Protecting PEX/UF-B/Ethernet from gophers with hardware cloth?

Question

I have a well house and some outbuildings that will need some water. I am running 1" PEX underground in 30" deep trenches to these buildings, as well as 10/3 UF-B and some ethernet cable for cameras.

I live in far north central Texas and I am worried about gophers. My soil is sandy and VERY rocky with hard sandstone about 6-10" deep. It's like concrete, but I still see gopher bulges all over the place.

My plan currently is to first drop in 1/4" 23ga mesh galvanized hardware cloth, then the pipe and cable, fold over, and bury the whole smash. There will be no joints or splices underground, and I figure the wire mesh will be locatable by a metal detector.

I already have the pex and cable and cannot return it. I've crossed that Rubicon, and the die is cast, so to speak.

I am looking for opinions as to whether this is overkill, or a bad idea, or what ...

Thanks in advance for any guidance

Answer 1

I'm from the prairies! Haw! We have gophers like crazy here and I've never heard of them eating into electrical pipe.

For ease of pulling and overall durability I'd consider using rigid PVC or direct burial pipe. Pex quality often varies as well(I've seen batches sent back for being too brittle in winter, too soft in summer, for having too thin of wall. It's also particularly easy to cut with a shovel. I'm not a particularly huge fella and I can cut more durable pipes like sprinkler line with a shovel. Point is without concrete around it in the long term it has poor durability. If the quantity of pipe you already bought is small then the cost of getting PVC or DB will not be huge, and if you bought a roll or something, PEX is cheap so it still didn't cost a fortune, and you can probably unload it to a local electrician or similar losing only a portion of your money or sell it by the foot on kijiji to recoup your full cost.

On the other hand, you could pour your pipe into concrete, but the cost of concrete is probably more than just getting more suitable pipe. Also when you're buying parts, make sure you check cost of a whole box of couplings/connectors/whatever as the markup on singles can be huge. Also same as with the 2/2/2/4 wire Harper mentions in his comment, check the pricing on larger sizes of both pipe types.

Answer 2

23 gauge hardware cloth strikes me as something that won't have a long life when buried in the ground.

I'm no gopher expert, but taking your word for it that some protection is needed even at 30" depth, I'd think about encasing the PEX and cables in something else:

• solid-core SCH40 or even SCH80 PVC conduit or pipe. Not SCH20, class 200, nor foam-core pipe.
• EMT electrical conduit
• steel pipe

This is a little bit.. weird.. because it's not entirely obvious to what extent electrical code rules apply. A UF cable does not have to be in conduit, but if it is, then conduit sizing rules should apply. Inside a building a low voltage data cable cannot be in a conduit with a power cable. Few would even ask about putting a water supply in conduit with a power cable. Those all can share a building space (the cavity of a wall, for example) -- so can they be buried together outdoors encased in something, anything, that provides physical protection but is neither "earth" nor "conduit?" Is it OK if that encasement happens to be labeled as a conduit? Are there rules about shared non-conduit encasement? I'm not sure.

Electrical code requires a conduit system to be fully built first; wires or cables are pulled through as a second step (ie don't slide conduit onto cables/wires and build-as-you-go). I'd suggest that if you do choose to protect those direct-bury rated items inside pipe of some kind, that you size the pipe large enough and use pulling junctions so that the PEX and cables can be pulled into the pipe after it is assembled. In the case that a gopher does chew through the protection and damage the lines inside, you'd have a fair chance at pulling them out of the encasement and pulling in repaired or replacement items. You'd also be able to measure the distance to the damage point and dig in exactly the right spot to repair the encasement if desired.

Answer 3

You can run Ethernet with power, just not over electrically conductive cables. So, fiber in innerduct is an option right next to the power. It's going to be cheaper to use 2 smaller conduits than to use one big enough for all that, though. Even in a trench outside of a conduit, you don't want something like direct burial Cat6 within a foot of the power.

That said, for direct burial you are supposed to keep a foot seperation between electric and water. Trying to place both together in the same conduit seems like a really dumb idea to me... Just run them seperately, and forget about the wire. If you need a PVC conduit as a sleeve to pull the PEX through, so be it.

Answer 4

Hardware cloth will do nothing for pocket gophers, they chew through it and bend it back and forth till it breaks.

Best advice I give all my customers is trench and put everything into their own PVC pipes, frame the bottoms and then pour with concrete. If there are every issues with the lines, wires, etc., it’s easy to fish new ones many years later.