Most people meet the roots in their sewer line the same way: the basement floor drain backs up on a Sunday, in a house that has never given a moment’s trouble. There was no warning, because there is never any warning. A line can be filling with roots for years and behave perfectly right up until the day it doesn’t.
So if you are reading this with water on the floor and twenty years of no problems behind you, nothing unusual has happened. This is the ordinary way it goes.
Roots come in at the joints
A root does not drill through the wall of a pipe. It finds a seam and grows into it. Clay sewer pipe comes in short sections with a joint every few feet, and every one of those joints is a seam, which is why roots are overwhelmingly a clay problem. In the lines we have on camera, roots turn up in clay many times more often than in cast iron, and in plastic they are close to unheard of, because plastic runs in long lengths with far fewer places to get in.
What a root is looking for is water, and a sewer line is the wettest thing in your yard. Once a hair root finds the seam it thickens, and the joint it is sitting in slowly loses the ability to close. That is the whole mechanism. It is not an invasion, it is a tree doing exactly what a tree does.
About a third of the lines we look at have them, and none of them have been severe
We went back through the last two hundred or so written inspections. Roots show up in about one line in three. That is a lot of houses, and it is the first thing worth knowing: having roots does not make your sewer unusual.
Here is the second thing. Across all of those reports, the word we have used to describe root intrusion is minor, twenty-six times. Not once in any of them have we written severe, or heavy, or major. That is not us being generous with the language. It is what the camera keeps showing, and we grade what we see.
Roots in a sewer line are common and they are ordinary. They are also, left alone, the thing most likely to put water on your basement floor. Both of those are true at once, and a company that only tells you the second half is selling you something.
What actually takes them out
We start with the flex-shaft milling machine, every time. It carries a carbide head on a flexible shaft, it reaches 125 feet, and it weighs about half what the big cable machine does. Lighter and faster matters more than it sounds: a machine that is easy to set up is a machine that gets used properly, on a line that gets cleaned wall to wall rather than bored a hole through.
If a line turns from clay to plastic partway along, and plenty of them do, the carbide head comes off and a plain chain goes on before we reach the plastic. Carbide never goes inside a plastic pipe. That is why more than one head rides in the van.
When the flex-shaft is defeated, and it is not often, we go back for the cable machine: a gear-driven sewer machine running eleven-sixteenths cable, two hundred and sixty-five pounds of it, with enough torque that we have yet to meet the root mass that stops it. Most companies moved to thinner, lighter cable years ago. We kept the heavy one for the days when nothing else will do, and we carry the mill for the other days, which is nearly all of them.
A camera goes down the line before we start and again when we finish, and the footage is yours to keep. You can see what came out rather than take our word for it.
Why we come back every year
Once roots are into a joint, they do not stop and they do not settle down. Cutting them out does not kill the tree, and the tree has not changed its mind about where the water is. What we have cleared will start growing back the same week.
From a clean line, the window before roots are heavy enough to back the sewer up is one to two years. That is the number the whole schedule is built on. We come at one year because one year sits inside that window with room to spare, which means the regrowth never gets as far as your basement. You are not buying a cleaning. You are buying the fact that the backup does not happen.
That is why nearly every report we write on a line with roots ends the same way, recommending annual cleaning to remove fresh root growth. It is not a form sentence. It is the same judgement, written out one line at a time.
What it costs
The first visit is $475. That is the full milling job, up to two hours of labor, and it is doing real work, because a line that has never been cleaned is holding every root that has grown into it since the house was built.
After that, the annual maintenance clean is $225, from an accessible clean-out. Same machine, same technician, much shorter job. Twelve months of fresh growth is a fraction of what we took out the first time, so it is a fraction of the work and a fraction of the price. The lower rate is for lines we have already milled out, because those are the only lines where the short version of the job is enough.
Both numbers are on the price list with everything else, and we will tell you which one applies before we book, not after we arrive.
What we don’t do
We don’t repair sewer lines and we don’t dig. We clean, we jet, we mill and we inspect, and that is the whole list. It means there is nothing for us to gain by telling you a line is worse than it is, because the job at the end of that conversation is not ours.
If a camera does show something that genuinely needs repairing, we locate it, mark it in your yard and put it in writing, and you take that to whoever you like.
Mon–Fri 8:00am–5:00pm. Free estimates across the Denver metro area.