Sewer Services in Rhode Island

Drains are inside the house. The sewer is everything after that.

The distinction matters because it decides who you are dealing with and what it costs. A kitchen line, a shower drain or a laundry standpipe is a drain cleaning job: one fixture, one branch, an afternoon. The sewer main is the single pipe every drain in the building feeds into, running from the foundation wall to the street, or to the tank on a private system. When that pipe has a problem, everything backs up together, starting with the lowest fixture in the house, and no amount of work on the individual drains will fix it.

That main line is what this part of the site is about. Two pages, two different situations.

Sewer cleaning: the line is intact but blocked

Roots at a joint, grease closing the pipe a little every year, scale flaking off the inside of old cast iron, or a wad of something that should never have been flushed. We clear main lines from 3 inch residential laterals up to 15 inch commercial and multi-family mains, by cable where a blockage needs cutting and by hydro jetting where the whole pipe wall needs scouring. Most residential outfits stop at 4 or 6 inches. We carry the equipment for the larger lines because the mills, schools and apartment blocks of Rhode Island run on them.

Sewer line repair and replacement: the pipe itself has failed

A collapsed section, an offset joint that catches everything, a belly holding standing waste, or a clay or Orangeburg line that has simply reached the end of its life. Cleaning buys time here and nothing more. We excavate and repair the failed section, or replace the run, ourselves, with the permit pulled and the utilities located before a shovel moves. The footage from the camera is what decides which one you need, and you get a copy of it.

Camera first, every time

Nobody should approve a sewer repair on a description. Before we recommend anything past a straightforward clearing, we run a camera through the line and show you what is actually there, where it is, and how far down. If another company has quoted you an excavation, a second look with our camera is the cheapest thing you can do before agreeing to it.

What we do not do, said plainly

We do not do trenchless lining or pipe bursting. When a sewer line needs replacing we dig it up and replace it, which is the repair that lasts and the one we can stand behind. And on a private system the line to the tank is ours; the tank and the field belong to a wastewater specialist, and we hand off with the footage rather than a guess when the trouble is theirs.