Your Trustworthy Resource for Sewer and Drain Services in Wheeling, IL

The best way to keep drains clear is to limit what you put in them:

• Do not put hard food (food you wouldn’t give a baby), coffee grounds, and grease down your garbage disposal.
• Keep hair and soap scum out of bathroom drains. Cover your tub and shower drains with a mesh screen or a perforated shower drain hair catcher.
• Remove loose hair by brushing it before you take a shower or bath.
• If you wash your dog in the tub or shower, put a washcloth over the drain. The amount of hair a dog sheds during a bath can clog your regular shower drain hair catcher.
• Toilets are designed to only flush human waste and toilet paper. Dental floss, feminine hygiene products, and other household waste should go in the trash instead.

Plunging is an effective way to open a clogged drain. It’s important to know that there are two types of plungers. The kind with a steep black cup is a toilet plunger. The red plungers with a shallow cup are designed for opening sink and tub drains. Make sure there is water covering the drain. Place the plunger cup over the drain and push it down until the plunger makes a good vacuum seal over the drain. Then grasp the handle and pump the plunger cup up and down quickly five or six times. Pull backward and see if the drain opens. Repeat the process until the clog is forced out and the drain opens.

Roots do not invade healthy, well-kept pipes. They attack vulnerable pipes that have cracks and leaks. These occur when regular maintenance is not conducted, or trees are planted too close to sewage lines.When it comes to landscaping, it’s important to know where your underground pipes, lines, and cables run. Limit the number of trees and find out which trees are safe to plant close to your sewage lines. If you can’t avoid planting trees close to your sewage line, make sure to plant slow-growing trees with small root balls that are unlikely to invade your pipes.

While preventative maintenance seems costly, it prevents high-cost repairs. When regular maintenance is performed, you can deal with any issues before they get worse. Routine video inspection and cleaning prevent roots from invading your pipes.

If you already have tree root damage, it’s important to get your sewer lines clean and work with us to develop a maintenance program. Ask about our root inhibitor treatment that kills roots up to 12” outside of your sewer pipe.

“Clearing” and “cleaning” can be synonyms in some cases, but in the world of plumbing, these terms refer to two very different processes designed to meet differing needs.Drain clearing is considered more of a “quick fix” for clogged pipes. During clearing, the plumber breaks up the clog with a rodding machine. Rodding machines consist of heavy-duty cable and cutting blade attachments and are motor-powered. The blades are designed to spin and break up clogs when the motor is turned on. While a normal flow can typically resume once the clog is broken up (cleared, not cleaned), remnants of past clogs are left behind, which makes it more likely that you’ll experience another clog.

Drain cleaning uses a machine called a hydro jetter which runs highly pressurized water through your pipes. Clogs and/or grease buildup is removed (cleaned) from the walls of your pipes. Drain cleaning solves existing problems and helps prevent future buildup, which will save you money in the long run.

Hydro-jetting CLEANS your pipes. It uses pressured water to push away any obstructions and leave the pipe as clean as when it was first installed. This process works by attaching a cleaning head to a water line that is threaded into the pipe. The head is covered in holes that release high-pressure jets of hot water up to 4,000 PSI into the lines, obliterating the clog and flushing it away without damage to the pipe. Besides removing the clog, pressurized water also dissolves grease and sludge which could cause another outbreak of clogging.Power Rodding CLEARS your pipes. It carefully eases a stabilized metal cable into the pipe to avoid damaging the delicate plumbing system. At the end of this cable, is a cleaning head made of extremely sharp blades that are measured to the diameter of the pipe. The blades rotate at high speed breaking up the clog and scraping away accumulated sludge from the pipe walls, resulting in a clear sewer for water to flow.