Drain & Sewer

Clogged or backed up sewer and drainage lines are common occurrences. Unfortunately, they happen for a number of reasons, so even if you perform regular maintenance, it’s a problem you may someday need to deal with. When a backup occurs, the first step is to ensure that it is in fact in your sewer or drain lines.

Does the blockage slow all of the drains in your house, or only certain drains? Is there sewage or waste water backing up into your pipes or is it just draining slowly? Do you notice any water or waste leaking up onto your lawn? While any of these problems needs to be fixed immediately, the severity of the situation will determine how quickly the repairs need to be done and how much they will cost.

There are two important things you can do to stop clogs from forming in your drains and sewer lines. The first is to avoid putting anything down the drain that isn’t supposed to go there. There are a lot of things on this list, including:

-Paper Towels
-Tissues
-Napkins
-Hygiene Products
-Diapers
-Toys
-Food
-Kitchen Grease

Pretty much anything that isn’t specifically rated for flushing should never be put down any drain – regardless of how easily it seems to go down. Yes, paper towels and napkins seem to go down the toilet fine, but they should never be flushed. They are designed to absorb water not disintegrate in it. Toilet paper on the other hand is designed to break up almost immediately when flushed – making it safe for your drains and sewer line.

The second way to avoid clogs is to have regular maintenance done on your drains. Pipe inspection with a video system will check for potential blockages and high pressure jetting can remove any that were found before they become serious problems.

For many years, if your sewer line got severely clogged, started leaking or was cracked in any way, the only solution was to dig a massive trench across the property to manually extract old pipes and replace them with new ones. This was both an expensive and intrusive process.

However, modern technology has made it possible to avoid this kind of headache in many cases. Trenchless pipe repair allows a plumber to create two small two foot wide pits on your property while sewer relining allows them to replace the inner lining of the sewer line without removing anything, often times making it more effective than it was when it was new.

While it’s certainly possible to guess what’s wrong with a sewer line or drain, it’s much more effective to see the problem before prescribing potential solutions. Video inspection allows a professional to look inside pipes to check for cracks, leaks, broken joints, or even roots infiltrating the pipes.

This often eliminates the need to dig trenches, makes it faster and easier to reach the potential problem in the pipeline, and speeds up the repair process significantly. Whether you can avoid digging or full replacement will depend on what the inspection finds, but in many cases, something simple like high pressure jetting will solve the problem with no further work.