Ever tried to follow a water pipe, only for it to disappear behind a panel or under a floor into a nest of pipes? Unless you pull up loads of nails, floorboards, walls, etc, it's impossible to work out where it goes and where it comes out.

There are tools that can find pipes in walls and in the ground, but not that can follow a single pipe as it passes around and behind other pipes, or through an inaccessible area. But this device will clip onto a pipe as it disappears into a hole and send vibrations through it (frequency to be determined by experiment). You will then be able to find where the pipe emerges by finding which pipe is vibrating, either by touch or a sensor. Gripping the pipe with your hand should damp the vibrations, allowing you to isolate the section you're interested in.

The result will be an inexpensive device enabling you to recognise a section of piping and mentally connect one end with another. Ideal if you're not sure what a pipe is connected to, or where the valve to close it off is; and particularly useful where you can see a few pipes disappearing into a box and more pipes coming out the other side, but you can't match them up.
-- pottedstu, Oct 23 2001

Osiris Smart Water Monitor https://www.kicksta...smart-water-monitor
Kickstarter campaign [notexactly, Mar 22 2017]

Osiris thread on EEVblog forum (my thread) http://www.eevblog....mart-water-monitor/
Discussion of the product, its feasibility, their patent, etc. [notexactly, Mar 22 2017]

Just get someone to bang it with a hammer like everyone else does.
-- CasaLoco, Oct 23 2001


Is it clockwork?
-- BigBrother, Oct 23 2001


This is a good idea, especially because of the images it conjures up imagining what you were up to when you thought of it.
-- stupop, Oct 23 2001


The last time I followed a water pipe I got pretty wasted.
-- thumbwax, Jul 22 2002


Something you can do to trace hollow PVC wiring conduit: connect one of those small 9V piezo beepers to a 9V battery via a switch. Stick the beeper into one end of the conduit. Hunt around the building or whatever for the sound - which is where the other end of the conduit ends. It works very well. The switch is so the beeper doesn't drive you mad at other times.
-- guyd, Jul 22 2002


Anyone else remember the idea where each faucet, shower, washing machine, etc. in the house would be given a fluttering valve thing inside its connection to the water supply pipe, and these would all be made such that they'd flutter at different frequencies, powered by the water flowing past? The claim was that this would help locate dripping faucets and other leaks. A criticism I remember was that scale would build up on it and prevent vibration. Another problem I can think of, though I don't remember if it was brought up then or not, is that the slow flow of a dripping faucet would produce a different sound than the fast flow of it being turned on, and different rates of dripping would probably produce different sounds too. Anyway, I tried both the built-in search here and Google with many different terms and couldn't find it. I wanted to find it so I could post [links] on it, which I'm posting here because it's the most relevant thing I did find.
-- notexactly, Mar 22 2017


// studfinder apps for the android phone. // That is intriguing. How are they meant to work?
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Mar 22 2017


Add a very small whale to the pipe, then just follow the call.
-- not_morrison_rm, Mar 22 2017


What's the diff between this and tapping on the pipe with a wrench?
-- Size_Mick, Mar 23 2017



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