We clean and inspect sewer lines in Boulder. We don’t repair them and we don’t dig, which is the reason this page can tell you what we actually find rather than what we’d like to sell you.
Boulder is outside our no-charge area, so there’s a trip charge of $50 to $100 depending on where in town you are. We’ll tell you which before you book, not after we arrive.
What’s under a Boulder house
Across the Boulder lines we’ve inspected, the pattern repeats. Cast iron leaving the house, a transition somewhere in the first ten to thirty feet, then vitrified clay out to the city tap. Where a section has been replaced at some point you’ll find SDR35 spliced into the middle of it, and the newer builds run ABS from the start.
That matters because the three materials fail in completely different ways. Cast iron scales inward until the bore is half what it was. Clay doesn’t scale at all — it takes roots at every joint, because the joints were never sealed against them. And the SDR35 patch in the middle is usually fine, but it changes the grade, which is where bellies come from.
One line will often have all three. That’s why we carry four cable sizes, a carbide flex-shaft mill and a jetter, and why everything comes out of the van on every job.
“Your sewer line is cracked” — a Boulder sale, and four cracks that weren’t there
A Boulder seller was under contract. The buyer’s inspector scoped the line and reported the cast iron broken at four separate points in the first thirty-three feet.
Four breaks in a sewer line is a replacement, and a replacement during an inspection objection is tens of thousands of dollars off a sale price.
We cleaned the line and scoped it ourselves. There were no breaks. What the other camera had found were the joints — original cast iron, sealed with lead and oakum rope the way it was done when the house was built. They look like interruptions in the pipe wall because that is exactly what they are, and once we had milled the scale off they were cleaner and more obvious than before.
The written report says it plainly: the mainline is clean and serviceable, no problems found, and the four reported breaks are lead-filled joints. We included footage of a lead joint so the buyer’s side could look at one.
The sale went through.
What the footage number in a report actually means
That other inspector put his findings at ten, twelve, eighteen and thirty-three feet. If you hand two reports on the same line to two different companies, the numbers will not match — and that is normal.
A sewer camera counts footage with a rotational counter on the reel. It measures how much the drum has turned, not how much rod has gone down the pipe. Wind the pushrod on loosely or let it come back in a mess and the count changes. Different camera, different reel, different number — on the same line, on the same day.
So the footage in any report, ours included, tells you roughly where along the line something sits. It is not a survey measurement and nobody in this trade should present it as one.
Which is why, when we find a defect that has to go in a report, we don’t just write the number down. We locate it and mark it — a green flag in the yard, or a green arrow sprayed on the concrete. The repair company digs to the mark, and verifies it with their own locator first. Nobody opens a lawn on the strength of a drum counter.
Bellies, and the twenty-foot rule
Bellies turn up on a lot of Boulder lines, usually where somebody has replaced a section and not quite held the grade. Most of them are nothing. We don’t recommend repair for a belly under twenty feet long, and we say so in the report.
On one Boulder line we found a long one — more than twenty feet, holding three inches of standing water — and still didn’t recommend digging it up, because a previous owner had already replaced that section and clearly couldn’t get the fall. Our recommendation was a survey to find out whether there is grade available at all, because we have seen lines like that replaced where the only thing that changed was the pipe.
There’s more on how a belly is measured, and the ten per cent threshold below which it isn’t even reportable, on the sewer line belly page.
And when it is real, we say that too
On another Boulder line we found a circumferential fracture, a two-inch offset where the clay met the newer pipe, and broken clay with roots through it at the city tap. The report recommends replacing that line from the fracture out to the tap.
That’s work we don’t do and can’t quote for. We wrote it down anyway, because the alternative is a homeowner finding out the hard way.
If you’re holding an inspection report right now
Email it to ourdrainandsewer@gmail.com with the video link. Cam prints the report, reads it and watches the footage herself, before anything is quoted. You’ll get a straight answer on whether what’s written there is real.
Half the words on a sewer report sound worse than they are, and several of them aren’t valid without a number attached. There’s a plain-English guide to all of them on what cracked, broken and collapsed actually mean.
What our Boulder customers say
Great coordination from Cam on the phone. Lane and Ronnie did a very thorough job of cleaning the 158′ of drain between the access point and the sewer main. They kept everything clean and dry and used the camera well to show me what was happening. And they were a pleasure to talk with. Furthermore, they saved us thousands of $ on the sale of our house. The buyer’s “inspector” claimed we had cracks in the sewer line. OD&S wrote a report pointing out that the “cracks” were seams between pipe sections that had been shined up by the cleaning process.
Sandy Dunlap — Google review, Boulder
What it costs in Boulder
Mainline cleaning from an accessible clean-out is $225, up to an hour with 150 feet of cable. A NASSCO certified camera inspection with a written report and a video link that doesn’t expire is $175. Carbide milling for cast iron and hydro jetting are $475 each. Every price we charge is published on this site, the same for everyone, with no membership scheme and no quote that changes once we’re in your basement.
Boulder carries a trip charge of $50 to $100 on top, depending on the drive. You’ll be told the number before we book the job.
Estimates are free. Cam answers the phone on (720) 435-7315, Monday to Friday 8 to 5 — she’s the only one who does, and she has been since we started.