Offering customers more than one drain cleaning option is central to Smiley Drain’s operational playbook. That’s why along with cable and sectional drain machines, the company invested roughly $45,000 in three Brute 4009 water jetters from Jetters Northwest.

Mike Marvon, owner of the Caldwell, New Jersey-based company, says he looked at several different jetters before choosing the compact Brutes, which generate pressure of 4,000 psi and flow of up to 9 gpm.

“One main reason I opted for the Brutes was the remote-control option, which enables technicians to work without a helper,” he says. “It also seemed like a very good, well-designed and quality piece of equipment — it checked off a lot of boxes. It’s a pricier machine than some others, but I wanted to make sure our technicians have the best equipment on their trucks to do what we have to do. Plus Jetters Northwest offers great customer service.”

Technicians primarily use the Brutes, which come with 300 feet of 3/8-inch-diameter hose, to clean 4-inch sewer laterals. But technicians can also use a hand-held reel that holds 75 feet of 1/4-inch hose to clean smaller lines, down to 1 1/4 inches.

The Brutes are cart-mounted jetters, but Marvon had the units removed from the carts and skid-mounted them on trucks, using stainless steel hardware. If the jetter is bolted to the truck, it gets covered by the vehicle’s insurance policy, as opposed to paying for an extra umbrella policy that covers just the machine itself, Marvon notes.

“It saves us an extra $300 or $400 a year per truck,” he says.

The company runs three Ford Transit 350 high-top vans. Marvon says having the jetters bolted onto the trucks has never restricted operations.

“We can service the machines in place, so they never have to come out unless something major breaks,” he says.

Marvon also customized the set-up by connecting a gas line from an auxiliary gas port on the Transits. That eliminated the need to carry gas cans because the jetters draw fuel from the truck’s supply.

The units feature panel-mounted controls; an adjustable pressure regulator; pulsation control that ranges from light vibration to a full-pulse mode to move the hose through bends; a three-way jetting control valve; a Kohler fuel-injected 747cc engine modular; a UDOR triplex plunger pump; and four nozzles.

For certain applications, Smiley Drain technicians use Reaper nozzles from Hydra-Flex.

The machine weighs 498 pounds and measures 45 inches long by 31 inches wide by 45 inches tall. 

Is there a particularly tough drain job that the Brutes handled with flying colors?

“That’s every job,” Marvon says. “The Brutes do everything that bigger jetters can do. They haven’t let us down once.”

Read more about Smiley Drain in the March 2023 issue of Cleaner magazine.