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I have a 6" high pressure line going by my house that is heavy steel with welded joints and buried deep. I think it has about 800 pounds pressure and moves enough gas to feed a smaller city. It was quite a production when they put in this line, especially when they hit a ridge of hard rock. They jackhammered with an excavator for 2 days to get 150 feet, but finally go deep enough. At first they used small yard double or triple regulator stations to get the pressure down to normal street pressure, but later they came back through and dug up the street again and put in a 2.5" plastic line about half as deep as the high pressure line, but in the same ditch. Both lines were carefully and heavily backfilled with good sand below and above them. The smaller lines, which are about 3/4" ID are heat welded to the street pressure line and then lead to a conventional regulator and gas meter by my house. The plastic pipe from the gas company is very thick, probably 1/4" and is what the gas company has used in our area for some time, without much of any problems. The gas company workers said they like it because in the ground, it is almost indestructable. I ran everything in the same ditch after first carefully asking the phone company, the gas company and the electric company. It is a real chore to dig, with the large number of rocks of all sizes that I encounter, so I try to work it so I don't have to dig very often. I have done my building in a particularly rocky area both to avoid wasting usable farm land and also to not have so much trouble with mud at wet times of the year. Something I forgot to mention is that the gas company buries a heavy, insulated copper wire attached to each plastic pipe. They have an electrical device that they attach to the end of the wire where the pipe comes out of the ground. The device produces a signal that they can hear with another device that they run over the ground, allowing them to very accurately locate their gas line, even if it is 3 or 4 feet deep. I thought this was really neat!
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