Clay Street · San Francisco
Sewer Lateral Plumbing Project
A sewer lateral replaced on Clay Street. The lateral is the length of pipe a homeowner is responsible for and the one nobody looks at until it stops working.
See the projectDrains and sewer
The oldest pipe in the city runs under your home.
Drain cleaning, camera diagnosis, hydro jetting, and sewer lateral repair or replacement in lines that were laid more than a hundred years ago.
The camera goes in before anything else does.
San Francisco’s sewer infrastructure is among the oldest in the country. Cast iron and clay laterals installed over a century ago still serve homes and commercial buildings across the city, and the hills and seismic history put them under stresses that flatter places never see. Cleaning a line without knowing what is in it is guesswork, so we run a camera through first.
What the camera finds decides the method. A localized soft blockage clears with mechanical snaking. Grease, mineral scale and root intrusion need hydro jetting, which drives high-pressure water through the pipe and scours the wall rather than boring a hole through the obstruction. We do not use chemical drain cleaners, because they accelerate corrosion in exactly the old cast iron we are trying to preserve. After the clean, a second camera pass confirms the line is clear and documents anything that needs repair.
When the line does need work, we do it. Repair, replacement and new installation are all in-house, so you are not coordinating between a cleaning company and a contractor.
The work
What we take on
Camera inspection
Run through the cleanout to locate the blockage, assess pipe condition and identify root intrusion, corrosion or displacement.
Drain cleaning
Mechanical snaking for localized blockages, at the source rather than at the fixture that showed the symptom.
Hydro jetting
High-pressure water for grease, scale and roots. More thorough than snaking, and no chemicals.
Sewer lateral repair
Sections replaced where the line is sound elsewhere, with the excavation planned around access.
Sewer line replacement and installation
Full replacement when the line has reached the end, and new installation for construction work.
Post-clean verification
A follow-up camera pass confirms the line is clear and records the condition for next time.
Drain repair and replacement
Corroded drain lines replaced. PVC generally runs about 30 years against cast iron’s 90, and maintenance moves both.
Questions
What clients ask first
Yes. When multiple fixtures slow at the same time the problem is usually in the main sewer line rather than in any one drain, and it calls for sewer line cleaning instead of a simple snake.
The camera decides. Mechanical snaking handles minor and localized blockages. Hydro jetting is for persistent backups, grease buildup and root intrusion, because it scours the full inside wall of the pipe.
No. Over-the-counter chemicals accelerate corrosion in older cast iron lines, which is most of what runs under San Francisco. Hydro jetting does the same job without that cost.
Backups through the building, several slow drains at once, gurgling when water runs elsewhere, sewer odor indoors or in the yard, soggy patches or unusually lush grass, and cracking in the foundation.
Yes. Cleaning, repair, replacement and new installation are all our own crews, so one team follows the job from the camera to the finished line.
Begin
Tell us about the home. We’ll take it from here.
A consultation for your build, your remodel, or a place in the Membership. If it’s an emergency, call us now.