hand or replacing randomly. Only takes 40 years of experience and you can learn it too. I'm not marketing my skill as a form of witchcraft I'm well aware its merely decades of unconscious study. It is not even remotely controversial that different humans have different abilities to focus their eyes and resolve small things and see in darker environments; I think it quite likely indeed that I can unconsciously see bulging capacitor packages better than the average bear. I know for a fact, having replaced many, that old HP/Tek instrument-grade "black beauty" capacitors have a, shall we say, unique smell when soldered as part of the removal process, and I feel unconsciously that I can smell a cracked/leaking "black beauty" capacitor at room temperature whereas most people cannot. I do not smoke, for example, so I know for a fact my sniffer works better than anyone who smokes anything, but I also think that having screwed around with electronics for several decades I can quite literally smell a failed "black beauty" capacitor (edited: at room temperature; I assure you anyone can smell it when overheated LOL).

> As an engineer I know to look for a slight depression in the ground, maybe so slight most can't notice, and the smell of wet dirt is different

Also spots with unusually healthy plants. If most of the grass is dry but there's a depression in the ground with slightly greener grass, there's probably water there. There are lots of subtle signals like that which an experienced dowser could subconsciously tap into.

This is one of the things that archaeologists are trained to recognize to find buried sites. Different types of soil retain moisture differently and man-made structures can cause uneven plant growth, forming cropmarks. Mostly you'll just see the natural variation of the soil though.

I bet on a smaller level there's even variation in leaf and bark color.

Another interesting theory: Everyone knows plants wilt when dry and perk up somewhat when watered; human eyes are hunter eyes, are we're good at detecting movement; can a trained gardener / professional orchard operator / dowser see in the movement of the leaves and branches in the breeze which plants are near a leak or a high water table area? I bet they can, consciously or unconsciously. There's always a little wind where I live.

I was thinking about my unusual ability to find bad capacitors; I'm a little proud that my ancestors and I have excellent visual resolution and no astigmatism but it would be very funny if my unconscious ability was seeing overheated components brown with heat; everyone's seen totally roasted and burned carbon comp resistors, but failing caps go high ESR which means high heat which means maybe I'm unusually good at color perception despite my pride about my lack of visual astigmatism. This probably happens with dowsers; they think they're "seeing" colors in the plants, but it would be funny if its not visual at all and they're actually feeling the bounce in their step as they walk across a lawn or field, or as you mention, they operate off being unusually sensitive to tilt.

Downvoted because you obviously haven’t tried it.

If that's your standard for evidence, I can claim that space is made of molasses. How can you object?! You haven't been up there!

I'm assuming they were joking. A lot of these comments boil down to the same dumb claim.

However, the difference is that you can actually try dowsing...

I think that dowsing is mostly a method to justify relying on somebody's gut instinct, intuition, experience or common sense, for lack of (affordable and practical) alternatives. Digging a well isn't cheap and people want something "better" than letting the well diggers make their best guess, even though their best guess is generally good enough.

My favorite dowsing story is from when I was a kid, a new house was being built downhill from my parents' house and the developer hired a dowser for the well. The dowser started to mark out a spot directly downhill of my parents' septic tank until my dad warned him.

Well there's definitely water in that there septic tank! Among other things.

Wow I would have never thought that dowsing was still used and that it would be such a heated argument here on HN. It seems that many people are really into it.

Can anyone post actual evidence on the fact that it works that is not anecdotal or an easily falsifiable video? Looking around the net there seems to be 100% scientific consensus that dowsing doesn't work better than a random guess.

No, no one can do this because it’s not real. It’s not even pseudoscience, it’s 100% BS.

I know, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. People claiming to be professionals who vouch for it. The scientific literacy in this thread is flat out depressing.

I think you're mostly jumping at shadows, I see a small number of comments claiming dowsing rods work (and they're downvoted for it) but far more comments that amount to saying that dowsing rods don't work but experienced dowsers can make reasonable guesses as to where water may be found. These are very different claims.

My comment claiming the latter was initially downvoted, I think by people who thought I was saying that dowsing rods work. They don't, obviously. But that doesn't mean hiring a dowser is categorically irrational.

I think there are a couple of aspects of human psychology at work here.

One is that if someone tries to dogmatically argue that some broad category of thing is impossible, because a small, specific subset of that category doesn't hold up to scrutiny, people who have themselves observed some other subset of that same category with their own eyes will tend to assume everything the first person is claiming is wrong.

Another is that in the absence of a better explanation, people will tend to develop folk wisdom explanations that run the gamut from "more or less accurate" to "not a good explanation, but correlates actions and effects with reasonable accuracy under certain common conditions" to "not a good explanation, and is no better than random chance at predicting outcomes".

The last is that if someone has been told that a particular activity is pseudoscientific nonsense, they will often assume that everything about it is incorrect, even if there is some grain of truth buried in layers of incorrect understanding. This will trigger the first kind of psychological reaction I mentioned.

AFAIK, there is no good theory that would allow dowsing for water to work, using any of the types of tools dowsers typically use. There have also been tests performed that seem to rule out specific scenarios. E.g. Randi's challenge in 1979 seems to rule out the ability for supposed dowsers to locate water moving through a buried plastic pipe.

On the other hand, as I discussed at length in a separate post, one type of dowsing apparatus (L-shaped metal rods held in some kind of cylindrical handle) can be used to easily detect magnetic fields. It is not subtle, and not the ideomotor effect. So when someone claims that no type of dowsing-style activity is possible, I can be reasonably sure they haven't tried the magnetic field variation, and are arguing from the dogmatic extrapolation of the more specific scientific testing regarding dowsing for water.

When "dowsing" for magnetic fields, the rods behave _exactly_ like dowsers claim they do for water (or other material). e.g. at certain points within the field, the rods will cross and feel "stuck" relative to each other. That seems like a weird coincidence if there's only random chance and the ideomotor effect going on elsewhere.

People in civil engineering or similar fields will likely have seen the technique used to find buried power lines, which AFAIK actually makes sense in some cases, because the current running through the line will generate a magnetic field. IIRC, it would have to be just one of the conductors, or the fields would cancel each other out, but still physically possible.

Everything I've read makes me extremely skeptical of the idea that any sort of dowsing technique can reliably detect water. But that doesn't mean it's not a measurable physical phenomenon related to something else (metal deposits, very dense material, etc.) that's just been incorrectly associated with water because water is relatively common if one digs far enough down.

If I had the time, I'd approach it from the angle of "can we reliably reproduce the movement of the dowsing apparatus in different locations, using different dowsers?" and if so, try to figure out what might be causing it, as opposed to assuming it's due to underground water or some other cause. It's probably something that's easier to detect now using existing technology, but it would be interesting to know for sure, and it would bridge the big divide between "I know for sure that all of you are just experiencing the ideomotor effect because I read that somewhere" and "I know that dowsing for all sorts of substances works because in at least some cases, I can feel an actual force acting on the implement(s)."

A lot of it is sophistry in the definition of words and playing word games.

The first problem is a sampling bias. Given a claim that a "good enough" EE can build a ham radio transmitter out of parts, we can test that claim by putting 100 college kids across random majors in front of a lab bench, 100% failed to build a radio transmitter, therefore ham radio is pseudoscience. Repeat for brain surgery, mental health therapy, dowsing, etc. Yet economic specialization exists and I assure you I can build a simple morse code ham radio transmitter at a well stocked electronics workbench regardless how many inexperienced members of the general public cannot.

The next problem is the sophistry mentioned. All that matters is the bottom line; does a company make more profit if some old timer tells them where to dig, or do they make more money not paying the old timer and digging randomly? Apparently, its more profitable to pay the old timer. No matter how many people are "mad" about scientific management not working and we must replace the old guy with a set of linear equations and a webcam, the company still makes more profit with the old guy on the payroll. Thus science doesn't matter. I find it quite likely that humans do not have x-ray vision. I find it reasonable that an ancient construction worker could unconsciously glance at a subdivision, remember when building similar houses, recall the average length of pipe installed was 10 meters, realize its probably leaking at a joint rather than in the middle, walk until he "feels right" which coincidentally happens to be 10.005 meters from the water main, "yo dig here" and they find the leak. But does it really matter as long as its profitable? Can you only use ChatGPT if you understand every line of source code AND understand the deep meaning behind every integer and floating point value processed, or can you "just use it"? How about abstracting away from ChatGPT and consider the emacs source code, can use use emacs without understanding every line of source code, or even, any line of source code?

I'm sorry but I fail to see the point of your reply.

Clearly.

It is a thousand word straw man argument, it even has internal straw men. A brilliant example of straw manning I would say, a straw men matrioska doll :)

It's baffling. I can see how a community of erstwhile engineers and intellectuals can talk themselves into the typical crankery in physics threads because things like quantum mechanics and dark matter aren't simple and don't make intuitive sense.

And a strong contingent of the tech community leans alt-right/libertarian now, so all of the anti-vaxx stuff that dominates threads where medicine or vaccination comes up unfortunately makes sense.

And a lot of people here seem to believe the UFO narrative, I think mostly just because the government denies it, which for many here is a signal that the government must be hiding something, and also because we're all nerds and nerds want to live in a sci-fi universe.

Given the general anti-establishment and contrarian nature of this community, no matter how outlandish an opinion is, someone will probably advocate for it.

But dowsing? Fucking dowsing? That's just a step above crystal pendants and reading tea leaves.

a community of erstwhile engineers and intellectuals

It might be time to give this idea up - a lot of hacker news articles are click bait filler from large news sites, rehashed old articles, random wikipedia topics and blogs with kitchy, low context contrarian titles. Deeply technical articles don't get a lot of attention. It's pretty close to a general news site with a general internet audience at this point.

Interestingly this all started in 2017 when a PhD student started aggressively pursuing water companies to find out which ones used dowsing: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/nov/21/uk-water-fi...

It seems she did not follow up on the claims of accuracy, or investigate the validity of the practice at all. It was simply immediately discredited as witchcraft and called a waste of public money. I guess this is the scientist vs engineer dilemma at work. The fact that 10 of the 17 water companies were using dowsing 5 years ago before a public shaming shows that the practice could have practical use.

> The fact that 10 of the 17 water companies were using dowsing 5 years ago before a public shaming shows that the practice could have practical use.

Err, no it doesn't. By this argument, thousands of doctors having used bloodletting or trepanning also "shows that the practice could have practical use".

> It seems she did not follow up on the claims of accuracy, or investigate the validity of the practice at all.

She's the one who cited studies where dowsing performs no better than chance, while the water companies published no data on the matter.

fwiw, both bloodletting and trepanning have legitimate modern forms.

In this case, where many for-profit companies were practicing dowsing it makes sense to ask if it might have worked. Probably, I agree, not because it fundamentally works, but as others in this thread have suggested - because practitioners unconsciously recognize the external signs of leaking pipes. This could match the the studies - actual randomized dowsing wouldn't work but standardized dowsing of the usual failing pipes could be easy.

We had this happen. There was leak somewhere in the pipe running from the street into our property, which ran under a small front grass lawn before running into the building. We had been away for a month and came back to find everything very damp and overly cold, it was quite subtle. We figured the leak was somewhere under the lawn and running downhill to the house.

So the man from the water company comes and says it's very hard to detect where the leak is, but he will come back with his dowsing rod to find it.

We told him not to bother, and figuring the leak was somewhere between the house and the water mains under the pavement (about 2m distance), started digging holes where the ground started getting soggier. Found it quickly by applying a bit of common sense.

Almost half the UK's lost treated water came from pipes under the purview of Thames Water and Severn Trent Water, nearly 400bn litres.

If you're going to practise this quackery, it makes sense that you'd have the best luck working for one of these two sieves.

The only way dowsing could be remotely useful is to keep the practitioners focus on the task at hand and thereby increasing the ability to perceive the evidence around them gained by observation,.

My water company (Yorkshire water) basically uses stethoscopes.

It's a walking stick length pole that they put their ear to, and you can hear a difference if there's a leak or not.

This is about gas, not water, and not about dowsing. But it does have to do with little clues that humans can miss:

The house next to me had a gas leak out by the street (or thought they did). PG&E came and cut down the tree, claiming that the roots had damaged the gas line. They ground up half the stump.

Months elapsed. The leak was still there. They came back, dug a really deep hole, and still didn't find it. So they moved a little towards my house, and found that the pipe had just aged and sprung a leak. Eventually I'll get all new pipes to my house.

Here's the "dowsing" part: I told the workers that they should just inject some bacon grease upstream from the leak, and my dog would find it by smell. They said that there actually are dogs who are trained to detect gas leaks. Why they didn't use one here, I have no idea.

Anyhow, I would bet that dogs can be trained to detect underground water, too.

Postscript: they did replace the tree, eventually.

Part of me would expect that under some circumstances the engineers have trained to know where leaks are likely.

Dowsing involves you walking mindfully methodically over the area.

At the end of the day it's be ridiculous for water companies to insist engineers don't carry the rods so long as they overwise follow policy and have acceptable pace.

Druids, with telepathic connection to mermaids, relayed to them by unicorns!

Gullibility on the part of customers ?

Sometimes people just want to "see" work being done, rather than trusting that it's based on statistics/previous work/gut-feeling. Kind of like when you add a loading icon to an action that has already been completed in the background to show the user that it's working.

Very interesting, your comment reminded me of why soap and shampoo manufactures have to put a chemical to make it foam up so people would know "it's working"

This isn't science, it's business. Are the companies able to find leaks via dowsing? Does it work quickly and efficiently? If so, there's no reason to stop using it.

Science can speculate that it's all a hoax, that there's no scientific basis, etc., but if it works, it's hard to argue with that.

It doesn't work though, that's the point. It's often difficult to convince people that something they have been doing for a long time doesn't work.

I think that depends on how you're approaching the question. If you pay someone with 40 years of experience that happens to use dowsing rods to find a leak you'll probably get better results than someone off the street. From a business perspective, it might be entirely reasonable to hire someone that uses dousing rods.

If you're hiring someone with 40 years of experience who happens to use dowsing rods and you believe the dowsing rod is a relevant factor in their success, you need to be fired immediately.

> and you believe the dowsing rod is a relevant factor in their success

You added this part..

> it might be entirely reasonable to hire someone that uses dousing rods.

It's implied here.

I don't think that implies the dosing rods themselves are what works. It may be reasonable to hire somebody who uses dowsing rods, if they have a lot of experience and can therefore make educated guesses about where the water is.

The dowsing rods are just a prop, maybe a psychological crutch that allows the dowser to listen to their gut. But the point is that somebody using a dowsing rod might be good at finding water even though dowsing rods don't work, and therefore it may be entirely reasonable to hire somebody that [incidentally] uses dowsing rods.

This was my point. Thanks for expanding it. It may be the case that using rods work, not because they point to water themselves but because they add something else to the process. Maybe they make people pay attention to their surroundings or something like that. Maybe all the people that operate them are part of a trade group that facilitates the transfer of other very valuable knowledge.

It was not my implication. My point was to differentiate output from methods and knowledge

The only relevant factor in the dowser's success is on the long term for every $100 you give the experienced old dowser he will save you $1000 of expensive diesel excavator time. Technically he can probably stay in business providing as little as $103 of value, but it's probably a lot more.

The sophistry is the continuous goalpost changing; the dowser can be proven to not have x-ray vision. So? The dowser can be proven to not "sniff" buried water bottles. So? People who have a proven ability to not make money in the field as a dowser, when tested for dowsing abilities, results show they are very bad at it (LOL, this is the funniest). Or in this example, well we've proven rods don't do anything, so ... so what?

No one can prove that giving the experienced old guy $100 does not result, in the long run, on saving $1000 of excavator time. I'd keep giving the old guy $100 LOL as I'm not running a charity.

Just because you can't replace or even usefully study management skill or artistic ability or technical "hunches" doesn't mean they don't exist, as clearly they're economically viable.

Spoiler: it doesn’t work.

Spoiler: it totally works

And I have a dragon in my garage.

> Science can speculate

That's now how science works to find out if something works.

If you could demonstrate it worked, that's an experiment. If most people agree the experiment is testing for the right thing, that's peer review. If a bunch of people all conduct the experiment, get the same result, and come to the same conclusion, that's science. If it's speculation, it's not science.

So either you're saying the majority of people who have conducted this experiment did it wrong, or that the methodology used by companies is testing for the wrong thing but just happens to be profitable. Given how low tech and quick the experiment is, and thus how widespread the testing has been for over a century, the latter is the most likely case.

I read an article over here about how even though lemon juice was known to prevent scurvy. But cost cutting led to the use of lime (which has less vitamin c) or processed the lemon juice in such a way to destroy the vitamin c.

Point is, something may seem to work, but if you aren't being scientific in your approach you aren't going to compare to something that actually works and discover your mistake.

What if it’s not working any better than blind luck but the water companies are using it anyway?

What if it’s actually a form of fraud disguised by the woo woo effect of saying it’s dowsing?

If I were a shareholder in one of these water companies I’d want some answers and some concrete stats.

There were a number of studies done in Germany where they would send dowsers out in places where people had cancer. The doswers were seeking geopathic stress lines (or "earth lines") which were thought to have aided the development of cancer. There are a number of articles online, here's a more recent one from the Irish Times discussed with a modern dowser: https://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/checking-the-fault-li...

I've always been skeptical of the old well drillers who use a Y shaped stick to find water. But here's my anecdote as a civil engineer with plenty of field time in the water industry, you can test this yourself for free, just call 811 and have them mark your utilities at home or the office:

I've never heard of using dowsing rods to find leaks, but they can actually find underground utilities pretty reliably. You take two bent metal rods that are an L shape. Conveniently here they use little plastic flags on metal rods to mark the locations of utilities. They also spray paint in broken lines the direction and location of the utility. This is useful when you have to excavate so you know where you're safe to use the machine and where you need to do hand digging.

OK so bend the metal rods in an L shape and point them straight ahead. Walk towards the buried utility (water pipe, storm sewer, gas line), and as you approach the location of the utility the dowsing rods will align themselves with the direction of the pipe. It's definitely spooky! And I didn't believe it until I tried it, believe me, I was skeptical. I wish someone could provide a reasonable explanation that doesn't rely on psychology. If you've never done it, I encourage you to try.

Edit: I should mention utility companies don't use dowsing rods to find their pipes. We have modern methods with sophisticated detectors and accurate maps. It is ILLEGAL to dig if you haven't called 811 for a professional markout.

https://youtu.be/AW_xDXDtDmc

This is what it looks like. There's no explanation for this phenomenon. No, it's not "gut instinct"

https://youtu.be/rHm-lZb5kuo

Here's a dorky journalist doing it. Maybe that's more credible.

Before I begin, let me start by saying that I know of no evidence that dowsing for water can work. To my knowledge, it's from there that the technique of using two L-shaped rods has been treated as discredited, even though the testing was generally only for "water witching".

That having been said, if there's a magnetic field present, it's easy to find using one or two of those L-shaped metal rods,[1] and also fairly straightforward to understand.

If you start with just one, the field will exert a dragging effect on the arm of the rod as it moves through the field, and the rod will more or less end up pointing toward the center of the field. I.e. the rod will act sort of like a cat whisker. It's such a small effect that the rods have to already be in motion to notice it. In most cases the field isn't strong enough to move the rod when it's at rest.

If you do the same thing with two rods, they will indeed cross under certain conditions. I don't know enough about magnetic field theory to explain that behaviour.

The first time I tried it, decades ago, I found a magnet that I didn't even know was present, so I knew immediately it wasn't just the ideomotor effect.

Some types of metal will affect the Earth's magnetic field enough to he detectable remotely (e.g. military magnetic anomaly detectors used to find submarines), so maybe an underground metal pipe is enough? I haven't tried that myself.

That having been said, the supposed ability to detect other buried objects is so persistent over centuries that I wonder if there could be a very subtle equivalent for gravity fields or something else. I highly doubt it, given that no one has been able to detect water in controlled tests, but it would be a fun surprise.

Edit: these days it's much faster and easier to use the magnetometer in your phone, but the first time I tried it was long before smartphones.

[1] I don't know how much the type of metal matters. I assume iron or steel is best.

> That having been said, if there's a magnetic field present

Water is weakly magnetic. The polarity of the H2O molecule is in fact essential to life as we know it. And of course typical water has plenty of other ions in solution.

I think you'd be very hard pressed to create a handheld digital gadget that could magnetically detect water under the ground. It might not be impossible, but I think the effect must be much smaller than you could plausibly detect with two pieces of bent wire.

I'm inclined to agree, but I do think "plausibly" is doing a little more work there than it first appears.

I've had a handful of paranormal experiences in my life that I was able to verify to my complete satisfaction. Also, when I had those experiences I was an avowed materialist agnostic who enjoyed shooting down religious people to show how clever I thought I was. I returned to a dualist philosophy as a result of logical inquiry, not religious indoctrination. Platonism is a gateway drug.

Even so, my first thought is always to look for a normal explanation. In my experience paranormal abilities are both extremely rare and frankly quite unreliable. Due to that, for me the apparent reliability of dowsing actually speaks against it being what I would consider a paranormal phenomenon. As others have put better in other comments on this submission, it's probably a matter of training and subconscious recognition. Nevertheless, I wouldn't rule out the possibility that there are practitioners who 99% of the time are doing that, but 1% of the time actually do something paranormal. I just don't know.

It’s called the ideomotor phenomenon: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideomotor_phenomenon

You are making the rods move by subconsciously moving your hands.

I'm sorry but it's not that. Please try it.

Edit: ok, devil's advocate. Maybe it IS that. How then, does a humans subconscious know where a pipe is buried below ground without any visible indication?

But you said yourself that you're having the locations of the utilities marked ahead of time.

As mentioned by others in the comments on the post, one possibility is that there are, in fact, visible indications.

In one of the videos you linked to, the guy doing the demonstration pointed out a visible line in the gravel that showed where a cable was buried, before showing how the rods crossed when he was directly above it.

Also, unless I misunderstood you, you advocated trying the experiment with utilities marked by flags and spray paint.

More subtly, someone with industry experience could be picking up on less obvious cues, as @VLM suggested in this comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34558567):

> As an engineer I know to look for a slight depression in the ground, maybe so slight most can't notice, and the smell of wet dirt is different, and pipe comes in coils or segments of length X so even unconsciously I might eventually learn to detect at spots multiples of X away from the water main. I imagine I could unconsciously become a highly skilled dowser just by working it hard enough for enough years and storing enough data.

Another possibility is something akin to publication bias: successes get remembered and celebrated, and misses get forgotten.

As far as I know, dowsing ability has never been demonstrated under controlled conditions, with those attempting to do so performing no better than chance.

>Edit: ok, devil's advocate. Maybe it IS that. How then, does a humans subconscious know where a pipe is buried below ground without any visible indication?

it doesn't, but it does a bang-up job of removing the failed attempts from recent memory since the experience of a failure is less rewarding.

after a few days of dowsing rod practice you'll only remember the successes intensely, because the failures will be routine and mundane.

This and your related comments are quite interesting. I like the Newtonian approach of feigning no hypotheses for phenomena like this. Any explanation is going to be necessarily speculative. What isn't speculative is whether or not the technique actually works which it appears to do.

I have no doubt that an accomplished stage magician could pull off similar feats in any number of ways. Is there an untapped well (hoho) of future Las Vegas stars in the water industry? Or is it a different skill set at work?

I'd be more impressed if it worked even when the location of the water utility is not spray painted onto the ground ahead of time.

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