There are two completely different problems that both look like water coming up where it shouldn’t, and they cost different amounts to fix. One is a drain. The other is your sewer mainline. Before you call anybody, it is worth knowing which one you are looking at, because the answer is usually sitting right there in the floor drain.
Anything that isn’t the sewer mainline is a drain
That is the whole distinction, and it is how we price the work. Your sewer mainline is the single large line that carries everything out of the house and under the yard. Everything that feeds into it — the kitchen sink, the bathroom sinks, the tub, the shower, the washer, the floor drains, the utility and bar sinks — is a drain. A blockage in one of those is a drain cleaning job at $175. A blockage in the mainline is a different job on a different machine, and it starts at $225.
Most people don’t know those are separate problems, which is how somebody ends up paying mainline money for a plugged kitchen line, or being quoted for a sink when the sewer is the thing that is actually blocked.
How to tell which one you have, before you call
Cam answers our phone, and she works this out with two questions. You can ask yourself the same two right now.
Were you running the dishwasher or a load of laundry when it backed up? If the floor drain came up while the washer was draining or the dishwasher was going, that is almost always a small line. The kitchen or laundry branch couldn’t take the water fast enough and it found the nearest low point. The mainline is still flowing.
Is there toilet paper or sewage in the floor drain? If there is, that is the mainline. Toilet paper and waste only get into the system from a toilet, and a toilet only discharges to the sewer mainline. For that to come back up a floor drain, the blockage has to be downstream of everything in the house.
Clean water while an appliance was running points at a drain. Anything that came out of a toilet points at the sewer. It is not a perfect test and we will confirm it ourselves when we get there, but it is right far more often than it is wrong, and it tells you which price you are looking at before anyone is standing in your basement.
What is actually in there
Each fixture fails in its own way, and after enough of them you stop being surprised.
Showers and bathtubs are hair. Essentially always. It collects at the trap and in the first few feet, binds together, and narrows the line until the water sits.
Kitchen sinks are greasy buildup. Grease goes down warm and liquid and cools into a coating on the pipe wall a few feet along. It builds inward over months. It is the same shape of problem as scale in an old cast iron line, just softer and quicker.
Laundry lines are lint, and then dirt. This is the one people get wrong. They assume it is lint alone, and it isn’t — lint is fuzzy, so it catches and holds the dirt that came out of the clothes. What comes out of a laundry line is a packed mass of both, and there is a lot more of it than anyone expects from washing clothes.
Cable, and the right size of it
Small lines get cable. Not the mainline machine, not the mill — cable, every time, because a small line needs a tool that can turn a tight trap without destroying anything on the way through.
We carry four cable sizes so the machine can match the line. A quarter-inch cable on a short, light machine goes into tub and shower drains, where the traps are tight and the run is short. A three-eighths machine with 75 feet on the reel is the one that does kitchen sinks, laundry, utility sinks and floor drains — most of what is on this page.
Plenty of companies arrive with one machine and use it on everything. That is how a kitchen machine ends up down a sewer mainline, and how a cable too big for a bathroom line gets forced somewhere it doesn’t fit. Carrying four sizes is the only reason we can tell you honestly which one your line needs.
What it costs
$175 for a clogged drain or sink — up to an hour of labor, 75 feet of cable. That covers kitchen, bathroom, bar, floor and utility sinks, bathtubs, showers, washer drains and floor drains. If it runs past the hour, additional cable time is $175 an hour, and you will be told before the clock starts, not after.
There is a $50 additional charge in a few situations, and we would rather you read about it here than hear it at the door: no accessible clean-out, access through a roof vent, access through a crawl space, or a toilet that has to come off and go back on to reach the line.
Every price we charge is published, the same for everyone, with no membership scheme and no rate that moves once we are inside.
If it turns out to be the mainline
Sometimes a drain call is a sewer problem, and we will say so rather than cable a sink and leave you with the real fault still there. If it is the mainline, the usual culprits are roots coming in at the joints or scale built up inside old cast iron, and both have their own page.
We don’t repair sewer lines and we don’t dig, so there is nothing for us to gain by telling you the problem is bigger than it is.
Mon–Fri 8:00am–5:00pm. Free estimates across the Denver metro area.