Home sewer line repair in Walnut

Three houses, three laterals

Drive one block in Walnut and you can pass all three of the county's typical sewer laterals. The pre-war house drains through vitrified clay laid in short sections, the joints packed with mortar that cracked decades ago, and whatever tree is nearest has long since found its way in. The mid-century slab house has cast iron drain lines cast into the foundation and a clay or cast lateral out to the street; the iron has been rusting from the invert up for sixty years. The newer house, anything from the late 1970s on, has ABS plastic, which no root or rust can touch, but which cracked where the backfill under it settled or where the ground moved under the whole street during an earthquake. The camera finds all three kinds of trouble; the repair that follows is chosen to match.

Who owns the pipe under the sidewalk

In most Los Angeles County cities the homeowner is responsible for the lateral from the house all the way to the tap on the main, including the length under the parkway, sidewalk and street. That is the stretch a trench makes expensive, because opening public right-of-way means an encroachment permit, traffic control, trench plates and a paving patch inspected by the city. A liner is installed from the private side of the property line and runs the full distance to the main in one piece, so the public ground is never opened. residential sewer service for Walnut from TSR Trenchless, Inc. shows which neighborhoods the crews serve and how that service is scheduled.

Lining under the floor

The slab house is where trenchless work has changed the most. The old remedy for channeled cast iron under a kitchen or bath was to saw-cut the floor, break out the concrete, dig, replace the pipe, backfill, pour and re-tile, with the family living around the hole for a week. A cured-in-place liner is pulled or inverted into the same cast iron through a cleanout or a removed toilet flange, inflated against the wall and cured with hot water or steam. The branch lines are reopened from inside with a robotic cutter, the camera records the finished pipe, and the floor was never touched. The same approach rebuilds the lateral under a driveway, a pool deck or a planted slope without disturbing any of them.

Hillside and beach lots

Hillside homes bring their own version of the problem. A lateral may drop fifty feet from the house to the street at a steep grade, pass through fill behind a retaining wall and change direction twice on the way. Trenching that run is dangerous and ruinous to the slope; a liner follows every bend and every change in pitch, and it is cured in place regardless of the angle. Near the coast the issue is water rather than slope. Sand and a shallow water table let groundwater into every open joint, which overloads the sewer and silts the line. A sealed liner shuts that infiltration out.

When the line must be replaced

A pipe that has collapsed, flattened under load or sagged into a belly that holds water cannot be lined, because the liner would copy the defect. Pipe bursting handles those: a bursting head pulled from a small pit at one end to a pit at the other splits the old pipe and draws new polyethylene in behind it. It also upsizes a line that was too small to begin with. When a defect is a single bad joint in an otherwise sound pipe, a sectional sleeve a few feet long is cured over that spot alone. the step-by-step inspection and repair sequence sets out those steps in the order a crew performs them.

Paperwork worth keeping

Ask for the pre-inspection video and the written finding, the method and its reason, the material specification and rated service life, the warranty, the permit plan and the crew's identity. After the work, file the post-repair video with the house records; it is what a buyer's inspector will ask for. The installer's standing in the verified-installer program is on the verified CIPP installer profile for TSR Trenchless, Inc..

Estimates are free. Call now: (310) 340-2515.

Residential services in Walnut

Questions about residential work in Walnut