Hydro jetting cleans a drain with water instead of steel. A high pressure hose goes down the line and a nozzle drives water forward and backward at once — forward to cut, backward to pull the hose along and flush everything it has loosened out towards the city main.
Done properly it is the most thorough clean available on a drain. It is also the wrong tool for a good many of the jobs people ask us to use it on, and we will tell you when that’s the case.
Three machines, and the one you need
Most companies arrive with one machine and use it on everything. We carry three, which means we have no reason to recommend the wrong one.
- The flex-shaft mill does most of the mainline work. Roots and hardened buildup both. A carbide head on a flexible shaft cuts roots out and takes scale back to bare pipe wall-to-wall, rather than boring a channel through the middle of it. On a normal day this is what goes down a sewer main. There’s a separate page on cast iron restoration.
- Cable does the small lines, always. Kitchen, bathroom, laundry, tub, floor drains — those get cable, every time. On a mainline it comes out only when the flex-shaft has been defeated, which doesn’t happen often. That machine is gear-driven with 11/16-inch cable and enormous torque, and it is what we bring when nothing else has worked.
- Jetting is for everything soft, and for volume. Grease, sludge, soap, sand, silt, paper packed solid — the things that coat a pipe rather than grip it. Water moves all of it, and moves it out towards the city main rather than boring a hole through the middle.
The difference that matters to you: some machines make an opening, others clean the pipe. If your line keeps backing up a few months after every cleaning, the odds are somebody has been boring a hole through the problem rather than removing it.
Reach — where cable simply stops
There is a hard ceiling on cable, and it isn’t the machine. We carry 250 feet of it, and past roughly 275 to 300 feet a cable driven with that much torque flips over and ties itself in a knot. You’d better hope that it doesn’t catch your arm, hand or glove. I’ve found several people who rented a machine and are now wearing a cast. That is what steel does at that length. No amount of equipment budget changes it.
Hose has no such limit. We carry 500 feet of jetting hose, and two working reels at 200 and 300 feet that come out most days.
So on a long line — an older Denver lot where the sewer runs out the back and down the alley, or a house set well back from the street — jetting is often the only way to reach the far end at all. If you have been told your line is too long to clean, that is a statement about somebody’s equipment rather than about your pipe.
Where jetting genuinely earns its money
- Kitchen and grease lines. Grease doesn’t block a pipe, it lines it — a little more every year until the bore is half what it was. Cable punches through and leaves the lining. Water takes it off.
- Restaurants and commercial buildings. Where the volume of grease means a cleaning schedule rather than a rescue.
- Sand, silt and construction debris that has settled along the bottom of a line.
- A line that’s been cabled repeatedly and still isn’t right.
- Before a camera inspection, when the line is too dirty to judge. You cannot inspect a pipe you can’t see the walls of, and half of what gets called a defect is a defect plus everything sitting in it.
When we’ll tell you not to bother
If the line is full of roots, jetting is the expensive way to do a job the mill does better. If the pipe is cast iron that has scaled down over decades, water will not lift buildup that has become part of the wall — that is a milling job too. And if the problem is one slow fixture on a small line, that’s a cable job and you don’t need the trailer in your driveway at all.
We don’t replace sewer lines and we don’t dig, so there is nothing further up the ladder for us to sell you. Recommending the wrong machine would cost you money and gain us nothing but a job that doesn’t hold.
What we bring
A trailer-mounted high pressure jetter — not a portable unit run off a van battery. It carries 500 feet of hose and works lines from 2 inches to 10 inches, which covers everything from a kitchen branch to a commercial main.
Trailer-mounted matters on a long run. Pressure and flow are what do the work, and a machine that has to fit in the back of a van has less of both.
You see it before and after
A camera goes down the line before we start and again when we finish, and the footage is yours to keep. On a jetting job that is worth more than on any other, because a clean pipe and a pipe with a channel bored through it look identical from the clean-out — and completely different on camera.
What it costs
- Hydro jetting — $475. Trailer-mounted, 2 to 10 inch lines, up to 2 hours labour, 500 feet of hose.
- Additional jetting time — $250 per hour.
- Camera inspection — $175. NASSCO certified, written report and video included.
Published, the same for everyone, no membership scheme. Estimates are free. The full price list is here.
Where we go
Across the Denver metro — Denver, Aurora, Lakewood, Arvada, Wheat Ridge, Westminster, Thornton, Northglenn, Broomfield, Commerce City, Englewood, Sheridan, Cherry Hills Village, Greenwood Village, Centennial, Littleton, Highlands Ranch and Lone Tree with no trip charge, and further out for $50 to $100 depending on the drive. Full detail on our service areas page.
Booking, honestly
We’re usually booked about a week out, and by Friday most of the following week is gone. Monday to Friday, 8 to 5 — no nights, no weekends, no holidays. We’d rather tell you that now than take a booking we can’t keep.
Cam answers the phone on (720) 435-7315 — she’s the only one who does, and she has been since we started.
Family owned and operated, and run on one rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That’s why we’ll tell you when your line doesn’t need the work.