Drain Problems Start Small. We Solve Them Completely.

A customer called about damp carpet at the bottom of the stairs. Nothing upstairs looked wrong and no fixture nearby was leaking. What we found was the main stack running behind the wall above the stairs, cracked at the hub just above the cleanout. Every fixture on the floors above was draining into that crack, a little at a time, and the water was travelling down inside the wall before it reached the carpet. The wet spot was nowhere near the broken pipe. That is normal for interior drain failures, and it is the reason we chase the source rather than the stain.

Branch lines running from sinks, tubs, showers, toilets and laundry back to the stack. The stacks themselves. Vents, which are the half of the system nobody thinks about until a drain starts gurgling or a trap siphons dry and the room smells. Cleanout access, which older homes are often missing entirely, and which turns every future problem into a bigger job. The pipe we replace most is cast iron and galvanized. Both fail from the inside out, so the outside can look fine while the bore has scaled down to a fraction of its original diameter. A washer drain backing up into the laundry room, with an auger that will not fix it, is usually that: the cable clears the blockage and the pipe is still too narrow to carry a full load of water.

Roughly at the foundation. Inside that line it is interior drain work, which usually means opening a wall or a ceiling, cutting out a section, and repiping it in ABS. Outside it, the line is buried several feet down and heading for the city main, and the answers are a spot repair, a liner or a replacement. Knowing which side of the wall your problem is on changes the price by an order of magnitude, so we work that out before quoting anything. If several fixtures are misbehaving at once, or a floor drain backs up when something upstairs runs, that points outside and belongs on the sewer line repair side. One fixture, or fixtures grouped on one wall, usually points inside. One myth worth clearing up, because it appears on almost every plumbing site written for warmer states: a soggy patch in the lawn is not a reliable Utah signal. Our lines sit well below the frost line. Trust the drains, not the grass.

Not always, and we will say so. A single cracked fitting in an otherwise sound ABS system is a section repair, not a repipe. We have cut out a cracked forty five, replaced six inches of pipe, and left the rest alone because the rest was fine. The case for replacing a run is when the material itself is done. Cast iron and galvanized reach a point where every clear is temporary, and you are paying for a drain cleaning two or three times a year on a pipe that is never going to flow properly again. When the walls or the crawl space are already open for other work, that arithmetic changes quickly, because access is most of the cost.

Most of the interior drain work we do is tied to a remodel. Moving a sink, adding a bathroom, or finishing a basement means the drain has to move too, and three things decide whether it passes: slope, venting, and pipe size. Those are also the three things we most often find wrong in work somebody else did. A kitchen drain run too high so the slope is flat. A line teed in with no vent. A one and a half inch branch that needed to be two inch once extra fixtures were added to it. Adding fixtures to an existing line is where sizing quietly becomes the whole job, and it is worth catching on paper rather than after the drywall is up. If your project is a kitchen, that is the most common place we get called mid-remodel.

We do not locate slab or underground leaks. That takes specialized listening and tracing equipment we do not own, and we will not bill you to guess at it. If the trail leads under the slab rather than into a drain line we can open up, we say so and point you to someone who does that work. Our leak repair page draws that line in detail.