Gastonia, NCDrainCleaning

Why drains in older houses here clog again and again

Over a third of the housing stock here was built between 1950 and 1979. A cast iron drain from that period is now roughly 50 to 75 years old. The inside wall rusts and turns rough, and a rough pipe holds on to paper, grease and hair that a smooth one would carry away. The line out to the street is usually clay or cast iron, the ground around it is Piedmont red clay, and roots work into any joint that has started to leak.

The frame mill houses around Loray Mill are older still, most of them built from the early 1900s through the 1920s. Any drain pipe left from the first plumbing in those houses has been in service for about a century, and most of it has been patched along the way. Every patch adds a joint or a change of material, and those are the places where debris hangs up. That is the pattern behind a main line that needs clearing every year.

• One slow sink or tub: a clog in that fixture's branch line
• Water in the tub when the washer drains: the main line
• A clog that returns within weeks: the pipe itself is the problem
• Sewage at a floor drain: shut off the taps and phone us

How we clear a line, and when a cable is not enough

We start by asking which fixtures are affected, because that tells us whether the blockage is in a branch or in the main. Then we choose the way in. If the house has an outside cleanout, the cable goes in there. If it has none, we reach the main through a pulled toilet or a roof vent. The cable head is sized to the pipe, and we run water through every affected fixture before we pack up.

A cable opens a path. It does not remove scale from cast iron or the fine roots left in a clay joint. When a line has a history of clogs, we recommend a sewer camera inspection to find out what keeps snagging debris. If the pipe is sound, hydro jetting washes the wall clean. If the camera finds a broken section, we show you the footage and explain what a sewer line repair would involve. Two Rivers Utilities runs the public water and sewer system here. Our work is on the private side.

Where we expect drain calls, from York-Chester to Franklin Boulevard

The oldest plumbing is in York-Chester, where houses date from about 1856 to 1955, and in the Loray Mill village. We also cover Highland, Brookwood, Gardner Park, Sherwood Forest and Armstrong Park. Roughly a quarter of the housing here is newer than 2000, and those homes run on plastic drain pipe. Their clogs are usually simpler: grease in a kitchen line or wipes in a toilet.

Real-estate agents listing a house from the 1950s or 1960s can have the line cleaned and inspected by camera before the buyer's inspector arrives. Landlords and property managers with older rental houses get one contact, the cost stated up front and a plain account of what we found. If you run a kitchen on Franklin Boulevard, one of the city's main east-west roads, or anywhere else in town, grease is the usual cause of a slow floor drain. We handle that under commercial plumbing.

Scheduling, price and warranty on Gastonia drain work

Our phone is picked up at every hour. You can ask for a same-day visit, and a routine job normally gets a slot 24 to 48 hours ahead. A sewage backup does not wait for an appointment, so call it in as an emergency and our emergency plumber line will pick up.

You get the price before we start. It reflects which line is blocked, the route we have to take to reach it and what has collected inside. Hair in a tub trap is quick work. A main line full of roots, reached through a roof vent because there is no cleanout, takes longer and costs more. If the first pass shows the job is bigger than expected, we stop and talk before going further.

One thing to know up front: drain cleaning is not covered by our 1-year labor warranty, because nobody controls what goes down a drain next week. Repairs to a drain or sewer pipe are covered for a year.