Call Ms. Digg?

I had to Google... that's a Michigan thing, here we just have 811 :-)

But they'll only find THEIR wires, not ones that the homeowner ran. Plus, she comes home on Thursday and I was hoping to surprise her with a new garden and landscape lights! But 811 takes about a month to come out :-/

I found wire locators for about $50, so I might have to go that route:

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=buried+wire+locator

Unless anyone can suggest a trick that'll save me $50?

Stax- Unfortunately, my experience is that free locater services for the utilities only mark the lines running from the street to the service entrance. They don't/won't help you find other runs, like the wire the OP is talking about.

I had them come out to my house a few months ago, and they only marked THEIR wires. This would be a wire ran either by the homeowner or the plumber that installed the original well.

Plus, she comes home on Thursday and I was hoping to surprise her with a new garden and landscape lights! But 811 takes about a month to come out :-/

Agree it costs nothing to call...sounds like it's area specific. Where I live, they show up in 2 days, but they have refused to do anything but locate the main feeds in the many times I've contacted them over the past 30+ years.

I think Stax did not get the fact that the OP is not looking for a utility line, they are looking for a wire that was installed by the OP's relatives.

Stax-

My call-before you-dig service marks electric, gas, water, cable tv, and FIOS cable...but only from where it enters my property to where it enters the house. Anything else in the yard is my responsibility. When you hit the buried cable, that sounds like it was something that was running through your property and that may be why they located it for you.

Don’t spend a lot of time searching for the pump feed wire. My opinion would be to abandon the electrical feed to the pump enclosure and run a new GFCI circuit where you want on the exterior of the main home.

If you really want to terminate the power to the pump, I suspect it has its own circuit at the panel, an electrician could trace/follow it out of the panel and remove the wire up to the point of it passing thru the basement wall.

It does have its own breaker, that was one of the appeals of piggybacking! :-) Right now she just has an extension cord draped over the top and stretched to the receptacle, then sandwiched in place at the top. It's not even a little bit safe, so I was hoping to eliminate all of that and give her a GFCI close to the house; I could use one plug for her landscape lights, then leave her an empty plug for her occasional uses.

She'll be home in a few hours, though, so it is what it is. Paying an electrician to do it isn't practical, I'll just cough up money to buy a locator that I'll use one time :-/

I had a local electrician trace out the service wires; it took 15 minutes and $105. I'd spend the $50 and get your own tracer.