Houston Sewer Line Replacement

On today’s show, it’s all about sewer line replacement in Houston.

Yeah,

I’m John Eccles, Richard Saad. So John, why would you need it? Why would you want it high? So today your sewer line replacements. So let me kind of set the stage. So we’re talking about you’ve already had us next plumbing or another plumbing company out of your house. The stoppages already been diagnosed and it’s something that’s just not going to go away, right? So you either have an offset pipe, a broken pipe, a root intrusion, a belly in your line that doesn’t have good slope. So there’s an imperfection to your sewer line of some sorts and it needs to be fixed. Um, let me lead off with, no matter who you use, a good thing that you need to address here is, hey, is it possible to do a repair versus a replacement? A lot of times it gets overlooked, um, for various different reasons, but that needs to be on top of mind.

If you can do that. Now, of course, that’s just going to be an option whenever you have an issue with your sewer line. Um, that’s going to be putting a bandaid on an overall, you know, all problem. So, but depending on your financial situation, what’s good for your home, how long you’re gonna live there. Sometimes we repair it. Makes Sense, right. But sometimes it makes sense for our homeowners and our repair will last. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Our repairs will last. Absolutely. But eventually the age of that pipe we’ll catch back up to you and another part of it’s going to go out. Yeah. So back to the replacement. So what we’ve done is we’ve done all the leg work. Um, you’ve had someone camera the sewer line. If they’re giving you a replacement cost without Cameron, that’s really dangerous because they don’t know exactly what’s going on.

There needs to be some sort of way to verify what kind of problem you’re having. Right? So we, we, we like to Kimra sewer lines to make sure exactly. Take all the guesswork out and tell you what’s going on. Right. Once that happens, man, we replace all sorts of different types of pipe. We see it all, especially Meyer land here in the heights. Um, what are some other areas west you, we see it a lot of mantra. We’ve got anything from concrete clay. Um, what are some other ones that we see? We’ve had some cloth ones here. Yeah, yeah. They’re like a tar based cloth. It’s these older pipes that just, you know, it in their day and age it was cutting edge, right? Everybody was excited to see it and it was the new thing. But now we have PVC, which is just compared to these other pipes, lights light years ahead of where they’re at.

Anyway, let’s get back to square one. We’re getting a little off topic. When we come in and do this replacement we’re talking about, you know, we, uh, it’s an open yard. Surgery is what it is. We’re going to be excavating in your yard. A lot. Lot of companies either go by hand or with machine, depending on the yard we like to do by hand because there’s all sorts of stuff in your yard that we don’t want to cut up and we want to take our time and make sure that it’s done right, but we’re going to open up this trench and your sewer line, depending on where you’re at and depending on how the house was built at the home is normally somewhere should be in the range of about two foot deep out to wherever the city ties in. With proper slope, depending on how big your yard is, depends on how deep it’s going to be at the city.

We’ve seen him four and a half feet deep. We’ve seen him 20 feet deep. It all depends on how it was originally installed and when you’re talking about that, right. So we get into these big trenches and as dangerous, right? It’s, I mean we’ve seen ambient, yeah, we’ve seen it on the news. Depending on the type of soil that you’re dealing with and stuff. We’ve gotta be very careful on how we dig that up. And you know how we’re placing the dirt on the side, especially when you get beyond that five foot depth. We really gotta be careful that we’re not not exposed to any sort of cave ins or anything like that. And what’s worse than after we got to dig, what are we going to do after that? We’ve got to take out the old pipe, right? Yeah. That can get nasty. That’s exactly right.

So you know, we like to tell our customers once we remove that pipe, now we’re dealing with bacteria so we’re going to be working within some, you know, some pretty harmful stuff that if it got into an open cut or something could cause some harm. So we take proper precaution to make sure that we, we open it up nice and neat, try to stay clean, right. And try to be safe and then get your new pipe in with as little downtime as possible. You know, it’s interesting that you say that. Just to mention that it is a dangerous job. Absolutely it is. We’ve had several guys get sick and especially under these pier and beam homes that have sewage underneath and we have to crawl up underneath there and yeah, we’re as protected as you can get. But we had a guy recently that, that caught a bacteria from underneath the house, uh, from that sewer and he was out almost two months.

Yeah. I mean, he was in bad shape for a long period of time. Yeah. And he was on antibiotics for almost two months trying to kill that bacteria. You know, a lot of my friends and even customers, sometimes they think of it is just grunt work. But there, there is some other danger to it. And I mean, there’s some skill to make sure that there’s, those things don’t happen to you. Yeah. You know, um, so that’s how we, that’s traditionally how sewer lines are replaced. We also do some pipelining, which is a new process, right? The city has been doing it for years. Right. Well, that’s where we dig up. Now again, uh, this situation you have, your pipe has to qualify, right. It doesn’t work in every situation, but what it’s doing is, is, is putting a fiber glass liner on the interior pipe.

It’s coating the inside of your current pipe, right? With a fiberglass lining that takes it from point a to point B, depending on how far you need it. They can do repairs, sections, they can do whole lines, you know, they can do it all. And that’s a really neat process, um, as to how it works, right? So they take this fiberglass and they paint it on this bladder and then they put it on there and they fill it and they push you with air and then fill it with hot water. And then that cures it in place. And once it comes out, you’ve got a brand new slick PVC line right in the place of your old line. Again, there’s some qualifying things that go into that. Um, but if, if you’re aligned, does qualify for it, it does save you the heartache of having the open yard.

Right? So some of that construction area doesn’t have to happen if it’s going underneath concrete that you just absolutely cannot take out. It’s a fantastic product. Absolutely. And we do have a lot of homeowners that have pools and they have great a decking and coping. And a lot of times, you know, it’s just one little area that became a problem and we can line that. But we have to run cameras, we have to verify, we have to look at things and we will tell you whether it can work or not. Yeah, absolutely. And if the percentage of, okay, we’re going to get 100%, we’re fine, but if it’s not 100%, maybe what we’re going to give you the option is, okay, we’ve got an 80% effects. What do you want to do? Yeah. But it is a great product. Oh yeah. Yeah. It’s that if you ever get to see it done right, it’s uh, it’s really cool.

And it’s a fast acting thing. So once the show starts, right, because once they start spreading the cure or I mean the fiberglass, it starts curing. So once that starts, the clocks on. And these guys you want to talk about, like you said it more than anything, we have to be precise. We got to be, it’s a tedious process. So we’ve got to double check our ts, crossed our I’s, cross our t’s and dot our I’s. There you go. I was waiting for you. Correct that. So you got to do all those things. But it’s a very interesting process and it’s cutting edge and not a lot of people in Houston, uh, offer that we do. Um, I’m not sure if any, actually, I’m not sure if anybody else in Houston offers it. I think there might be a few, I don’t know the names, but um, in any way, if that ever comes across and that’s something you’re interested in, we can definitely talk to you about it.

When we, again, when you’re talking about sewer line replacement, this is a big project. Normally it’s a brine project and it’s a high dollar project. Yeah, it is. It is. So, so in saying that, if they did not hire us to come in to initially get the stoppage right to unstop it and then run a camera and you guys need a second opinion, we’re here for you. We will give you a second opinion. Matter of fact, we just did one about a month ago where they wanted to charge him 24,000 and we fixed it for grant. We did one yesterday like that and we did another one yesterday. Happens a lot more than what you guys think now. Depending on where the roots are located, you could easily get away, get away with a patch job. Yeah. But these companies want to say the entire thing, right? Yeah.

It’s better for us to do the entire thing. But you can get away in some circumstances what the patch job, which is a lot cheaper. And usually what I will tell people, if there’s root intrusion and one spot and it’s in the spot where you can do a patch, why not? If the rest of it looks good, yeah. But it’s up to you and you might want to elect to do the entire amount just to get it all done and not do the patch or repair. Um, and I’m kind of that guy. I’m that guy. I mean, I’d really do the whole thing, but there’s a lot of people that wouldn’t know. So a lot of times we can give options and these other companies don’t give options. Yeah. You know, so speaking from a Knicks plumbing standpoint, right? The way that we like to cure ourselves, exactly what you’re saying, we want to give you an option once you to be able to choose what’s best for you.

You know, back to what Richard’s saying about second opinions. We camera 90% of all the houses we go to, we’ll camera at no charge. The only time that we do charge is if there’s not a direct access to the line and we’ve got to do something crazy like get on the roof or something like that. But other than that, we normally, Kimra, everything for free because we want, again, just like we say every week on the show, we want to assist our customers and give them as much information to make a good decision. You know? But I want to back something up with that. Usually they call us for the stoppage. Yeah. And we’ll throw in the camera. Yeah. So if you call us for the stoppage, we’ll usually do the camera for free. And it’s very rare that we do charge for that. Yeah. And that’s going to allow you guys to make a great decision on what you want. That’s going to be best for you and the family. And that’s what that camera system is gonna do. It’s gonna take 100% of the guests workout. That’s right. That’s exactly right. Don’t call us just for the camera and no money.

But yeah, I want to clarify that. But I mean, if you’re experiencing some issues and you’re not sure what to do and you’re being told one thing and you’re just not sure if it’s right, give us a call. We’re always, you know, at the office, Richard or I, and you know, we’re more than willing to help out anybody out of a situation and make sure that they’re making the best decision for themselves in their home. Absolutely. When you say that’s what we’re here for, we’re free. We’re here for Houston much. Right? We’re here for you guys and it’s right. So that call us with questions right now with the weather that it’s been wet, dry, cold sewer lines are popping all over the place. We did how many this week we did 1414 lines. Yes. This week. And this is what the cold does, right? It moves that ground. So if you guys have problems and have concerns and maybe you don’t understand something that somebody else said, call us. We’ll help you, we’ll help you through it whether you hire us or not. Try it.

Okay.

Well thank you guys. Thank you so much. See you next week.