There’s not much pleasant to be found inside a drain line, and all cleaning contractors eventually seem to run into a challenge that’s especially difficult. It’s then that the real pros emerge, meeting the challenge with deductive reasoning, creative use of equipment, and tenacity greater than the most stubborn clog. These three contractors share their experiences with tough cleaning jobs.
Kendall Todd’s company, Atlantic Pit Service Inc., cleans drain lines and grease traps and pumps septic systems in a northeast suburb of Atlanta. “When we started years ago, there was one Chinese restaurant,” he recalls. The restaurant never called for grease trap cleaning until they couldn’t get anything else down the drain.
“Their line had stopped up, and the water started coming out in the street,” Todd says. “We kept pumping the tank, of course, but nothing was moving through. Finally, we broke through to the second tank, and then we were able to get our high-pressure jetter down there.
“Turns out they had about a 2-foot-long slug of solid grease in there that was eight or 10 inches long. It was blocking up the pipe from reaching the sewer line. We worked and worked and worked to get that out of there, using nothing but the jetter. It was an all-day job, six or seven hours. That’s the worst one I can remember.”
The term “tough job” is always relative. The toughest job Pat Neel can recall as service manager for A-1 Restaurant Services in Phoenix also involves a grease plug and a jetter, but with an intensity many times magnified.
A restaurant had called A-1 to clear a blocked line that they had struggled with for three weeks. Neel’s crew jetted furiously, but to no avail. Finally, they knew they had to find the source of the problem. They thought the blockage was in the 4-inch line coming from the building, but they didn’t know exactly what the problem was.
“We actually stuck a 2-inch grease trap pump hose down the line and pumped out all the liquid,” says Neel. “Then we shoved our camera down the line, just to see what the problem was. We thought we saw a break in the line, but it ended up being a gigantic buildup of grease, right before the line tapped into the city sewer.
“We had to jet for more than 90 feet past that point to get it to flow into the city sewer. I believe we had to crank our 4,000-psi jetter up to full pressure to move that big plug.” The grease had collected in a belly in the line, where it cooled and coagulated into a solid mass. “The day we actually broke through, we took another day or two to clear the whole thing out — probably ten man-hours all told.”
Dan Black occasionally has to clean a drain as part of Dad & Sons’ water treatment and conditioning work in the Lansing metro area. His nightmare job came in a phone call from a landlord whose rental unit had a backed-up lateral.
On inspection, Black discovered that this line tied into that of the next-door neighbor’s house before going out to the city sewer. He quickly launched a cable with a spearhead tool. Before long, the tool lodged between a split in one of the line’s clay tiles and stuck fast.
No matter what they did, Black’s crew couldn’t dislodge the cable, so they were forced to tell the landlord he would have to pay a backhoe to dig up the line. He got angry and refused, but Black showed him that he had signed the job ticket, which clearly stated that if a cable got stuck in a line, it was the customer’s responsibility to dig it up so the crew could retrieve the cable and clear the blockage.
The landlord argued furiously for over an hour, but finally saw that he had no choice. “We’d told him up front, but I guess he didn’t understand that,” Black says. “I explained that we couldn’t see down a sewer line, and you can’t afford to lose money when you go out on a job. It took awhile, but he finally came around to understand that.”
When the backhoe dug up the line, “it just came up in pieces,” Black recalls. “The line was in bad shape from root intrusion. That’s what caused the crack where the cable got stuck. We had to just replace the whole line.”
When all was said and done, the landlord swore he’d never use Dad & Sons again. “But we’re pretty much the only game in town,” Black says, “and then we got ourselves the camera equipment to televise the line. So he did end up coming back.
“He has 20 units in this town, and we’ve done quite a few more jobs for him. What we did was give him a break on his all of his jobs for a while, just to smooth things over, and that worked pretty well. Now he uses us all the time. We bent over backwards for a while, but sometimes you have to. A happy customer might tell one person, while an unhappy customer will tell ten. You can’t afford that.”
