more to the story!
I wouldn't dig up the whole thing. Just dig test holes at quarter distance locations until you find the line. Then turn on the power and use one of those cheap beeping current detectors to narrow down the section the break is in...dig at the mid point of that section and test there, and so on until you only have to dig up a ten foot section. If you have driven over the line lately, maybe look there first
Well,
This is gonna get kind of painful but there is more to the story, much more! A sophisticated sniffer might find the issue but nothing I have.
The line curves across an old barn lot from the house to the barn, an old dairy barn. The line is on paired sixty amp breakers at the house, and should carry about fifty amps the distance it is running over the I believe eight gauge wire. Now things start to get interesting. The wire that comes out the ground at the other end is a different type of wire than goes into the ground at the house. No conduit once it is out of sight underground so there is a splice somewhere along the way, almost certainly done by the owner, deceased in the nineties.
I have 122 volts per leg at the barn, spot on. I don't have any amperage. I can run one of the tiny air compressors with maybe a tenth horse motor or less, a third horse motor doesn't even twitch out of the same receptacle that the small air compressor runs off of. The power in the whole barn is like that including when I ran a new four foot pigtail and twenty amp receptacle on a new breaker from the barn box.
I don't blow the breakers anywhere and the meter at the house isn't spinning ninety miles an hour which I have seen when there was an electrical leak long ago somewhere else. Another story but yes I have seen an underground electrical leak before. My guess is that there is major corrosion wherever the underground splice is in the present situation. Find the splice and I think I find my headache.
Without knowing where the cable runs my only options are to dig it up all the way or to dig trenches to find the cable dividing it into a half and then quarters as you suggest. Compounding this is that there is a lot of clay and gravel in this land plus this has been a homesite since probably before the war of northern aggression, no telling what else may be in this ground. I started my trenching from the end near the barn where I hoped the splice was near. Knowing what I have already found around this place I worked my way down the conduit and out to the bare wire. Now I can gently uncover it as I go. Trying to force a shovel through all of the stuff in this ground to cut right angle trenches I am almost certain to damage the unprotected cable with the trenches to divide the cable into sections.
I never seem to tangle with simple projects with easy solutions!
Hu
PS: Brent, I kinda like the dowsing idea! Probably just find oil, there is a bunch under here, not mine though!