Dowsing for water?

steingar said:
Another way to do the trial is to have your container of water hidden, but not buried. At 6Y9 I might hide the water in an aircraft or tent, just out of sight. You could have a series of 20 overturned buckets, with only three covering containers of water, for example. Just so long as it wasn't visible.
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Thanks for the suggestions. What EdFred said is accurate; the rods deflect when you pass OVER water. They don't "point to" where the water is (like "walk southeast, it's OVER THERE!").

I do like the suggestion of covered (hidden) water. For initial baselines, and to see if it's worth burying samples, I'll try this first. Paper sacks (like lawn/leaf recycling bags) or plastic buckets over quantities of water that "seem" to deflect when not covered. If I find that works with any sort of consistency, we'll try with different people dowsing. Another idea would be to lay out garden hoses, capped on both ends, where SOME of them have water in them and others do not. Can't see the water, but should only indicate over the ones that are filled.

Both of these methods have the disadvantage that any "false hits" might be due to true pipes under the ground that you're not aware of... how do you 'cancel out' that negative indication without calling it 'an excuse'? You'd have to do the test in an area where you KNOW there are no pipes or underground water. How do you find such an area?
 
TangoWhiskey said:
Thanks for the suggestions. What EdFred said is accurate; the rods deflect when you pass OVER water. They don't "point to" where the water is (like "walk southeast, it's OVER THERE!").
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Unless there is some type of gravitational involvment in the communication between the water and the rod, the communication should be spherical. If the rods detect water 10 feet away when directly overhead, a 10-foot radius to the side would have to have the same effect.

It's like the angular distance that DMEs provide versus the distance provided by a GPS.
 
TangoWhiskey said:
I do like the suggestion of covered (hidden) water. For initial baselines, and to see if it's worth burying samples, I'll try this first. Paper sacks (like lawn/leaf recycling bags) or plastic buckets over quantities of water that "seem" to deflect when not covered. If I find that works with any sort of consistency, we'll try with different people dowsing. ?
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Yep, it is that simple. Get 20 gallon milk jugs. Fill 1 with water, and fill the others with sand. Conceal them in plastic bags and place the bags in a grid. Blind chance says the dowser will be correct 5% of the time. Anything significantly better than 5% would be of great interest to the scientific community.

The person who secretly positions the concealed jugs must have NO communication with the dowser or anyone else observing the test, and may not be present during the test.

If you wish to test it first with the milk jugs visible, the person doing the test will have to be someone who already makes the claim that he can successfully find water. At any rate, this part of the test is unneccessary.

TangoWhiskey said:
Both of these methods have the disadvantage that any "false hits" might be due to true pipes under the ground that you're not aware of. You'd have to do the test in an area where you KNOW there are no pipes or underground water.
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Sure, but it shouldn't be too difficult to find a place that lacks water near the surface. If the dowser claims he misses because of an unknown underground source, he should be getting hits all over the place. And that still wouldn't explain why he failed to get a hit on the water-filled milk jug.
 
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TangoWhiskey said:
Both of these methods have the disadvantage that any "false hits" might be due to true pipes under the ground that you're not aware of... how do you 'cancel out' that negative indication without calling it 'an excuse'? You'd have to do the test in an area where you KNOW there are no pipes or underground water. How do you find such an area?
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Dude, you're in Texas! I never saw so much nothing in all my life out there! Find a patch of dirt out in the middle of nowhere with no power lines nearby, and there won't likely be any pipes there either.
 
steingar said:
Dude, you're in Texas! I never saw so much nothing in all my life out there! Find a patch of dirt out in the middle of nowhere with no power lines nearby, and there won't likely be any pipes
there either.
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I suppose doing it in a barge in the middle of Lake Grapevine would be pointless. :rolleyes:
 
write-stuff said:
So would dowsers find water 75% of the time in Texas, no matter where they look? Or is there some limit to how much insulating dirt the divining rods can "see" through?
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If they go deep enough yes. And, I don't know. I'm not an expert or proponent of it.
 
steingar said:
If underground water is that prevalent, then the dowsers have 3:1 odds on hitting their water.

Doesn't explain how TW found his pipe, though.
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If they were steel rods I could buy the premise that the water somehow locally affects a magnetic field, but then again a compass should be affected too...
 
If water could amplify a magnetic field I don't think dowsers would be first ones to discover this fascinating anomaly.
 
EdFred said:
I never said amplify.
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Yes, but that's the only thing it could do to make the rods move. The ambient magnetic field doesn't move them, it's too weak to overcome the friction of the dowsing mechanism and gravity. So if it is magnetism that makes it work, it would have to be INCREASED magnetism.

But water has no effect on magnetism anyway (other than acting as an insulator) so it's a moot point.
 
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