Scrutable

Two water companies admit to still using dowsing rods to detect leaks in their pipes. This is down from 10 companies who admitted to using them in 2017. Both companies say they aren't 'standard issue' but acknowledge that some of their engineers still use them.

Thames Water says,

We don’t provide dowsing rods as standard issue, however some engineers may choose to use their own to help to narrow down results from other leak detecting equipment in particularly rural areas.

Severn Trent said,

that while some of its engineers might have dowsing rods with them, it is not company policy to use them... A spokesperson for Severn Trent said: “We do not consider dowsing rods to be an effective way of finding leaks and as such we don’t issue them to engineers."

After all it is 2023. Sometimes I forget and think I am living in 1614.

In 1614 they would probably have burnt the dowsers as witches.

JQH wrote: ↑

Wed Feb 01, 2023 6:16 pm

In 1614 they would probably have burnt the dowsers as witches.

It's pretty good incentive to find water though

Wouldn't finding water be proof of guilt?

I sometimes wonder if there is a confusion over the use of listening sticks, a widely used simple device to help you hear the rushing sound of water escaping from a crack in a pipe. It works like the old-fashion glass beaker against a wall or door to hear what people are saying in the next room, which does work very well if you try it. Though sound gets transferred and you can't reliably say, it seems loudest here, this is where to dig. Leak location is difficult. Even when it is spurting out of a crack in the paving, the actual leak may be surprisingly far away.

In the road I live in, well beyond the houses, they once dug a series of about 30 holes at about 5m intervals to try and find a gas leak. I could smell the gas in still conditions, when cycling down the road, and reported it. You can imagine someone using dowsing as an alternate form of coin-tossing to decide where to dig first.

The Catholic church did explicitly ban dowsing in mediaeval times on grounds of occultism. When protestant churches came into existence, they also applied that ban. So it could get you into trouble over dowsing for an extended period of time, not just during the witch hunt hysteria/purge.

Dowsing was often to find metal ores, and other things, rather than just water as we tend to associate it today. Ironically, at one point it was used for a time in France to detect witches and other guilty miscreants, and that had to get banned too.