Kenny Litalien might call himself a drain cleaner, but he’s really a gumshoe. When customers have sewer-line mysteries, Litalien loves puzzling out the answers. Over the last 10 years he has built a thriving drain-cleaning and inspection business, Mass Sewer & Drain, in suburban Boston. But things really took off about four years ago when he began to offer line locating.
Locating is a challenge that delights, but he shied away from it for years — until he found equipment that he liked. “When you’re wrong, it’s expensive,” he says. A new locating system he bought a few years ago turned him around.
Today, pipe inspection accounts for 10 percent of his work, and locating buried sanitary and storm sewer lines makes up another five percent. Those numbers may seem small, but they mask the bigger significance of the work. Inspection and locating help him level the playing field against larger, brand-name franchises.
“Right now it’s just a way to take care of the customers we already have,” says Litalien. “It keeps the customer onboard. It keeps them from looking for someone else.”
He doesn’t believe it needs to stop there. As his knowledge deepens, and as more of his nine em-ployees learn to use the equipment, Litalien expects inspection and locating to grow by leaps and bounds. He thinks it could easily generate a half-million dollars a year someday.
High school memories
Litalien entered the drain cleaning business while in high school, as an employee of Metro Sewer Service in Woburn, Mass. “My boss used to pick me up after school,” he says. “I quit school in the 11th grade to work for that guy.”
After five years, he went out on his own, starting Mass Sewer & Drain. (Mass for Massachusetts). About five years ago, he bought his old employer and folded that business into Mass Sewer, holding on to both company names to keep the brand recognition Metro Sewer built over its 30-year history.
Inspection has always been part of Litalien’s offering. He started with a camera from Scooter Video Inspection Systems, switched to Electric Eel equipment, and more recently turned to the Flexiprobe system from Pearpoint Inc. He likes its image clarity and the built-in sonde, which works well with his Schonstedt locating equipment.
Back when Litalien was a Metro Sewer employee, the business did some locating, and he accompanied work crews as a helper. He wasn’t impressed with the hit-and-miss results. “That’s expensive when you’re opening up a main road within a city,” he says.
He credits supplier Jim Fay of Pipe Tools in Pennsauken, N.J., with changing his mind. “I started buying my equipment through him five or six years ago,” Litalien says. His first purchases were cameras. Then he tried Schonstedt locating gear.
Try, try again
Litalien entered the locating business when a local restaurant customer experienced frequent sewer line backups. “Every time it rained heavily, they’d get flooded out,” he says. The solution was to put in a check valve, but the line had to be inspected first to make sure there were no other tie-ins to it, and the location needed to be precise so that he could install the check valve with the minimum of disruption.
“A couple of companies had been in before us trying to locate a 5-inch sanitary sewer leaving the building,” he says. “It was about 25 feet to the city sewer line — just a sidewalk and a street.”
When his first attempt to locate the line failed, Litalien called Fay, who let him borrow a Schonstedt XT512 unit. “The Schonstedt nailed it,” he says. He put off buying the unit, but then had to turn another customer down because he lacked locating equipment. At that point, he made the purchase.
The XT512 locator stands alongside a full complement of investigative gear. Litalien uses a Pearpoint Flexiprobe P330 camera with a 200-foot reel and a standard 512 Hz sonde in the camera head. He also uses a drain cleaning machine from Electric Eel Mfg. that uses 8-foot sections of dual cable and 6-foot sections of C cable.
When a camera won’t fit, he uses a Prototek sonde, which he nicknamed “the Blue Bullet.” He can attach it to the Electric Eel cable and send it in. “Then we use the Schonstedt to chase the bullet,” he says.
For smaller cleaning jobs — drains smaller than two inches — he uses a Super Vee drain cleaner from General Pipe Cleaners and a Hande drain cleaner from Electric Eel. Both have 35-foot, 3/8 inch cables. He also has a 600-gallon trailer-mounted water jet unit from US Jetting and eight service trucks: two Chevy Astro Vans and six Ford Econoline E-250 vans.
Detective case file
Like any good detective, Litalien has a file full of successful closed cases. Some of the most noteworthy have seen him follow up on problems that have stumped other contractors. Not long ago, the operators of a chain drugstore in Rhode Island had reached the end of their rope. The store had been plagued by an odor and a backed-up sewer line. Another contractor had already snaked the drains. “They got it clear, but one of the guys got the cable stuck,” Litalien says.
Litalien brought along his Pearpoint camera, but instead of sending it into the line and out of the store from the inside, he went the other way: from the store’s septic tank, through the line, and into the store.
“I saw the camera go past the snake blade and then climb up the wall” inside the pipe,” he says. Then on the video screen he saw the culprit: an uncapped cleanout in the sewer line, buried in the wall.
“I found the cleanout on the video, but I couldn’t figure out where it was,” he says. Using the camera’s built-in sonde and his Schonstedt locator, Litalien pinpointed the problem, and the store’s contractors were able to solve it. “They opened up the wall and put the cap back on,” he says.
Litalien says his unorthodox approach made the difference. “It’s unusual to run from the septic tank in,” he says. “If I had run from the building out, we would never have seen the open cleanout.”
Success breeds success
Success stories like that one have opened up lots of opportunities for Mass Sewer. On a grocery store remodeling job, Litalien was called in to locate three sanitary sewer lines as precisely as possible. The remodelers were working at night so the store could stay open during the day, and accuracy was key: “When you shut down a supermarket at night to dig, you can’t be running into unexpected sewer lines,” Litalien says.
Another from the case file: A 25-story high-rise in downtown Boston had a clogged roof drain. “The management company had called in the plumbers before us,” Litalien says. “They were running their snakes to find where the roof drain was clogged.”
One of the men on the job knew of Mass Sewer’s locating abilities. Other plumbers there were skeptical and told Litalien when he arrived that he needn’t bother. But using his sonde and locator, he tracked the blockage to a spot in the wall in the basement about seven feet up from the bottom floor — behind a concrete wall that had to be opened up for the repair.
The basement room where the repair was done held computer equipment for the building. “It was a major overhaul, and if I was wrong, forget it,” he says.
Yet another job was at New England Baptist Hospital, where general contractors adding a new wing called on Mass Sewer as a subcontractor. The project included new roof drains. Mass Sewer had to inspect the storm sewer running from the hospital to the street and locate all of catch basins. The hospital’s hilltop location added to the challenge.
“It was probably the hardest locator job I’ve ever had to do,” Litalien says. “We could hardly walk on the hill, it was so muddy.” Running the camera through from inside the building out to the main line, Litalien identified the locations of three catch basins and used the camera to discover some bad tie-ins and broken pipe. “Once I found them with the camera, we had to locate them so they would know where to dig,” he says.
That job pushed the equipment to its limits. “You can locate anything as long as it’s not too deep — 12 feet or so,” Litalien says. On the hospital job some of the lines were as far as 15 to 18 feet underground. “We still located them, but it was very, very hard because the signal was so faint.”
Missing ring
The locating story Litalien likes best is the mystery of the missing diamond ring. A long-time residential customer in Lexington, Mass., had dropped the ring down a toilet. Litalien put his camera into the sewer line from behind the house.
“Just as we were coming into the basement, there it was,” he says. Workers established the exact point, cut open the hardwood floor, and extracted the ring from the line. The customer called a local TV station, and a news crew filmed a re-enactment.
Publicity like that is free — and priceless. And with stories like that to tell, Litalien is looking ahead to the day when all that sophisticated gear uncovers a lot more business as expertly as it detects sewer lines and clogs.
