Plumbing Notes/general
Drain cleaning + sewer-line service
A look at a real drain and sewer-line repair in the Inland Empire, from snaking a backed-up cleanout to cutting in a new ABS wye where the old clay line finally gave out.
By Brad Staiger — Staiger Plumbing, LIC. #802197
What these photos show
The pictures here are from one of our drain jobs, not stock photos. You're looking at black ABS pipe and fittings staged next to an open cleanout at a building foundation, a drain snake going down into a cleanout box set in a concrete floor, and a fresh ABS wye getting tied into an old clay sewer line in an excavated trench. That's the arc of a typical drain call in Riverside or San Bernardino county. It starts as a slow drain or a backup, and depending on what we find, it either ends at the snake or it ends out in the dirt with a saw and a fitting. Most calls stop at the snake. The ones that don't usually trace back to the same handful of things we see over and over in older Inland Empire neighborhoods.
Why IE drain lines back up
A lot of homes from Fontana out to Redlands still run on clay sewer pipe, especially anything built before the mid-70s. Clay comes in short sections with a hub at every joint, and every one of those joints is a spot for tree roots to push in. Inland Empire summers bake the yard dry, roots go looking for water, and the moisture inside a sewer line pulls them straight through the joint. On the clay soil around Norco and Chino Hills, the ground swells in winter and shrinks in summer, and that movement cracks old pipe and pulls joints apart. Add hard-water scale building up on the inside wall, and a line that drained fine for forty years starts holding water. By the time you get a backup at the lowest fixture in the house, the pipe has usually been narrowing for a while.
Snaking from the cleanout
The cleanout is the first place we go. Most Inland Empire homes sit on a slab with no basement, so that floor cleanout is often the only real access to the main line. In the floor shot, the box is set into a concrete slab with standing water sitting in it, which already tells us the line downstream is blocked. We feed the snake straight down into the water and work the cable through until the head hits the obstruction and breaks it up. For a residential line, a soft blockage of grease, paper, and root hair usually clears and the water drops right away. We run the cable a few times to open the full diameter, not just poke a hole through the middle that closes back up in a month. If the cable keeps stopping at the same spot and won't push past, that's the tell. Something is broken down there, and no amount of cable fixes a cracked pipe.
Cutting in a new wye
When the cable confirms a break, we dig. The trench shot shows a new ABS wye going in where we cut out the failed section and tied back into the existing clay line. That transition is the part that has to be right. ABS to clay gets joined with the correct shielded coupling rated for the two materials, banded down tight so the joint doesn't leak or catch debris and start the whole cycle over again. We pitch the new run so it drains by gravity, backfill, and test it before the dirt goes back. On an older Corona or Riverside property the existing pipe might be clay out at the street and cast iron under the house, and both can be brittle enough that you find more bad pipe once you're in the ground. We'd rather replace a rotten section while the trench is open than close it up and come back.
What this means for you
Not every drain call needs a trench, and we'll tell you when it doesn't. We snake residential lines, and when the problem is a broken or root-choked sewer we open it up and replace the bad section in ABS. What we don't do is hydro-jetting or septic work, so if that's what your line needs we'll say so instead of selling you something we don't run. Staiger has worked Inland Empire drains since 2001, we're licensed under LIC #802197, and we answer our own phone when a line backs up at night. If your drains are slow, gurgling, or backing up at the lowest fixture in the house, that's the line telling you something. Getting a snake or a camera on it early is a lot cheaper than waiting for sewage on the floor.
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