Trenchless Sewer Repair

A flexible liner — layered felt or fiberglass — is saturated with a two-part resin, a step the trade calls the wet-out. It is then inverted or pulled into the existing pipe and pressed tight against the inside wall along the whole run.

The resin is cured in place, using hot water, steam or ultraviolet light depending on the liner and the line. The result is a hard, continuous pipe formed inside the old one, bonded to it and following its path, bends included.

The method is standardized: the North American industry works to ASTM F1216, the practice covering rehabilitation by inversion and curing of a resin-impregnated tube, and the accepted design life of a cured liner is fifty years.

The jointless part is what makes it worth doing. Almost everything that ends an old sewer line gets in at a joint — roots, groundwater, soil. A cured liner has none along its length, so the route the old pipe failed by is no longer open to the new one.

Pipe bursting suits lines that are past lining. A bursting head is drawn through the existing pipe on a cable, fracturing it outward into the surrounding soil while towing new pipe in behind it, along the same path.

The new pipe is HDPE with fused joints — the lengths are heat-welded into one continuous pipe before it goes in, so there is no glued or gasketed joint anywhere in the run for a root to find.

It also answers something lining cannot: diameter. Because the old pipe is displaced rather than lined, the replacement can come back the same size or larger, and an undersized line can typically be upsized by something in the order of twenty to fifty percent — a four-inch lateral returning as six — without trenching its length.

It needs an entry and an exit pit, so it is not literally digging-free. It is two small holes instead of a trench across the property.

Lining suits a host pipe still doing its structural job: cracked, leaking at the joints, taking roots, scaled up inside, but holding its shape and its line.

Bursting suits a pipe that has lost its shape — collapsed or badly deformed sections, a run that has separated, or a line that needs to come back bigger than it went in.

A line with a significant belly in it is its own conversation, because neither method changes the grade a pipe sits at. Where the fall is the actual problem, the right answer is excavation and re-laying that section, and we will say so.

None of this is guesswork from the surface. The camera inspection answers it, you see the same footage we do, and the recommendation arrives with its reason attached.

Access first. Where a property has cleanouts — the capped pipes near the foundation or out toward the property line — the work usually goes through those, and where it does not, a small pit is dug at one or both ends.

Then the pipe is cleaned, and this is the step that decides whether the finished job lasts. Mechanical descaling with cutters and chains takes off hard scale and roots, and hydro jetting at several thousand PSI scours what is left. On old cast iron, both: a liner can only bond to a wall that has been taken back to the pipe.

The line is measured, the liner cut and wet out to that length, installed, and cured — a short residential run is often a couple of hours, a longer or more complex one most of a working day. Water use inside the house pauses while it cures, and we tell you exactly when and for how long.

Branch connections are then reopened from the inside with a cutter, a final camera run goes down the finished pipe, and you get that footage too. Most houses are one to two days on site, rather than the week an open-cut replacement of the same run would take.

A continuous pipe with no joints along its length, a smooth bore that carries flow well, and a wall that resists the roots and groundwater that ended the original line.

A liner does take up a little of the inside diameter, which sounds like a drawback and rarely behaves like one: the new surface is far smoother than decades-old clay or scaled cast iron, so a lined line commonly drains better than the pipe it was formed inside.

And the yard is still a yard. For a lot of properties that is the whole decision — the pipe was always going to be fixed, and the question was what the garden, the drive and the trees looked like afterwards.