Drain Cleaning
Clogged Drain Causes
Roots on old systems tend to be the biggest problem. Homeowners tend to plant trees right on the main sewer line. We don’t know why, but they do. So if you’re getting whole house stoppage, the majority of the time it’s going to be roots in the line.
If it’s an old cast iron line, you could already have settling where the pipe now has a belly and it holds all the waste and paper. The most common cause of stoppages is the use of wet wipes. If you look at the box, it said that most of the time it says flushable. These wipes do not dissolve, they do not flush. They’ll stop up the line. They won’t flow with the water.
Roots. We run our cutter head on our machine down it, followed up by a camera service so we can see what’s going on after we get it unstopped. If you have root intrusion, we would have to consider replacing your sewer line. If it’s cast iron, instead of just doing a spot repair, we have to replace the entire line, because the rest of the line is going to fail soon as well.
On cast iron, your best option is just to replace it all at once. Instead of trying to fix it here and then another piece goes bad. Now you got to fix that, and eventually, you’re going to have a new line.
Professional Drain Cleaning
Professionals will use the correct size machine and head. If you have a three-inch line, you need to run a three-inch head on your big machine. Some people will go rent the small machines. Homeowners will and all they’re going to do is just push holes through it and it’ll start draining, but it won’t clear it because the small machine will never get edge to edge in that pipe and get everything out of it.
If your house doesn’t have stoppage issues, there’s no reason to do an annual service on it. If you start having problems and you want to call and have your drains clean, whether it be your kitchen sink, you know, your lab line or lavatory line, stuff like that, your main line. But there’s not really any maintenance to prevent stoppages. The only way to prevent stoppages is to not flush stuff that isn’t supposed to be flushed.
If you’re buying a new home and want to know what’s going on, we can run a camera, inspect everything, and ensure that you don’t have any hidden issues that might trap debris.
Sometimes it can just be that if you got small kids, they’re just flushing a lot of toilet paper, and there’s not really anything you can do to prevent that. At the end of the day, we’ll get to the bottom of the problem and keep it from recurring.Â
Call us today to get a fair assessment of what is going on.
