A published price list is only worth something if you know what you’re buying. So here’s the equipment, and why there’s so much of it.
Four cables, because there are four different jobs
Every cable machine on our van is a Gorlitz, and they run four different sizes:
- GO 15 — 1/4-inch cable, 35 feet. The tub machine. Bathtub and shower drains, where the trap is tight and short and anything heavier simply won’t go round the bend.
- GO 380 — 3/8-inch cable, 75 feet. The kitchen machine. Kitchen, bathroom, bar and utility sinks, laundry drains, floor drains.
- GO 50 — 1/2-inch cable, 150 feet. A full-length sewer machine on a frame small enough for a tight bathroom — for when the line is a mainline but the only way at it is through a room the big machine physically can’t get into.
- GO 68HD — 11/16-inch cable, 150 feet, plus a spare reel with another hundred. The gear-driven mainline machine. Most of this page is about that one.
Notice what changes as you go down that list and what doesn’t. The GO 50 reaches just as far as the big machine — a hundred and fifty feet either way. What you give up by going to half-inch cable isn’t distance. It’s diameter, and with it the muscle to drive a cutting head through something that doesn’t want to move.
That’s the whole ladder, in one sentence: we pick the machine by the pipe and by what we can physically get the machine to, and we only give up power when the house makes us.
Four sizes because there are four different jobs. A quarter-inch cable in a six-inch sewer main accomplishes nothing at all. Eleven-sixteenths in a bathtub drain won’t get past the trap. The skill in this trade isn’t owning the biggest machine — it’s arriving with the right one, and that means owning all of them and putting them all in the van every morning.
Which is worth knowing, because a company that carries one machine has to use it on everything. Seventy-five feet of 3/8-inch kitchen cable in a sewer main will sometimes punch an opening through a blockage and the drain will run again for a few weeks. It has not cleaned the pipe. When it backs up again nobody explains why, and the second visit often arrives with a replacement quote attached.
Two mainline machines, and we bring both
When I started in this trade in 1998, 11/16-inch cable was the standard for sewer mains. Everybody ran it, and so did we, for years.
An 11/16 machine weighs two hundred and sixty-five pounds. Carrying that down a basement staircase and back up again at the end of a day is real work, and the trade dealt with it — most companies went to thinner cable, 5/8 or half-inch, on a lighter machine. Same job, less capability, easier day.
We went a different way. Our day-to-day mainline machine is now a flex-shaft. It reaches a hundred and twenty-five feet, weighs about half what the big cable machine does, and — this is the part that matters — it does something cable has never been able to do. It mills. A carbide head spinning on a flexible shaft takes rust scale off a cast iron wall and gives you back the pipe’s original diameter. Cable pushes a hole through scale. The flex-shaft removes it.
That’s a genuine improvement and we’re glad of it. But the heavy machine still rides on the truck. Two hundred and sixty-five pounds of it, most days going home again untouched.
Why we still carry it: roots
The big machine is a Gorlitz GO 68HD: 11/16-inch cable, a hundred and fifty feet of it, driven by a 10:1 gearbox rather than a belt.
The gearbox is the whole point. A belt is designed to slip — that’s its job, protecting the motor by giving up when the cutter binds in something. Sensible for the machine. No use at all to you, standing in your basement while a root mass forty feet under the lawn wins the argument.
A ten-to-one gearbox doesn’t give up. It keeps turning the cutter with the full torque of the motor behind it. Where roots are concerned that machine is basically invincible — not thick ones, not a lot of them, not in clay and not in cast iron. In twenty-eight years I have not seen roots beat it.
So we carry the light machine because it’s better, and the heavy one because some days better isn’t enough. Nothing in that van is there for show.
Access costs you footage
If there’s no clean-out and we go in through the roof vent, the first stretch of cable is travelling down the vent stack before it ever reaches the horizontal line. So a hundred and fifty feet on the reel is about a hundred and twenty-five feet along the sewer.
Worth knowing if you’ve been told your blockage is unreachable. It may be unreachable from where they started, with what they brought.
There’s a spare reel too
Another hundred feet of 11/16, on its own reel. That’s what the additional-cable charge on our price list is — past a hundred and fifty feet a second reel goes on the machine, and that takes time. Two hundred and fifty feet of mainline cable in total.
We’d far rather charge you for the extra hour than tell you a line can’t be cleaned.
And here’s where it stops
Two hundred and fifty feet isn’t a round number we picked. It’s about as far as this machine can actually be controlled.
Somewhere around two hundred and seventy-five to three hundred feet, an 11/16 gear-driven machine becomes uncontrollable. Not because the motor runs out of anything — because the torque is so high that at that length the cable flips over on itself and ties itself in a knot, down inside your pipe, where nobody wants a knot.
The thing that makes this machine unbeatable in the first hundred feet is exactly what defeats it at three hundred.
So past two hundred and fifty feet we stop cabling and do something else — jet it, or work it from a second access point — and we’ll tell you that’s what we’re doing and why. Every tool has a limit. We’d rather you heard ours from us.
You can look at any of it
None of this has to be taken on trust. The machines come into your house. The cable is on the reel in plain sight and the model number is on the frame — you’re welcome to look, and to ask what size is going down your pipe.