We clean and inspect drains and sewers in Westminster — cabling, hydro jetting, carbide milling for cast iron, root cutting, and NASSCO certified camera inspection with a written report. Westminster is inside our no-charge area, so there is no trip charge here.
We don’t do repairs and we don’t dig. That’s worth saying first, because it’s the reason we can tell you your line doesn’t need replacing — we have no replacement to sell you.
What’s under a Westminster house
Westminster is a city of material changes. On nearly every line we’ve put a camera down here, the pipe changes at least once between the basement and the city tap — cast iron under the house, then vitrified clay out to the street, and on the newer conversions a length of PVC or SDR35 at the far end where somebody has already been in.
The runs are ordinary metro lengths, somewhere between about sixty feet and a hundred and five from the clean-out to the tap.
If your report says vitrified clay, that is not the bad news it gets read as. Clay sewer pipe is air-dried and then kiln-fired for around fifty hours into something closer to ceramic than to the soft clay plumbing that came before it. It fits together more tightly than the older material, it is still specified in public sewer systems today, and plenty of it in this city has another few decades in it. What clay does have is joints — and joints are where roots come in.
Roots at the joints are not a failed pipe
One Westminster line we scoped runs a hundred and five feet to the city tap: cast iron out of the basement, clay for most of the distance, SDR35 at the end. Roots were coming in at four separate clay joints along the way.
The conclusion on that report reads that the mainline is clean and serviceable, and that no problems were found.
That is not us being generous. Roots enter clay at the joints because that is the only way in — they do not grow through sound pipe wall. Finding them tells you the line is old and has trees over it, which describes most of this city. They get cut out, they come back in a year or two, and the line runs fine for decades. That is maintenance. A report that turns four root joints into a replacement recommendation has made a decision that the pipe does not support.
“The line is flat and holding water”
Another Westminster inspection found a line sitting flat, holding a little water along its whole length. That sentence frightens people, and it is one of the most common things a scope turns up here.
Sewers are built with a minimum slope on purpose. They are designed so the waste floats out, not so the pipe runs dry, and a shallow film of standing water along a line is normal rather than a defect. That line was written up as clean and serviceable, and it was.
There is one place it does matter, and we say so in the report rather than leaving it out: standing water sitting in cast iron will rust it from the inside, and over a long enough period that brings the pipe to the end of its life sooner than it would otherwise get there. It is a reason to keep an eye on an iron line and keep it clean. It is not a reason to replace a working one.
How deep and how long a low spot has to be before it counts as a defect is a question with actual numbers behind it. Here they are.
And when it is real, we say that too
This August we scoped a Westminster basement where the cast iron was cracked along the bottom for most of its length — not one crack, not a stained channel, but open cracking and holes through the floor of the pipe over run after run of it. We cleaned the line, and the line was clean. The pipe was still finished.
What went in that report was not “replace the sewer.” It was cured-in-place lining — a new jointless pipe formed inside the old cast iron — with pipe bursting named as the other option. Both for the same reason: neither one requires taking up the basement floor along the length of the line. Lining needs no trench at all, and bursting needs one opening inside and one outside the foundation.
We don’t do either of those, and we don’t make a penny from recommending them. Which is exactly why it’s worth reading what each repair method actually involves before somebody quotes you one.
Realtors send us here
A good share of our Westminster work arrives through real estate agents rather than homeowners — a scope booked against a deadline, on a house somebody is buying or selling.
That work suits us, because a sale is the moment when being unable to sell a repair is worth the most. We’re NASSCO certified, the inspection comes with a written report and video the other side’s agent and the lender will accept, and the report says what is there whether that helps the deal or not. More than one transaction has been settled by a clean post-cleaning report showing the line was never the problem. More for agents here.
If you’re holding a report
Send it to us before you agree to anything. Call Cam on (720) 435-7315 or email ourdrainandsewer@gmail.com with the report and the video link — she reads every report and watches every video before anything gets quoted.
If you want to know what the words in it mean first, we’ve written all of them down — belly, offset, scale, choked down, and what the footage numbers are and aren’t.
What it costs in Westminster
- Mainline sewer cleaning from an accessible clean-out, up to an hour, 150 feet of cable — $225
- Clogged drains and sinks, up to an hour, 75 feet of cable — $175
- NASSCO certified camera inspection, video and written report — $175
- Camera with locate, video — $145
- Carbide flex-shaft milling and cast iron restoration, up to two hours — $475
- Trailer-mounted hydro jetting, up to two hours, 500 feet of hose — $475
- No trip charge in Westminster.
Estimates are free and the full price list is published. We book about a week out, and by Friday most of the following week is usually gone.