Sewer Cleaning in Rhode Island

Main line sewer cleaning, 3 inch to 15 inch

The size range is the point. A house lateral in Rhode Island is usually 4 inches, sometimes 3 in an older home, sometimes 6 where a large house or a two-family was plumbed generously. Past that you are into the mains that serve apartment buildings, restaurants, schools, mill conversions and small commercial blocks: 8, 10, 12 and 15 inch pipe that a residential drain cable simply flops around inside of. We carry the cable machines and the jetting equipment to clean the whole range, which is why property managers and commercial owners call us for the lines other companies turn down.

How to tell it is the main and not a drain

• More than one fixture backing up at once, usually the lowest in the building first
• A floor drain or basement fixture giving back water when something upstairs is used
• Gurgling from a drain you are not using, as air is pushed back up the branch
• Sewage odor at a cleanout or floor drain before anything visibly backs up
• Recurring clogs that clear and come back, which is a partially blocked main, not bad luck

A single slow sink or one sluggish tub is a drain cleaning call. Any of the above is a sewer call, and treating it as a drain problem wastes a visit.

What is usually in the line

Roots find the joints in clay and cast iron and grow into the flow, and they grow back on a schedule. Grease from a kitchen cools and hardens a few feet down the line and closes the pipe a little at a time, which is why restaurant mains want a regular clean rather than an emergency one. Old cast iron sheds scale from the inside until the bore is half what it was. And then there are the wipes, the paper towels and the things that were flushed in a rental unit nobody was watching.

Cable, jetter, or both

A cable machine cuts through roots and breaks up a blockage, and for a root mass or a foreign object it is the right first tool. Hydro jetting is different in kind: high pressure water scours the full circumference of the pipe wall, stripping grease and scale and flushing everything to the main, so the pipe is restored to its real diameter rather than punched through. On a main line that has been slow for years, jetting is the difference between clearing it this month and clearing it for a long time.

Where the line is accessible we camera it after cleaning as well as before, so you can see the pipe wall you paid to have cleaned.

Commercial and multi-family

Restaurants, multi-unit buildings, schools and mixed-use mill buildings have mains that fail expensively and at the worst hour. We clean them on a schedule where the owner wants one, and on an emergency basis when the schedule was skipped. Larger diameter, longer runs and shared responsibility between tenants and owners are all ordinary to us, and we document what we found so the next conversation is about facts.

When cleaning is not the answer

Cleaning restores a pipe that is intact. It cannot fix a collapsed section, an offset joint, a belly holding waste, or a line that has rotted through. The camera tells us which situation we are in, and when it is the second one we say so and point you at repair or replacement rather than selling a cleaning that will need repeating in a month.