Sanitary sewer · locate green · Royal Oak, MI
Every drain problem
has a depth.
The depth is the price.
A blocked kitchen sink and a collapsed lateral are the same phone call and nowhere near the same job. What separates them is how far down the trouble sits, and whether anyone has to open your yard to reach it. The whole scale is below, published, before a truck parks on your lawn.
- Answered by
- Ray or Denise, 6am to 10pm
- Working here since
- 1993
- Cameras on every truck
- Since 2011
The scale, top to bottom
Five depths. Yours is one of them, and you can usually tell which from what the water is doing. Prices are what we have charged in Royal Oak this year for the ordinary version of each job. A bad one costs more and we say so on the phone, not in the driveway.
-
0ft
One fixture, and only one
The tub drains slowly. The kitchen sink holds water. Everything else in the house is fine.
It is in the trap or the first few feet of branch line, which is grease in a kitchen and hair almost everywhere else. A cable reaches it from the fixture itself. Nothing comes apart, nothing gets opened, and we are usually out inside an hour.
- Method
- Hand cable, 25 ft
- Access
- None. We work from the fixture
- Typical
- $145 to $220
-
4ft
Two fixtures back up together
You run the washer and the basement floor drain burps. Flush upstairs, the shower gurgles.
Two fixtures sharing a symptom means the blockage is below where they join, in the branch under the slab. A hand cable is too short and too soft for it. This is a drum machine through the cleanout, and we put a camera down afterwards so you can see it is actually clear rather than temporarily open.
- Method
- Drum machine, then camera
- Access
- Interior cleanout
- Typical
- $260 to $400
-
8ft
The whole house backs up, and it keeps coming back
Cleared in March, back in June, back again in September. Usually worst after rain.
That rhythm is roots. Royal Oak has clay laterals under maples that were planted when the pipe went in, and a root mass rebuilds in a season. Cutting them buys a few months. Jetting scours the pipe wall back to full diameter and buys years, and the camera run afterwards tells you whether the pipe underneath is still sound or only clear.
- Method
- Root cutter, hydro jet, camera
- Access
- Exterior cleanout. No excavation
- Typical
- $450 to $900
-
12ft
The pipe itself has failed
The camera stops. Water stands in the line at the same spot every time. Sometimes a soft dip in the lawn above it.
A section has cracked, dropped, or gone out of round, usually within a few feet of the tap at the property line. There are two ways to deal with it and the difference matters to your yard: a cured-in-place liner is pulled through the existing pipe and cures into a new one, which requires no trench at all, or the failed section is dug and replaced, which means one pit rather than a strip across the lawn. We camera and locate first, then price both and let you pick.
- Method
- Camera, locate, then liner or spot dig
- Access
- Liner: none. Spot repair: one 4 ft pit
- Typical
- $1,800 to $4,200
-
18ft
It stopped being yours
Your neighbors are having the same week. Water comes up in the street, or backs into more than one house on the block.
Past the tap it belongs to the city, and no amount of work inside your basement will fix it. What that situation actually needs is somebody to prove where the blockage sits and hand the evidence to the people who own that pipe. We run the camera, record the footage and the locate depth, and file it with Royal Oak DPW on your behalf.
- Method
- Camera, locate, written report to DPW
- Access
- Exterior cleanout
- Typical
- No charge
We do not bill for proving a job is not ours to do. It costs us an hour and it is the fastest way we know to be worth calling next time.
When we do have to dig
Most of the trade advertises a no-dig guarantee, and most of the time it is honest, because most drain work genuinely never breaks ground. It is worth saying plainly where the line actually is.
Lining handles a cracked or root-damaged pipe that still holds its shape. It cannot fix a pipe that has collapsed, gone badly out of alignment, or been crushed by a footing. If the camera shows one of those, a liner would be selling you a repair we already know will fail, so we dig.
When we dig it is a pit at the failure, located to within a foot before the shovel comes off the truck, not a trench following the pipe. Sod comes up in sections and goes back down the same day. If we open ground and find the problem somewhere else, moving to it is on us.
- Lining worksCracked, root-invaded, or corroded pipe that still holds its round
- Lining failsCollapsed, offset more than half a diameter, or crushed
- Located toWithin 12 inches, before excavation
- RestorationSod lifted in sections, replaced same day
- If we are wrongMoving the pit is at our cost
What people say when it is over
Third company in two years and the first one to put a camera down before quoting. Turned out to be roots at the tap, not the collapse the last guy wanted four thousand dollars to dig up.
Ray told me on the phone it sounded like it was past my line and he was right. Ran the camera, wrote it up, sent it to the city, charged me nothing. City had it open by Thursday.
Quoted me the liner and the dig side by side with what each one does to the yard, then let me think about it overnight without a single follow-up call.
Tell us what the water is doing
One fixture or the whole house, once or every spring. That is usually enough for us to tell you which depth you are looking at and what it runs, before anybody comes out.
Ray or Denise answer, 6am to 10pm, seven days.
After 10pm the line still rings through for a backup in progress.