Sewage Line Repair QnA

Sewage Line Repair QnA with Gary from Schuelke Plumbing

My home sewage line is old cast iron and I think I’m in the need of seeing if a liner can be put in to repair it. What do you think?

Gary: We actually have two separate types of trench-less sewer replacement that we use depending on the situation. So if you’ve got a majority of your sewer line runs in your front yard, which most people do, we can do a combination of the two because a liner can be a little expensive to do the whole thing.

And the line is really made for segments of your sewer line that are underneath the street or they go in underneath a really nice driveway that nobody wants to Jack hammer, that type of thing.

So we use that, we use that in those situations. And then the pipe bursting. If it’s just running through the grass, the majority of it, we can replace the majority of it with pipe bursting and then that will save some money and, and still accomplish the same thing because you have one seamless pipe that goes the whole way from your front yard.

Oh, very good. Yeah I have a cast iron underneath the house. The house is an older house built in 1920 in the Redlands, CA area. It’s a raised floor. And, I’ve noticed that there’s, leakage from that cast iron underneath the house. And then I also had someone run a camera out through the lawn, out to the streets and on that four inch line because there’s an Oak tree there that has multiple places where it’s damaged and it’s basically a need of a liner….or so I think. 

Gary: We would love to come out and give you an estimate. And we would do our own camera inspection as well, which we wouldn’t charge you for it. It’s just something that, you know, we don’t want to rely on somebody else’s work. We want to make sure that we’re getting a good assessment of the sewer line and then we can provide you with a, wcostith a quote to get it done. I will get you on the schedule for Tuesday eight to 10 go ahead. That sounds, that sounds good.

And so your approach could be a less expensive than doing it all with aligner, correct?

Yeah, it depends on what kind of access we have. The differences with the epoxy lining, you only have to dig one hole to shoot the liner down, the entire stretch of the sewer line.

But the liner material is more expensive with a pipe bursting that I explained to you before, we had to dig two holes, one at the top end of the run and one down near the sidewalk or the curb. And we actually, we, we would pull a brand new pipe from, from, you know, one hold or the other. And then if your sewer line is damaged from the street or from the curb out into the middle of the street where it connects to the city sewer line then we would have proxy line that section and that would save you a substantial amount of money doing it that way. If the sewer line out in the street is in good condition, then we could leave that alone and just do the pipe bursting and definitely would save you quite a bit of money.

Typically our pipe costs are going to run you anywhere from about $75 to $100 a linear foot. And then the epoxy lining is about $130 to $150 per linear foot depending on size and in length.