Here is something that sounds too simple to be worth an email.

You run a pipe. Then you run your actual line inside that pipe. The outer one does nothing at all. It just sits there, empty, wrapped around the real one.

Then the concrete goes over the top.

Ten years later something fails, or you want to add something you never thought about, and instead of cutting your driveway open you pull the old line out of the sleeve and pull a new one through.

That is the whole trick. The rest of this is just where to put them.

The one most people have heard of is the main water line.

It comes in under the slab. If it ever leaks under there, you are looking at $1,500 to $4,000 and up just to find it and fix it, and that is before anybody mentions your flooring.

Run it inside an oversized sleeve and it stops being a slab repair. It becomes a Saturday. Pull the old line out, pull a new one in.

At least two sleeves. Always. I do not care how short the driveway is.

If it is a long one, put one down near the bottom and one up in the main part closer to the house. That upper one matters most, because that is where almost all of your irrigation, lighting and power ends up wanting to cross.

Two inch, three inch or four inch. Give yourself room. The pipe is the cheapest thing in the entire job.

And run power and irrigation in separate sleeves. Do not try to share one.

I was going to tell you six to eight inches below the driveway base, which with four inches of concrete on top puts you right around a foot. That is what I usually say out loud on a jobsite.

Then I looked it up, and for anything carrying power that is not deep enough.

NEC Table 300.5 wants 18 inches of cover under a residential driveway, measured from finished grade to the top of the pipe. One exception, a 120 volt 20 amp GFCI protected branch circuit can go at 12.

Here is the part that makes this worth the paragraph. An empty sleeve is not a wiring method. Nothing is wrong on pour day. The code only applies the day somebody pulls wire through it.

So if you set it shallow, nothing fails inspection and nothing gets flagged. You have just quietly decided what you are allowed to run through that pipe for the rest of the life of the house. Under concrete.

Irrigation and drain sleeves, six to eight below the base is plenty. Anything that might ever carry power, put it at 18 inches. The trench is already open. Going deeper costs you nothing.

Any large flower bed, sleeve into it.

And here is the one almost nobody takes advantage of. Your gutter drains are very likely already getting trenched out to the yard for pop ups, or out to the curb. Somebody is already digging that line.

Drop another sleeve in beside it while that trench is open. No reason to pay for the same hole twice.

This is the part that gets skipped, and skipping it makes everything above it useless.

Cap the ends.

Then take an actual sheet of paper and measure. Off the corner of the house or the garage, down the side of the driveway. Mark sleeve crossing one and sleeve crossing two. Write down the depth if you went to a specific one.

Do not put a stake in the ground. Somebody will drive over it, somebody will pull it out, and it will be gone before the sod shows up.

Keep the paper. That is the entire system.

Boring under a finished driveway starts around $1,000 in most places and climbs from there.

A lot of that is not even the work. It is just getting somebody out there with a rig and set up.

Same hole. Different day. Ten times the money.

Usually we coordinate with the concrete guy so the sleeves go in while he is getting the driveway ready. Sometimes your builder has somebody who handles it instead.

Either way it has to happen at the time somebody is forming up that driveway for concrete, and the pipe needs to be sitting on site when they do it.

One honest note, because I am not trying to start a fight between your builder and your concrete guy the way everybody on the internet seems to want to.

It is not free. There could be a charge. I am just telling you when it happens and what to have ready.

This one happens before the driveway gets formed, not after.

"I want two sleeves under the driveway before you form it. Separate ones for power and irrigation, and put the power sleeve at 18 inches of cover. I will have the pipe here."

And while you are at it:

"Can we drop one more in beside the gutter drain line while that trench is open?"

Nothing in here is clever. It is PVC.

What you are actually buying is the right to change your mind later. A shop you have not built yet. Landscape lighting you have not picked out. A gate at the end of the driveway, a charger, a water line to a garden that does not exist.

The decision is not what you are going to run through it. The decision is whether a future version of you gets to run anything at all without a saw.

Everything I write about here is the same shape. Cheap while something is still open, expensive the minute it closes. That is the entire field guide, 50 of them, with the numbers and the words to say before they close the walls.

Be honest on this one. I genuinely do not know how it splits.

If you know somebody whose driveway has not been poured yet, forward this to them today. This one is gone the morning the forms go up.

And if one person signs up off your link, I will send you the full cost breakdown of the first house I ever built. Every line I tracked, 2017 prices, which are going to hurt to look at. It is not for sale and it never has been.

That is it for this week.

Hit reply and tell me if you have ever had to get something across a finished driveway. I answer these myself.

Jon | Built With This