What's the Best Method for Sewer Cleaning in Edmonton, Alberta?

For Edmonton homeowners, a nasty drain clog can prove troublesome if you don’t know what to do about it. Fortunately, you’ve come to the right place to learn how to handle one of life’s many inevitabilities – a clogged sewer line.

Wouldn’t it be great if you had a trusted friend that’s an Edmonton plumber who could tell you what to do every time a dreaded sewer line clog happened? Most of us aren’t so lucky, but Mr. Rooter Plumbing of Edmonton is happy to stand in for you.

Read on to learn the best method for effective sewer cleaning in Edmonton, AB.

The Dangers of a Sewer Line Clog:

In Gwynns Falls, Baltimore, in 2019, the public sewer system released nearly 20,000 gallons of water into the streets. Eventually, the city managed to get it under control. As it turns out, the overflow was a result of grease and rags clogging up the city’s septic system.

Officials advised the public to avoid direct contact with the septic water. They also acknowledged that there were problems with the water system before the overflow, such as water that was not even suitable for swimming. As a result, Baltimore officials re-emphasized that the public should avoid contact with surface water in the area.

In your home, the drainage system is something that you want to keep flowing properly because any water that has gone into your waste lines is now contaminated with all kinds of stuff that you’d probably rather not think about. When you have a sewer backup, it is important to call your expert Edmonton sewer cleaning experts to remove raw sewage from your living space.

Clogged drains happen for a variety of reasons, but whatever your cause is, make sure you get it fixed properly, so it doesn’t keep happening over and over again. In fact, sometimes the problem might not necessarily be with your pipes; rather, it could be a problem with your toilet or someone flushing down a foreign object. But you won’t know until you call the experts.

Dealing With Sewer Backup In Your Home in Edmonton

If you experience a sewer backup in your home, there are two things to focus on: Stop the overflow and perform a sewage spill cleanup.

We’ll focus on the cleanup here. We recommend that, for any sewer backup that has spread into any wall, appliance, furnace, water heater, or your personal belongings, you get a professional right away to do the cleanup. While a small cleanup around the floor drain is well within the capabilities of most homeowners, we generally find that anything beyond that doesn’t get cleaned up properly.

Did you know that mold can start to grow in wet walls within 24-48 hours? Usually, the backup happens in the utility room of a home. If mold starts growing in the basement, it could become a health hazard when turning on your furnace, as it could circulate unhealthy spores throughout the house. We recommend calling your local Edmonton sewer cleaning professionals for a proper inspection and cleaning service.

Different Ways to Clean Your Drains

A licensed plumber in Edmonton will help prevent plumbing emergencies in your home by offering regular inspections. During a typical drain and sewer inspection, we’ll perform proper plumbing maintenance to eliminate clogs from becoming serious plumbing issues.

The most common thought when property owners try to figure out how to manually complete Edmonton sewer cleaning services is to use chemical drain cleaners. These chemicals rarely do anything to help unclog your sewer line. If used too often, they could corrode your pipes. There are other, better ways to eliminate clogs.

Better methods range from using simple manual tools to high-tech plumbing equipment. Whatever method a plumber chooses to deploy, the end result is a plumbing system that works like new.

By avoiding chemicals, you’re protecting your waste lines and sewer line’s health. Most skilled plumbers in Edmonton will start out by attempting to clear your pipes with manual tools, such as a snake or an auger, depending on individual scenarios.

Typically, a plumber will use a snake if the clog is in your sink or toilet. A drain snake is an excellent tool for clearing small obstructions, such as hair, tissues, and other debris.

Hydro jetting is another eco-friendly solution we regularly use for drain cleaning services and sewer cleaning in Edmonton AB. When plumbers use this method, they connect a nozzle to a high-pressure water hose. The system exerts a psi level of up to 3000 to clear nearly any obstruction, such as sludge, mineral deposits, and tree roots.

This method will also clear the buildup in the joints and cracks of your plumbing system. When a plumber uses a HydroScrub® Jetting unit to clear your blockage, it conveniently flushes any debris into the city’s municipal sewage system.

Unlike chemical cleaning detergents, hydro scrubbing will not corrode the metal in your pipes. This technique relies purely on high-pressure water combined with an enzymatic cleaner.

A Good Place to Start is the Plunger

Stubborn clogs can prevent you from using your sink, shower, toilets, and appliances. Typically, this experience is extremely frustrating. When this occurs, you can’t brush your teeth without the basin filling up or do dishes without dirty water backing up into the sink.

Chemical cleaning agents are the most toxic goods that you can buy at the grocery store. Not only will they deteriorate your pipework, but they’ll also release harmful chemicals into the air that will irritate your eyes and skin.

Anytime you experience a clog and want to tackle it yourself, reach for your reliable plunger. However, if the clog is affecting more than one line, you should call a professional plumber in Edmonton for effective sewer cleaning.

Edmonton AB properties should all have a couple of plungers nearby. When you use the plunger, apply equal force as you push it up and down. The idea is to create pressure that will dislodge the blockage. You may have to plunge 20- to 30 times before the blockage breaks free. You can use a plunger to treat clogged sinks, toilets, showers, tubs, and basement floor drains.

While plunging doesn’t always do the trick, it can be surprisingly effective in some cases.

Using a Handheld Drain Auger

Next, you’ll want to try a handheld auger, which is also known as a drain snake. To use it, you’ll need to pull the cable out of the drum and feed it into the clogged sink. You’ll want to put it into a cleanout past the p-trap because it’s very hard to push a cable through one. If you can get it out to the clog, turn the handle to rotate the cable. With any luck, it will either burrow through or catch onto the blockage. Now, if you pull the cable back, hopefully, you’ll bring the culprit with it.

Cables do best at clearing clogs from hair or other hard blockages. But they don’t tend to work with grease or sludge on pipe walls because they just poke through back and forth rather than clean. However, the clog just heals every time, like T-1000! These handheld cables are usually 15-25’ long, so it gives you some reach but not a lot.

We don’t recommend handheld augers when the clog is affecting more than one line. This is because the blockage is more than likely further down the pipeline and could indicate a sewer line clog. You’ll need a team of efficient Edmonton sewer cleaning technicians that has all the professional plumbing tools to get it done.

Large Mechanical Sewer Augers

The large sewer augers are the big leagues as far as unclogging a sewer line goes. Your average homeowner in Edmonton doesn’t own one of these, nor should they. These machines are heavy (approximately 200 lbs) and are very dangerous to use.

While these are available for rent from some places, we strongly recommend against their use by untrained persons. Many plumbers have been injured by these machines, usually by the cable catching their hand and twisting it around the cable. If you are at this point, we urge you to call a plumbing technician. They will determine the severity of the blockage and check your sewer line’s overall health. If they think you need a professional Edmonton sewer cleaning team, they’ll likely go straight to hydro scrubbing.

Hydro Jetting: A Case Study

In New Castle County, Delaware, the city showcased its brand-new hydro jet system. The technology enables city workers to find problems in the County sewer system and prevent grease, oils, and fats from causing drainage issues with the city’s sewage system.

During the demonstration, workers cleared a blockage to show residents how they can prevent overflows and blockages with routine maintenance. They used the city’s sewer cleaning truck and a jetting nozzle to clean grease from the inside of the sewage system. Using high-pressure water, the workers also removed grease from the walls of the sewer.

City officials expressed that once grease enters the city sewer system, it cools off, gets hard, and turns white. Eventually, it builds up and blocks the sewers if workers don’t clean them regularly. Without proper maintenance, the grease buildup will cause a nasty backup in local businesses (even in Edmonton).

Sewer cleaning with HydroScrub® Jetting keeps the city’s sewer system running properly. With routine maintenance, city workers can reduce the cost of maintaining local plumbing and prevent sewage backups.

The city sponsored the demonstration to show residents how pouring grease, oils, and fats down their lines affects the city sewage system. The exhibition was part of the yearly Great Schools Clean Streams program.

City officials expressed that sewer clogs are entirely preventable. The cost of hydro jetting is far less than the cost of cleaning up sewage overflows.

The city’s program works. New Castle County experienced 75 overflows in 2005. Since launching the hydro jetting maintenance program, overflows have dropped by 67%. In 2017, for instance, there were only 26 overflows in the city.

Hydro Jetting in Your Home

Hydro jetting is a great option for large municipal pipes, but it's a great option for drain and sewer cleaning in Edmonton AB too. The only difference is scale; we use much smaller equipment in your home than Epcor would use in their pipes.

A great way to think of hydro jetting is pressure washing the inside of your pipes. When you have had backups, lots of sludge and gunk stick to the walls of the pipes. When your pipe’s diameter is narrowed by sediment, it will collect more particles over time and cause issues like slow draining. The only way to clean this up is by hydro jetting the pipe. At Mr. Rooter Plumbing of Edmonton, we vouch for this system and guarantee that it pays to use the right tool for the job!

Where hydro jetting really shines is on clogged kitchen sinks. Kitchen clogs are usually caused by grease, tiny bits of which have been deposited in the pipes for years and years. Once it gets bad enough, it can turn into a real humdinger of a clog. Putting a cable in won’t move the grease along; it just pokes holes which tend to heal again (remember T-1000?) as soon as the cable comes back out. But hydro jetting not only breaks up the grease into small chunks and forces it down the line, but it also cleans your pipe walls. We often hear after jetting a kitchen sink drain that it has NEVER drained this well!

That’s not all a HydroScrub® Jetting unit can do. Mr. Rooter even has a larger one that can cut through tree roots in sewer lines! Imagine enough water pressure to cut roots! When we first got this tool, our Edmonton plumbers didn’t believe it could be done, but we were wrong. When it comes to nasty root blockages or sludgy sewers, this is the only way to go.

The Sewer Camera - A Vital Tool

Most people don’t think a sewer camera video inspection is a necessary part of sewer cleaning in Edmonton AB. In some smaller waste lines, it isn’t very feasible to get a camera down the pipe, but in larger ones, it is imperative to see what is causing your problems!

Often, when your sewer system is clogged, we put our camera down the sewer cleanout to locate the blockage and investigate for other potential issues. Was it a tree root intrusion? Perhaps a section of your sewer pipe that isn’t going downhill? Maybe someone flushed a Barbie doll? There are a lot of potential causes, some of which are cause for alarm, whereas some are not. But you’ll never know until a professional fully inspects the line with a plumbing camera. Make sure you get to see the problem with your own eyes, it is much easier to understand what is causing your sewer backup when you can see it on our monitor as the camera travels through the pipe.

How to Unclog a Sewer Line With Drain Cleaners

OK, we’ll admit, this is not really a thing. Drain-cleaning chemicals like the one that rhymes with “Braino” kinda suck. If a drain is totally blocked, and you pour this into the fixture, how is it going to get down to the clog? It isn’t. It’s just going to sit there, slowly dissolving whatever it comes into contact with. This includes steel sinks and every type of drainage system. Older pipes in Edmonton made of copper or cast iron really suffer when put in contact with chemical cleaners. If you thought a blocked pipe was bad, these cleaners could eventually leave you with holes and cracks in the pipe. This is much worse; we don’t like delivering this news.

However, there is some hope. We have a product that is environmentally friendly and works really well, within limits. This product is called Total Drain and is a Mr. Rooter-specific product. It is composed of billions of bacteria in every dose. When poured down a slow kitchen sink drain, for example, these billions of bacteria get to work right away, munching any grease or other food they can get their tiny hands on.

This product works well with frequent small doses down a slow drain. But please understand it is great for drain maintenance or for cleaning your pipe’s interior, but it won’t help at all for a fully clogged pipe. Even when experiencing symptoms, it might be too far gone for the bacteria to save it. You’ll likely need a professional plumber to unclog it, then keep maintaining it with Total Drain from there.

It’s also worth mentioning that if you are in a septic system, these bacteria couldn’t be happier there. There’s an endless supply of food for them, and your septic system will feel the benefits. It will work better, stay cleaner, and require pump-outs less frequently!

The Best Choice - Local Professional Service

When the going gets rough, it’s best to hire an experienced plumber for drain or sewer cleaning. Edmonton AB has Mr. Rooter’s specially trained plumbing experts in dealing with tricky pipe and sewage problems. They can clear annoying blockages, provide expert Edmonton sewer cleaning services and prevent any further damage to your sewer line.

When searching for a dependable plumbing technician in Edmonton, you should only trust experienced, certified, licensed technicians. Mr. Rooter Plumbing of Edmonton only hires the most skilled talent in the Edmonton area and also serves nearby neighborhoods, including Sherwood Park, Mill Woods, and Pleasantview. What’s more, our plumbers deliver service with a smile.

You can trust professionals to handle your sewer system with care. All of our staff members are local residents who live and work in the community. When you need water damage restoration services, we’ll refer you to experienced technicians who will guarantee a quick cleanup.

You can count on Mr. Rooter Plumbing in Edmonton to fix any plumbing problems right the first time, from sewer cleaning to a trenchless sewer line replacement.

Call us today for a rapid assessment and repair of your most challenging drain or sewage problems.